Top 10 worst products ever

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Posted on 12 Mar 2010 at 14:22

8. Sega 32X/Mega-CD
Sega was worried that its competitors were getting a technological march on it, so it decided that rather than launch a brand new console it would create add-ons to boost the Megadrive's (Genesis in the US) capabilities: the 32X and Mega-CD.

The 32X plugged into the Megadrive's cartridge slot and was designed to add 32-bit processing to the Megadrive. It contained two 32-bit CPUs and a 3D graphics processor. It was relatively expensive at launch and was hampered by games support: most developers didn't use the 32X's capabilities to its full and opted for basic conversions. Sega hammered a nail into its own coffin by ditching the Megadrive and focussing all development on its Saturn console.

The Mega-CD add-on wasn't much better. This added a CD drive to the Megadrive, so that games could use more storage than the traditional cartridges allowed. It was a good idea in theory, but developers got lazy and decided that the CD should be used for incredibly bad full motion video. Rebel Assault is a perfect example of this in action: you watch some low-quality Star Wars video and move a cursor around the screen occasionally shooting at things. It's one of the worst games ever.

Neither the 32X or Mega-CD helped the Megadrive last any longer and people, quite rightly, opted for real 32-bit consoles.

7. Danmere Backer
Essentially rust on a bit of Sellotape, VHS was one of the worst inventions of all time. It produced poor-quality sound and pictures that degraded over time and if the picture quality remained, the tape would simply get stuck round the insides of your VCR ruining it forever.

Using VHS as the basis of a backup system was never going to be a good thing, as Danmere proved with its Backer product. Essentially an ISA card that connected to a VCR, so you could store data onto VHS tapes it was a bizarre idea.

Aside from being relatively slow, we found that when we tested it we could never make an error-free backup. Some files could be recovered using a processor-intensive recovery task, but some were gone forever. This pretty much negated the point of having a safe and secure backup.

Fortunately, the popularity of VHS has waned and real backup media (hard disks, online and optical discs) have thrived.