With Sony’s PlayStation 4 now available, and Microsoft’s Xbox One set for release in just a few days, I thought it might be worth it to take a look back on some of the other gaming consoles that have debuted over the years with similarly high hopes only to be completely glossed over, misunderstood or generally forgotten about.
In researching this article I came across a few of these consoles for the first time myself, so here’s hoping you learn something today outside of the proper, meaningful stuff that you learned in church or school or at work or off the back of a cereal box or some such. I just think it’s fair that someone outside of the fifty people who bought one ought to think about these machines now and then.
Also, please note that every one of these is in fact a variation on an already-existing (and massively popular) machine. As far as I remember, I’ve never seen a single one of these in actual human life, and that’s as an actual human man who’s been known to visit a shop on occasion (though only in extreme cases of course, like the exhaustion of one’s bread supply or for the purchase of PSN vouchers back in the post-hack paranoia that gripped us all two summers ago). For your benefit, and ’cause I’m just the sweetest, I’ve organized them by category, so do keep reading, you persons.