The biggest computer/gaming mistake you have ever made.

[GiraffeeDreams]

+1


Sonic N and Red Faction was as good as it got.

 

[bzar]

Haven't had anything too bad... probably buying a macbook. Couldn't work with OS X at all, mostly because of no good comprehensive package management system to fetch libs and stuff and near-zero customizability. So I put linux on it. The laptop makes for a lousy linux machine mostly because it has some quirks like a non-replaceable EFI that only boots to linux when you pretty much make it work wrong, funny keyboard, a power management that only works sometimes and a bad GPU. I'm sure it's awesome if OS X is what you want, but since it wasn't what I wanted, my macbook takes the top spot for me.

 

[Tensuke]

Posting about a big gaming/computer mistake on the Pandora forums, you're brave Craig.


I had completely forgotten about Game.Com...I had Lights Out, which came with it, and some shitty Batman game...That was all I could ever find for it. HUGE waste of money, that one was. And I almost bought a Gizmodo, I came really close but I wanted to see what stuff it had coming out for it...Pretty much nothing.


And my current Gigabyte motherboard wasn't the wisest purchase, I bought it for the onboard NVIDIA 9400 gfx, since my gpu had died, but I ended up getting a 5770 very soon after. The board doesn't like it when I try to OC my cpu at all, and my RAM only runs at 800 (supposed to be 1066).

 

[Exophase]

Buying a PSP-2000 after someone assured me I could hack it with a Pandora's Battery, only to find it had some new motherboard revision that locked it out. Ultimately that PSP still got some use.. my original PSP-1000 was all scratched up and missing its charger. But it still felt like a superfluous purchase.


More recently (like, a week ago) an XBox 360 I bought died. It was the original one with no built-in storage, only $99 refurbished, came with component cable and wireless controller as part of a GameStop deal. Didn't use it at all for the past several months, until on an impulse bought a Kinect, after which the unit lasted all of two days before dying (graphical artifacts while playing, then never output video again). Ended up replacing it with a $199 4GB model.. making that $99 a complete waste. But at least it has some internal storage that isn't dog slow - I was saving games on a USB stick and one of them took like 10 minutes to load each level - and it has builtin wifi and doesn't sound like a jet when operating, And I'm still using that component cable (which the new XBox did not come with).. at first I was bummed out to find that the unit had no HDMI, now I'm struggling to justify buying an HDMI cable now that I can. My TV seems to be doing 1080p on the component cable, but I need to double check that. Also have two controllers now.


Still, felt like I was making a great purchase at the time and it really wasn't. I guess I hoped it'd last until a price drop for new units..


Then there's that Dell Axim x50v I bought solely with the intention of porting stuff to and never did anything with. At least my mom used it to play Freecell for a while. Definitely doesn't justify the > $200 I paid for it.


Here's a real debacle.. in summer 2003 I decided I was going to be on a car for a good long while and decided I'd buy a GBA. I didn't want the SP since I didn't like the form factor and lack of headphone port, but I didn't want something without any lighting either. Solution: buy a GBA off of eBay with an Afterburner mod installed. AFAIK it cost $70, which at the time must have not been a trivial amount of money. For some reason I also ordered a TV tuner, since I always wanted a portable TV. What ended up happening was that I asked my brother to get the door when the post man came and he failed to do so.. the package was left there, allegedly. I never got anything; I presume someone stole it (I complained to the delivery company and they sent the delivery guy who only insisted he left it there).. I spent a good amount of time trying to find out what could be done here, while talking to the seller. Bizarrely, he refunded me the money even though it was surely not his fault (except perhaps in using a post service that didn't require signature delivery.. still happens to me sometimes, now I wonder if that battery Craig sent me got stolen too.. I have had a fair number of things just dropped that haven't been though, so I don't know). I ended up getting another GBA with Afterburner. The case was in poor shape and the mod didn't work. Somehow I thought I could make it work myself by ordering my own kit, so I did that.. and of course I couldn't (I'm awful at this sort of thing, especially would have been then). I sent it to Afterburner to have them to do it professionally. They ended up insisting I buy a new case since it was in such bad shape, which I did too. Finally got the unit back.. at a time that would have been one day late. Fortunately the trip ended up getting postponed a day for other reasons.


