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Top Ten Portable Flops
Written by Eugene Kim on Monday, October 30, 2006
The Game Boy (and now, DS) brand seems to be unstoppable, even in the face of shinier, more advanced competition. We take a look at the top 10 handheld losers.
For casual handheld observers, the Game Boy brand is all they know. The reality is that there have been a surprising number of casualties in the portable battlefield. The Game Boy is actually the handheld market's only real success story (along with the DS, of course). Here's our look back at some noteworthy systems which either failed hard, or failed... really hard.
10. Atari Lynx
Released in 1989, this portable was remarkably powerful, sporting a 16-bit graphics engine and a pretty solid-for-the-time 4096 hue color palette. Predictably, the system ate batteries like Kobayashi eats hot dogs, and when combined with the $189.99 entry price, poor marketing, and a decidedly skateboard-like shape AND size, this system was on life support before it even hit the shelves. When it finally did, it met the Game Boy head-on and was promptly crushed like a squirrel running across the interstate.
9. Sega Nomad
We wanted to like this one, we really did. Who could argue with the appeal of having the entire Sega Genesis library available on the go? Alas, it was not to be. As was standard during this time, battery life was atrocious. Additionally, it turns out that when you scale text that was supposed to be small even on a TV (like the entire bottom edge of Dark Castle screens) to a 3-inch one, the result is damn near unreadable. Though, if you're playing Dark Castle in the first place, there's probably a lot of stuff you can't read.
8. Nintendo Virtual Boy
A lot of people think that education is the most powerful tool in preventing sex between teenagers. Those people have obviously never heard of the Virtual Boy.
7. Game Boy Advance 1.0
Yes, we know, the GBA produced some great games. We're not denying that. It's just that...well, we can't figure out how the first iteration of the hardware ever made it out of beta testing. Though we understand omitting the backlight to cut costs and improve battery life, the "reflective" LCD was roughly as reflective as black construction paper. Why, I was once playing Castlevania: Circle of the Moon when my batteries died and I didn't even notice for two hours.
6. Nokia N-Gage
We just can't figure out what the target market was for this system. Nokia made it so expensive that it could only be bought by someone in one of the upper two or three tax brackets, but then forgot that the way those people got that rich in the first place was by showing up to work every day and not acting like a dumbass, which is exactly what you're doing when you talk sideways into a humongous plastic taco.
posted November 6, 2006