Blog:Shovelware consoles

NOTE: Unfinished

WHO LET THE SHOVELWARE GAMES OUT?! Seriously, what the hell happened to quality control in gaming nowadays? This has gone downhill ever since the release of Little Britain: The Video Game on PS2 and PSP, and now they're legally allowing games with the slightest budget put into their developments, even including a broken calculator app on Nintendo Switch?! Bullshit, this pretty much forces me to always have to look up for game reviews to avoid being scammed for a bad game, which probably will happen OFTEN! They've existed ever since the Atari 2600 era, but they've gone literally worse nowadays!

Well. At least, a low-cost budget game, which shovelware relates to, generally costs below $20. You've just wasted money on a single bad game, which only gives small pain, and from there you also might be able to refund the game before that teaches you a lesson to look up game reviews on the internet. Well, what if we get into consoles this time? Isn't this... a brand new name for a category of bad consoles? Well, that's exactly what I'm going to call that type of console. A shovelware console.

Shovelware consoles are... you guessed it, consoles that are made with very little development time and effort, often resulting in very weak reliability and poor hardware that is either too weak for contemporary standards, or hard to make games for. Yes, they also exist. You can take a look at a lot of retro-based consoles on the internet, and you'll see what I mean. Those consoles are very ugly, and they even cost more money than consoles, meaning that if you actually buy for those consoles, that scam will hit your feelings SUPER BAD!

However, these are rarely found in supermarkets because of bad quality and sometimes poor marketing, and rather appear commonly in budget shops and on the internet. I'm not quite sure since almost all consoles I've seen on the shelves in my life look good and are not shovelware at all. So, most kids will always get good consoles and avoid shovelware consoles, unlike getting shovelware games more often since this type of game often tricks parents into buying them and give it to their kids without realizing the poor reception from many. Glad the internet is why shovelware games are more commonly avoided than before, making bad games flop even more than back then.

Alright, for now, down below are the types of shovelware consoles I found so far. They vary in many kinds of quality and disadvantages, and this section will also list the worst console examples for each type.

Rip-offs
To me, it's the most obvious thing that qualifies a console as shovelware. They are very often of extremely bad quality, ranging from broken controllers, trying to replicate motion controls but failing miserably, severely outdated hardware and incredibly cheap build quality. They can easily be spotted with plagiarized design and name, most notably the Chintendo Vii. However, some of them are dedicated consoles that only copy an original console's design, and no more similarities. I think those consoles mostly come from Eastern Asia, mainly in China and Taiwan, probably to avoid copyright infrigements.

Worst example
Wireless Air 60

Really? Were JungleTac even trying on this one? It's the sequel to another rip-off of the Wii made by themselves too, which means they made 2 Wii rip-offs, the first one being the Chintendo Vii! Well, these consoles atleast did try to replicate motion controls. That's good for me, but the Wireless Air 60 lacks everything that made the Kinect, the console whom the former ripped off, pretty innovative even with its poor marketing! Instead JungleTac just went even lazier with cloning consoles, just by adding in a basic camera that can't track body movements at all, and instead just detects the movement of pixels on the screen. That does NOT work well, because not only is it just a completely lazy way of making a camera capable of "tracking movements", but it also ruins the already fake motion controls as well, since sometimes they're either broken or trigger some commands randomly while the player didn't intend to do so. The console comes with 60 mini-games, as suggested by its name, but the worst thing about it is that most of the games just don't even take advantage of "motion" at all. Instead they use cross-hair shifting, a method of control where you move from left to right with body movements. So yeah. This is a complete failure of a console, and is an utter waste of JungleTac's time while milking rip-offs of other consoles, which was basically their hobby during the company's whole life-span.

Dedicated retro-based consoles
They're intended to emulate or perfectly run retro games with hardware that vary in each of them. They can either be based on other developers' hardwares like the NES, which therefore considers those consoles as Famiclones, and the Sega Genesis, or use a modern operating system that only emulates the retro consoles, allowing them to be compatible with more compatible platforms. Note that while Famiclones have gained a bad reputation, there's still some good ones like the FC Twin, which can play games on both NES and SNES.

The big problem about making those consoles, is that if they contain ROMs of games, this makes such consoles actually illegal to manufacture and sell since most ROMs are copyrighted by the owners of the respective games they contain. Well, not only are some retro-based consoles illegal to make if they contain pirated ROMs, but many dedicated retro-based consoles contain way too many ugly hacks of existing games just to hit the "10 million games" mark, which is frequently advertised on those consoles. Many consoles that instead rely on emulation, may also have severe emulation issues, like buggy graphics and sound, and extreme slow-motion or FPS lag because of either weak cores or hardware.

Worst example
Classic Mini SX-86

Okay, the console's actual name is unbelievably long that I just don't have time to write it. That's why I shortened it just like that. Anyways, this console is also an SNES Classic rip-off only when it comes to its design, which is why I didn't talk about it in the rip-offs section. Other than that, the emulation is unforgivably terrible. It comes with many pirated games, all on an SD card instead of internal storage, but barely any of them even work on the system because of the extremely weak emulation. Not even NES games run properly on the console, despite NES games working perfectly on a huge ton of emulators. Not really much to say about it... it's similar to other bad dedicated consoles, but I think the emulaton is at its worst on this console.

Consoles based on another device's hardware
It is quite possibly the laziest way to make a game console possible, because those consoles' developers only grabbed another device's hardware, slapped it on another console that can end up being pointless to get, and try to hide the fact that their console is ripped off from another one they made. Usually, they are easy to spot by listening to the sounds or looking at the graphics and compare them to another hardware that looks familiar, or take a deep look into the device's motherboard. This category of consoles can qualify as rip-offs even if they are made by the same developers that made the original consoles, but this can serve as a sub-category since they're directly based on other system hardware.

Worst example
Commodore 64 Games System

Absolute torture to your money is the best way to describe this rotten piece of crap only released in Europe. Firstly, this is based on the Commodore 64, which is already widely known for being able to play games, not to mention that the C64GS only costed 50 pounds less than the original C64. And what's the point of getting the console anyway? Because the cartridges that are used by the C64GS for its games are sold at absurd prices, 20 POUNDS to be exact, when you could buy a normal C64 game for like 3 pounds. And yeah, this console was released in 1990, and that was based on a 1982 computer. Which means the hardware is incredibly outdated for its time because the 16-bit era was close to arrive in Europe with the Mega Drive. Also, Commodore desperately focused on quantity over quality with their consoles. They tried THE SAME THING to make their next consoles, that is, they are also based on other hardware just like the C64GS. Firstly they released the CDTV and then the CD32 which were both based on Amiga, so yes, they sold really poorly and sent Commodore into the bankruptcy hell, unfortunately killing the company. THE COMPANY'S BLOOD IS ON THEIR CONSOLES' HANDS!!!