These Are The Most Useless Gaming Accessories

Since the dawn of video games, inventors have been fighting to make your boring ol' console into a more interactive, ergonomic experience. The truth is that there's rarely a better way to play than the standard controllers and devices that we've always had, but failed video game peripherals sure are hilarious in retrospect. Here are a few tragic attempts at gaming accessories that have no reason to exist. Honorable mention goes out to Nintendo's Power Glove, ROB...and, well, almost every accessory ever put out for the Wii. These peripherals are still the worst of the worst.

The LaserScope was a game controller that was worn on the head as though the user were answering customer service calls for L.L. Bean, and made the wearer look like some kind of '90s Marvel Comics cyborg hero. Instead of using the usual NES zapper, the user would focus their vision through an eyepiece worn on the head and shout into the LaserScope's microphone in order to fire. In theory, this would help the user fire as fast as whiplash would allow, but screaming at your games to make them work is a garbage way to live your life while simultaneously ruining the lives around you.

One might think that by the year 2010, game companies would be able to use decades of knowledge to produce only things that were genuinely useful or interesting. But then you see something like the Game Boat and realize that idiots will always just be idiots. The Game Boat is literally an inflatable raft that you stand in when playing Kinect Adventures. Since Kinect senses your body motions to control your game character, you don't even need to hook the boat up to anything; you just kinda inflate it and trip on it while you're playing. Good job.

There have been radio peripherals for just about every Game Boy ever released, but the only way to explain why they exist is to simply say, "because they do." Buying a modified cartridge to channel fuzzy radio stations through your AA-battery-devouring Game Boy's tinny speakers is a poor alternative to actually buying a cheap pocket radio, even the cheapest of which would have superior functions to these pointless devices. Heck, you can even buy a Radio Boy, which is a Walkman in the shape of a Game Boy, if you can absolutely not escape the siren song of Nintendo.

Around the dawn of the Wii, the media was inundated with stories and videos about the system's motion controllers slipping out of the hands of dumb children who would never, ever, in their whole lives, be able to open a jar of anything because of their floppy, wet, hot dog fingers. Even though Nintendo introduced sturdier straps to their Wii-chucks, that was simply not enough. Someone needed to make special Wii gloves with gripping surfaces to really get those things to stick, at which point you may as well just wear a helmet when you eat breakfast and tape those suckers to your hands anyhow.

No kid ever really thought that the only obstacle between themselves and video game mastery was the fact that they had to waste both hands holding the pesky controller. But regardless, someone marketed a plastic board that solved that non-problem. By slotting the NES controller into this chunk of plastic, you'd free up all ten fingers to mash buttons, even though thumbs are now and have always been the king of video games. A noble attempt at finger equality, but the Speedboard just proved that all digits are not created equally.

Issuing fancy in-game weapons as real-world collectibles isn't such a bad idea when trying to get an audience involved with a video game, and even though the Resident Evil 4 chainsaw controller is a beautiful collectible, it's absolutely useless as an actual game controller. Just imagine using a chainsaw in real life, and then having to reach around it at weird angles to hit buttons to make it actually do stuff. There's a reason that actual chainsaws aren't designed to force the user to cut off their own arms to access all of their features, but the designers of this controller didn't really think about that.

It's hard to count the number of companies who fell over themselves trying to make pointless plastic devices that kids could shove their Wiimotes into, but it's easy to count the number of real successes—because that number is zero. While a giant, cheap tennis racket or golf club seems like a nice way to add some veracity to one of the Wii's many fake-sports games, many of these devices directly cover up the Wiimote's very important sensors, and few stayed on tight enough to avoid breakage or damage to your precious antiques. Just use your imagination, kids.

The controller that shipped with the original Xbox console wasn't terrible at the time, simply because there was no alternative. But handling the thing was like trying to program a bowling ball. Microsoft didn't even reinvent the traditional twin joystick controller as much as they found one and tried to inflate it like a basketball. Fortunately, a slimmer version of the controller was out before too long, and the grotesque saucer of brightly-colored buttons faded into history before it could totally destroy the console from the inside.

If you're keeping your Game Boy in your pocket, you're a chump. NYKO's Hip Clip was designed to snap onto the back of your handheld Nintendo so you could wear it proudly on your belt like you were some kind of bargain basement Captain N. While it sounds like a very bold fashion statement, the amount of abuse an unsheathed Game Boy would be subject to on your average playground would result in a very quick and deep case of Screen Scratch, and before long, you wouldn't be able to even tell which Pokemon you were enslaving. Just keep it in your pants.

Made for multiple consoles, the Turbo Touch tried to replace the usual four-axis control with a touch-sensitive disc that wouldn't require any actual pressing, reducing game-related hand stresses. Smart in theory, the controller's recessed thumb panel made actual use fairly difficult, and the makers underestimated the value of haptic feedback when it came to button pressing. The device never really caught on, and reportedly cut up a bunch of experimental, probing thumbs in the process.