Since we’re talking about crappy peripherals, we might as well devote a few inches to the DexDrive.
“What’s a DexDrive?”, I hear you say.
A DexDrive is a squarish device that plugs into your PC, and you jam memory cards from your favorite game system into it. Now, that’s not to say that a single DexDrive will read every memory card for every system, no, that would make far too few dollars for its developer. You have to buy a different drive for each system.
But what’s it do?
Well, at the time (the middle 1990’s) memory cards were the de facto way to store your game saves, but the problem was that memory cards were pretty expensive. So, for about the price of two cards, you got a device that let you transfer the saves to/from your computer, where storage space was comparatively huge.
Which sounds great, right?
But, you have a huge problem immediately: to use the device you have to format your card so that the drive can use it. Which means that you have to erase everything on your card in order to use it. Which meant that in order to use mine, I’d either have to buy a new memory card or delete the stuff on the one I already had on it. Which meant dozens upon dozens of hours down the toilet (if I ever wanted to go back to those games, that is).
Oh, and there was the time it corrupted the card that I actually tried it out on, that kind of sucked, too.