I got a few "cheap" GBA games off of eBay to play, that ended up being bootlegged. I didn't notice it immediately because the cartridge shell looked identical and the sticker looked right. I should have been alerted to the fact that they came from Hong Kong and were described on the package as "samples." But what really tipped me off was when I found that one of the games had a serious bug that was only present in some bad ROM dumps. Oops.


The real funny story is that I barely played any of the three games I got. The two RPGs, Lunar Legends and that Lufia game, were pretty mediocre and didn't stand up to the quality of the others of the series I had played. The third game, Metroid Fusion, just frustrated me, and I played it until I got hopelessly stuck. I ended up playing it again years later after I played through much of the series but at the time I probably wasn't really ready for it. The tuner had poor reception, except it could somehow pick up Telemundo 100% perfectly seemingly no matter where I was in the country (or at least from Ohio to New Hampshire). That was pretty novel in its own way, but you can't get an awful lot out of watching a channel in a foreign language you don't speak. I did end up using the tuner later during the great North American blackout of 2003, this time with an external antenna.

 

[TooCoolToRule]

Spending over £2,500 on a custom build PC four years ago, only to realize there was only ONE game that took advantage of it's power (Crysis) and that four years later I could have spent about £800 and still had the same amount of fun.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

I bought a copy of Rise of the robots, with my own money.

Lol. So many of us did.It was so fuckin hyped up.I actually played it with my eyes closed to show how por the ai was.Hold up on d-pad and press kick buton repeatedly.The enemy walks into your line of fire and you win all matches i kid you not.Nice graphics but way too many animation frames.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

Buying a PSP-2000 after someone assured me I could hack it with a Pandora's Battery, only to find it had some new motherboard revision that locked it out. Ultimately that PSP still got some use.. my original PSP-1000 was all scratched up and missing its charger. But it still felt like a superfluous purchase.


More recently (like, a week ago) an XBox 360 I bought died. It was the original one with no built-in storage, only $99 refurbished, came with component cable and wireless controller as part of a GameStop deal. Didn't use it at all for the past several months, until on an impulse bought a Kinect, after which the unit lasted all of two days before dying (graphical artifacts while playing, then never output video again). Ended up replacing it with a $199 4GB model.. making that $99 a complete waste. But at least it has some internal storage that isn't dog slow - I was saving games on a USB stick and one of them took like 10 minutes to load each level - and it has builtin wifi and doesn't sound like a jet when operating, And I'm still using that component cable (which the new XBox did not come with).. at first I was bummed out to find that the unit had no HDMI, now I'm struggling to justify buying an HDMI cable now that I can. My TV seems to be doing 1080p on the component cable, but I need to double check that. Also have two controllers now.


Still, felt like I was making a great purchase at the time and it really wasn't. I guess I hoped it'd last until a price drop for new units..


Then there's that Dell Axim x50v I bought solely with the intention of porting stuff to and never did anything with. At least my mom used it to play Freecell for a while. Definitely doesn't justify the > $200 I paid for it.


Here's a real debacle.. in summer 2003 I decided I was going to be on a car for a good long while and decided I'd buy a GBA. I didn't want the SP since I didn't like the form factor and lack of headphone port, but I didn't want something without any lighting either. Solution: buy a GBA off of eBay with an Afterburner mod installed. AFAIK it cost $70, which at the time must have not been a trivial amount of money. For some reason I also ordered a TV tuner, since I always wanted a portable TV. What ended up happening was that I asked my brother to get the door when the post man came and he failed to do so.. the package was left there, allegedly. I never got anything; I presume someone stole it (I complained to the delivery company and they sent the delivery guy who only insisted he left it there).. I spent a good amount of time trying to find out what could be done here, while talking to the seller. Bizarrely, he refunded me the money even though it was surely not his fault (except perhaps in using a post service that didn't require signature delivery.. still happens to me sometimes, now I wonder if that battery Craig sent me got stolen too.. I have had a fair number of things just dropped that haven't been though, so I don't know). I ended up getting another GBA with Afterburner. The case was in poor shape and the mod didn't work. Somehow I thought I could make it work myself by ordering my own kit, so I did that.. and of course I couldn't (I'm awful at this sort of thing, especially would have been then). I sent it to Afterburner to have them to do it professionally. They ended up insisting I buy a new case since it was in such bad shape, which I did too. Finally got the unit back.. at a time that would have been one day late. Fortunately the trip ended up getting postponed a day for other reasons.


