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No peripheral vision – Japan’s gamers sound off on hardware add-on nightmares

Casey Baseel Jul 24, 2014
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One of the reasons I’ve done most of my video gaming with a console instead of a PC is the simplicity, on the consumer end, of the hardware. After plopping down the money for the system, you’re pretty much good to go, without the need to continually tinker with and incrementally upgrade it in order to play the latest games.

Still, that doesn’t mean everyone is satisfied to leave well enough alone in the console and handheld world, as evidenced by the piles of hardware add-ons that have been released over the years. Not every addition is a good one, though, as illustrated by the Japanese gamers who flocked to website Niconico News to share their video game peripheral horror stories.

In recent years, peripherals have become a little less common, so before we wade into the hardware add-on morass, here’s a little background on the subject. You can probably count the number of successful, satisfying peripherals from the 8 to 64-bit eras on one hand, and that’s even allowing for the possibility that you’ve been in a gruesome farm-equipment-related accident or two.

The Game Genie was a godsend for players looking to cheat or hack their way through a game. Perhaps the only bona fide peripheral success from a first party developer, the P.C. Engine’s CD-ROM add-on was a hit that extended the system’s life by several years in Japan, but was an eventual flop overseas.

Aside from that, peripherals have generally fallen into two categories:
1. Disappointments
2. Huge disappointments

Peripherals are usually designed to boost the power of a system. Nintendo’s Super Game Boy was billed as a way to enjoy improved versions of the titles for the company’s original handheld by adding a splash of color to the ordinarily monochrome graphics, plus displaying them on a full-size TV. Unfortunately, it did this by acting as a conduit to play Game Boy games on the vastly more powerful Super Famicom/Super NES, and many people saw the Super Game Boy as more of a downgrade to the latter than an upgrade to the former.

“I bought a Super Game Boy, but the additional color didn’t make the gameplay any better,” recalls one 34-yeard-old respondent, who would have been in junior high school when it hit stores in 1994. “It was a pain to hook up too, so I stopped using it pretty soon after I got it.”

This wasn’t the first attempt to enhance the Game Boy experience, though. Long before the Super Game Boy, there was the Hyper Boy.

Manufactured by Konami, the Hyper Boy had a slot for the entire Game Boy, cartridge and all, to slide into. Once in place, the magnifying glass provided larger graphics and the joystick more arcade-like controls….all while massively reducing the portability of the handheld. Maybe that’s why, as one dissatisfied customer said, “Almost nobody remembers it.”

Moving on to peripherals for regular consoles, the Super Famicom had a couple of stinkers, starting with the Super Scope.

Light guns in general have a dismal track record on home systems, as the limited nature of shooting games generally translates into an extremely small library of titles for them. The Super Scope was no exception, but at least, as one 30-year-old gamer remembers, it made an awesome bazooka if he unplugged it to use as a bazooka when he played soldiers with his friends.

The Japan-only Sufami Turbo wasn’t a rapid-fire controller, nor was it a Super Game Boy-style converter to play TurboGrafx-16 games on Nintendo’s 16-bit console. Instead, the Bandai-made Super Famicom peripheral contained two cartridge slots, one of which could hold base programming for games, and the second of which could be used for low-cost add-ons with new maps and levels.

In some ways, it was a less elegant precursor to the downloadable content that’s provided so much lifeblood to the game industry today, but in 1996, the Sufami Turbo was an idea ahead of its time on a system past its prime. The very last Sufami Turbo game was released just three months after the peripheral went on sale, leaving its mercifully small user base high and dry.

At least in the case of the Sufami Turbo, Bandai can use its lack of console hardware as an excuse. It’s a little harder to wrap your head around the sudden collapse of Nintendo’s own 64DD. Also known as the Bulky Drive, the DD was a disk drive for the Nintendo 64, whose reliance on cartridges was becoming an increasingly crippling handicap in its fight against the CD-based PlayStation.

Launched in December of 1999, the DD didn’t end up as laughably short-lived as the Sufami Turbo, but it didn’t last much longer either, with its last release coming just eight months later. In all, just nine DD titles were made, which might not have been such a bad deal had they all been A-plus-quality games.

Unfortunately, the complete DD library included one expansion pack that required an existing Nintendo 64 cartridge to play, a golf game, four different Mario Artist packs, and SimCity 2000 (which also had versions on any number of competing systems). The only games of any real interest were the quirky god-simulator Doshin the Giant, and the Doshin the Giant expansion. Doshin would later get a rerelease on the Nintendo GameCube, clearing away almost any reason for anyone to buy a DD (not that there was much of one in the beginning).

A harsh critic could argue that the 64DD was the result of Nintendo taking a wild shot in the dark to try to slow down the juggernaut the PlayStation had become. Sony’s storied system had peripheral snafus of its own, though, which were sometimes triggered as much by the exuberance from its massive lead as Nintendo’s were by its flailing attempts to play catch up.

Namco’s NeGCon was pushed as a great way to play driving games like the company’s then-hit Ridge Racer series. Twisting the controller allowed for analog steering, and certain buttons were also analog, enabling precise presses of the accelerator or brakes. What wasn’t so fun, though, was a lack of L2 and R2 triggers, or a select button for that matter. Even worse, since the NeGCon was launched at the same time as the PlayStation itself, games weren’t yet at a level of sophistication to implement that level of control. “I bought one, but I always got slower times when I used it,” grumbled one respondent.

Sony itself would go reaching a bit too far with the PocketStation, a souped-up version of the PlayStation’s memory card which was released in 1999.

With a small black and white screen, tiny cross pad, and single action button, Sony optimistically thought gamers would want to play mini games on the PocketStation even while they could instead be spending time with Final Fantasy VIII, Resident Evil 3, and Silent Hill.

Whereas the PocketStation was ostensibly trying to appeal to gamers by looking fun, the controller for Capcom’s Steel Battalion did everything it could to look cool.

With control sticks, buttons, switches, and even pedals everywhere, the controller for Steel Battalion, which, we have to stress, was only usable with this game and its sequel, pumped the total cost of the title up to 19,800 yen (US $196). For shelling out enough cash to buy four ordinary games, the controller would make you feel like a real mech pilot…

…provided you actually had someplace to set it up, that is. The oversized contraption made Steel Battalion impossible to play while chilling on the couch. For the many gamers who lacked the space for a dedicated warmech staging facility in their apartments, the experience turned sour quickly. “I bought it, but I had no place to put it,” remembers one gamer.

Awesome-looking and full of promises it could never actually deliver on, it was basically the second coming of the Power Glove. No wonder when Capcom finally decided to make a third Steel Battalion game in 2012, they decided to give it motion controls instead.

Source: Niconico News
Insert images: Freett, Ameblo, All About