15 Worst Video Game Peripherals

5 – Sega Mega Drive – Activator,

• The first attempt at full body mapping in a video game console, or at least that’s what the advertising tried to make you believe, in reality it was less effective at mapping your body movements than an eighty year old with cataracts watching you and pressing the buttons in accordance to your movements.
• There was a sensor for each of the eight inputs on the Mega Drive, so if you waved your hand above the ‘C’ sensor it would be the same as pressing the C button, as long as your ceiling was perfectly flat, opaque, had no fan on it and didn’t look at the activator in the wrong way.
• On top of everything else you couldn’t activate multiple buttons at once, so if you wanted to move diagonally you were shit out of luck.

4 – GBA – e-Reader,

• The e-Reader was essentially a QR code reader before they really took off and it was a cool idea at the time since it gave you the ability to play NES games, add levels to Super Mario Advance and a couple of other things.
• While it was considered successful in Japan it didn’t do nearly as well in the rest of the world this was probably because in order to add items to Mario you needed two GBAs and a link cable, which isn’t exactly portable or financially viable for most people.
• Apart from the NES and Game & Watch games there was only support for 4 different games, meaning the money spent on it was mostly wasted.

3 – Wii – Football,

• This is easily the dumbest idea ever thought up by Nintendo, yes that includes the cancelled Vitality Sensor and the Virtual Boy that required you to take a break every fifteen minutes to prevent possible blindness.
• Despite the wrist strap and the Nerf material it’s still a bad idea to make a ball that needs to be in front of a TV and not be thrown.
• The use of this peripheral can only end in so many ways, funnily enough each of those ways ends in either a broken screen or a black eye for some unfortunate passer-by.

2 – Xbox – HD DVD player,

• This add-on isn’t intrinsically flawed in any way whatsoever, what brought it down was the fact that HD DVDs have less support than the Betamax.
• Possibly the biggest downfall of the HD DVD was that it had 20GB less storage than the Blu-ray as well as the fact that HD DVD is quite a bit harder to say than Blu-ray.
• The only positive side to the HD DVD player was that Microsoft decided to make it an optional add-on to the system instead of forcing the consumer to pay more for the ability to participate in a dead format.

1 – PS2 – Rez Trance Vibrator

• It’s a puck, small and black, attached to the PS2 via a USB port and was designed as an additional device to the game Rez where it vibrated to the beat of the music.
• I don’t know about you but the vibration of a controller doesn’t exactly sound melodic in any way shape or form and the trance vibrator was even louder.
• Although this device did get some use by someone to enhance the experience of the game, it was not in the way it was designed, at least one girl put it between her legs and used it as a masturbatory aid despite the pleas from the developer to be wholesome.

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