I got a few "cheap" GBA games off of eBay to play, that ended up being bootlegged. I didn't notice it immediately because the cartridge shell looked identical and the sticker looked right. I should have been alerted to the fact that they came from Hong Kong and were described on the package as "samples." But what really tipped me off was when I found that one of the games had a serious bug that was only present in some bad ROM dumps. Oops.


The real funny story is that I barely played any of the three games I got. The two RPGs, Lunar Legends and that Lufia game, were pretty mediocre and didn't stand up to the quality of the others of the series I had played. The third game, Metroid Fusion, just frustrated me, and I played it until I got hopelessly stuck. I ended up playing it again years later after I played through much of the series but at the time I probably wasn't really ready for it. The tuner had poor reception, except it could somehow pick up Telemundo 100% perfectly seemingly no matter where I was in the country (or at least from Ohio to New Hampshire). That was pretty novel in its own way, but you can't get an awful lot out of watching a channel in a foreign language you don't speak. I did end up using the tuner later during the great North American blackout of 2003, this time with an external antenna.

Metroid fusion? You got stuck on the boss aptly caled nightmare right? I actualy flung my gba on the flor in disgust at that boss until i finaly cracked him.There was also one realy obvious but piss poor badly designed bit that confused me for days.Good game though.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

I bought a second hand n64 once.Hated it.Crappy one centre positioned analogue stick which i could not get to grips with.Games anoyed me too.Jetforce gemini was way over rated.I still have it in a box but i have no love for it. Also ive had at least 4 red rings on my 360's but it's stil my current console of choice.


The ps2 was crap at launch.No good games at all for over a year.Al it had was badly ported dreamcast games.I stuck with my dreamcast for a long time.

 

[Exophase]

Metroid fusion? You got stuck on the boss aptly caled nightmare right? I actualy flung my gba on the flor in disgust at that boss until i finaly cracked him.There was also one realy obvious but piss poor badly designed bit that confused me for days.Good game though.

Nah.. I don't remember the exact area, but I got the impression that I had to shoot pretty much every tile of every wall to find the next hidden passage in order to proceed. And I got tired of it and gave up.


On my later play through I didn't find it that bad, actually found some of the others to be worse in this regard, but all not too awful. I still think this is bad game design, though.

 

[DaMummy]

bought a desktop from best buy, for $1,100. geforce mx440 (you might remember this geforce from the system requirements list that always states that the game will play on thousands of gfx cards, except for the mx440), a 750gb hdd, and some pentium cpu that was barely enough to play gta3, mustve been about 15 at the time, and it was the first real computer i bought with my own money......never again making that mistake. not 2 years passed before i got fed up with every game not being able to play with my mx440, one of the command & conquer games was the one that broke the camels back. went on to buy my whole next desktop in parts, and i still use the same thing except for few new hdd's and ssd's and a sound card, still plays about anything i want, like 7 years later


also, fuck Telemundo and their perfect reception no matter where you are in ohio, probably even underwater in lake erie

 

[Nintendo]

From the perspective of buying something that ultimately never offered anything to my personal tastes, I'd have to say that investing in the Dreamcast was a mistake on my part. It never got one single game that was of any interest to me, so it was a very bad buy.

 

[MaxNormal]

I bought the first model EEE PC on the first day it was available. Later netbooks aren't too bad I gather but the original EEE is pretty limited in what it can do - tiny screen, crappy battery life and the OS that came on it was very poor. It has not gotten much use and I still havent onsold it. The keyboard has a bug where it will randomly repeat some letters which makes it very frustrating to use. I've tried a few different OS's on it but nothing really makes it worth the hassle.


I'm slightly tempted to say my pandora purchase as I'm still waiting for it 4 years later... I'm sure I'll be happy enough when it turns up though.

 

[iprice]

I made the mistake of asking my wife to get BioShock 2. There's nothing wrong with the game, but she went to the local shop after work one day specially to get it and trashed the car by reversing into a bollard. That game alone cost over £1500 in repair costs and still bites into our insurance quotes three years later


It's a good game (not as good as the original) but not worth £2000+!

