Buying/Wanting Shitty Tech

[Huxleys Babkins]

Inspired by St_Eddie's post in the Duke Nukem thread about his near miss with a Tiger Game.com;

Preciously why I was so enamoured by the Game.com when I came across it in the Argos catalogue.  There were no screenshots and I had no means to access the Internet back then, to find out any further information.  At my behest, my Mum asked the Argos employee if there would be any further games released for it and he replied "it depends how well it sells" (in retrospect; duh!), so I decided it best to hold off on acquiring the system.  It was only many years later that I decided to find out what I had missed out on and looked up some footage on YouTube.  I wasn't quite prepared for the sights and sounds which greeted me upon that day.

I was wondering if anyone else had any stories of wanting/buying/being bought shit technology.

My story involves me complaining that my Sega Master System wasn't getting many games any more and wanting an SNES for Christmas. I showed my mum all the games I wanted and she nodded and said she'd see what she could do. We didn't have much money at all so I thought it was a long shot to get a £150 console so I was very surprised to see her be so positive.

I got to Christmas day and unwrapped an Atari 2600. In 1993. She was so pleased. I could play "all the games I wanted for a fraction of the price of that Nintendo thing". She'd taken my list and looked through Toys R Us and seen that "Mario", "Donkey Kong", "Road Runner" etc. were all on there. Having seen my Master System get ports of 16 bit games she presumed that this was the same thing and that I'd be playing slightly cruder versions of Mario World and Donkey Kong Country. Once I booted it up she was so upset. I tried to put a brave face on, but she'd effectively replaced my obsolete console with one that was even worse.

We packed it up, took it back to Toys R Us on boxing day and settled on a Game Boy instead. Link's Awakening, Super Mario Land, Tetris. Sorted.

[the]

Warlords though mate. Missed out there.

[Jerzy Bondov]

I was absolutely desperate to get an Atari Jaguar. I went on and on about how amazing it was going to be, so much better than any other console. 64 bit! Imagine that! And they were bringing out a VR headset, really, they were! I saw an advert in ST Format! Luckily even my parents could easily tell that the Atari Jaguar was a big old crock of shit. Eventually I got a Sega Saturn instead which as everybody knows was a brilliant and very successful games console.

[AsparagusTrevor]

Despite already owning an Amiga 1200, I swapped my Mega Drive for an Amiga CD32. Stupidest fucking thing I ever did.

[Small Man Big Horse]

I had an Amiga and an Amiga 1200 but was persuaded by a friend who owned one that the CDTV was going to be the future of gaming, and that as the games came on cds they were going to be huge with movie like graphics and all that sort of thing. This video shows that this was not exactly the case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCm845PLAw, indeed most of them don't look any different to the Amiga version bar improved sound. The only good thing about it is when a public domain company released all of their discs across 2 cds, but that didn't make up for the massive disappointment that it was.

[Pdine]

I lobbied my parents for both an Acorn Electron and an Elan Enterprise. I am so thankful I got neither.

[doppelkorn]

In 2014, after a skint run of hand-me-down unsmart phones, I finally had enough for a modest Android device which would bring the internet to my pocket. I had decided on a Moto G until a fairly tech-savvy mate recommended a Nokia Lumia device with Windows Phone because it had very slightly better battery life, which I duly bought. Fucking awful decision. THERE WERE NO APPS! NONE.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I lobbied my parents for both an Acorn Electron and an Elan Enterprise. I am so thankful I got neither.

My dad got a bbc master and upgraded to an archimedes a3000. More powerful he said. More interfaces he said.

Fuck all games, I said.

[Z]

I just bought a BBC Micro Bit



As a kid we had an old as fuck magazine in our house that had an ad for the 2600 in it. The idea of a games console that came with a fuck ton of games (as the one in this ad did) had me absolutely drooling from the mouth.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I want a commodore pet. I have absolutely no idea what purpose it would serve otherwise than collecting dust in the corner looking futuristic.

I like the reddit subthread /r/retrobattlestations but get exasperated when people start posting old PC's. A beige mid 90's pentium fills me with nothing but ennui. Soulless boxes.

[Z]

I bought a floppy drive a few weeks ago; and I wanna do something with cassettes and 80s UK computers too, maybe leave my suicide not on a cassette beside a ZX Spectrum or something.


Want a Sony PVM too, I'll eventually pay way too much for one and hate all the room it takes up.

[Endicott]

I want a commodore pet. I have absolutely no idea what purpose it would serve otherwise than collecting dust in the corner looking futuristic.

I used one for a while around 1978-79. It looked like it was straight out of Kubrick's 2001.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I bought a floppy drive a few weeks ago; and I wanna do something with cassettes and 80s UK computers too, maybe leave my suicide not on a cassette beside a ZX Spectrum or something.


Want a Sony PVM too, I'll eventually pay way too much for one and hate all the room it takes up.

There's a couple of p/bvm's at work and they still look grand. Back in my console days I kept hold of a Philips 8833 and that looked bloody good when fed with RGB. Not as good as a BVM though.

[Huxleys Babkins]

As a kid we had an old as fuck magazine in our house that had an ad for the 2600 in it. The idea of a games console that came with a fuck ton of games (as the one in this ad did) had me absolutely drooling from the mouth.

In all fairness the 32-in-1 cart Atari shipped with the last run of PAL 2600s was fantastic. It was like a greatest hits where they'd recoloured and slightly renamed the games.

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-32-in-1-game-cartridge_7201.html

I bought a floppy drive a few weeks ago; and I wanna do something with cassettes and 80s UK computers too, maybe leave my suicide not on a cassette beside a ZX Spectrum or something.

Fun fact: Google left the Linux driver for USB floppy drives in Android and, with the appropriate adapter, you can use floppy disks as storage for your mobile phone.

https://youtu.be/iT1l8Dcjb1Y

[biggytitbo]

I had an Amstrad GX4000 with 50 games promised for Christmas. There were no games for Christmas.

[Beagle 2]

Consistently asked for and recieved Atari products.