 

[Stephane Hockenhull]

Bought a WinCE PDA for 600$, the hardware worked fine but WinCE is a totally crippled piece of crap with overly expensive crippled software that made the whole thing pretty much useless.


I tried installing Linux on it but the kernel and apps never got to a point where it was stable enough to use.


I ended up literally using it as an expensive paper weight, it looked good on my desk.


ergo my order for an OpenPandora but the Jury is this out on that one.

 

[renegadechic]

my biggest mistake is ALWAYS around my own impatience. i am usually very very good at holding out on new releases and often not even rushing to the latest generation. this all changed a couple of years ago when transformers war for cybertron came out. i've always been a massive transformers fan, had previously enjoyed the armada transformers game on the PS2 even though the disc was scratched and couldnt get further than half way. so when it came out i just decided i had to have it and thankfully was able to get a decent PS3 slim bundle for pretty cheap with the PlayTV box and everything. now ultimately i know it is a good product and i have gotten hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of it, just feel a little foolish for jumping in on new releases. it was the same with batman arkham city and ultimately zelda skyward sword (but i did want the gold wiimote). seeing a lot of the same games now selling for less than half the price and even less than that if second hand just makes me titter at myself.


so yeah not too serious in the grand scheme of things. i did buy a second hand dreamcast (with 2 controllers, 1 vmu, sonic adventure and rayman 2) on ebay for £20 which i slightly regret as it has issues with resetting itself but i am trying not to despair as it might be fixable. i do feel like i should have bought a better condition unit though rather than trying to be a skintflint. other than that my biggest mistake is impulse buying dubious quality second hand games for older consoles which i dont end up playing because i have too big a backlog or because an exciting new release distracts me i.e. most of the final fantasy series!

 

[Prometheus]

i did buy a second hand dreamcast (with 2 controllers, 1 vmu, sonic adventure and rayman 2) on ebay for £20 which i slightly regret as it has issues with resetting itself but i am trying not to despair as it might be fixable. i do feel like i should have bought a better condition unit though rather than trying to be a skintflint.

It is fixable, and quite easily at that - there are even video tutorials on YouTube which should walk you through how it's done.


A "better condition" unit is just as likely to have the same problem, so you actually got a good deal, there.


[/off-topic]

 

[Garrett]

Well I imported one of these..

https://www.youtube.com/embed/RPjkaJ1ysCg?feature=oembed

..which I've still got (can't bring myselt to Ebay it) and although back in the day I regretted it shortly after it arrived, it now holds a special place amongst my console ephemera.

 

[SoulFire9001]

I got an arcade edition xbox 360 in 2007, had no problems except the disc tray was acting up a bit for about a month, but I knew who and what was causing that. I got a new one last year for christmas as a surprise, so I sent off the old one to a friend of mine. I haven't heard anything related to problems as of yet.


I just remembered another one related to gamecubes. When we first got one, we were so fascinated how it opened up and we would keep pressing the open button for no reason (just kidding about the first part, but we did mash on it). Eventually it got stuck and stayed open, so we had to have a couple game cases on top of it to make it stay closed. We then got another one that lasted for a little while. One day we brought out the old N64 and had to use the video cable from the gamecube on the N64. When we got finished and I used the gamecube again, something happened and it didn't work anymore. I assumed it was the video cable cause we used it on the N64, but I had my doubts. We then borrowed a friend's gamecube to play FF:Crystal Chronicles using the same video cable that the old gamecube used. Same thing happened to that gamecube a little while afterwards.

 

[TrashyMG]

Well I bought about 10 pricey video cards between 1997 and 2000 in search of the latest and greatest 3D performance. I spent $1200 on just the Pentium II 400 mhz processor when it first came out.. The motherboard and rest of the components were pricey too..


I wish I had that kind of spending money as I did back then..

 

[Garrett]

Well I bought about 10 pricey video cards between 1997 and 2000 in search of the latest and greatest 3D performance

Yeah me too,


I probably should have grown out of it by now, but pretty much every time a new series of GPU's arrive.. I'm raiding the piggy banks & down the back of sofas.