The Telstar Arcade was a quirky first generation console made by Coleco, who were quite a big player in console gaming at this time. It was a triangular system that could play a bunch of different cartridge games using the same method as the Soundic console's mentioned earlier in the list (ie all the hardware was put in the cartridges themselves), this was one of the earliest examples of this idea though.

I also touched on this one earlier in the related Soundicvision entry.

This machine made by the Hong Kong company Soundic, as well as its numerous clones released throughout Europe, achieved respectable success here and were actually very good value for money at the time. They offered a more limited experience of what the more powerful 2nd generation consoles were doing by incorporating the hardware into the cartridges instead of the consoles, and they did this at 1st gen prices, being barely more expensive than the basic pong machines (which were still selling quite well in the late 70s in the budget market), but offering a lot more.

The Creativision was a console released around the time of the Colecovision that had very similar hardware but incorporated a different CPU, surprisingly it was even possibly an older system.

The machine was sold all around the world and did gain some minor success in some places, such as in Australia where it was released by a popular electronics company there and rebranded as the "Dick Smith Wizard".

The console was well built, was very capable for the time and actually quite interesting in some ways, the controllers had keypads on them and when you set two controllers next to each other on the console they formed a sort of mini keyboard, which was a nice touch.

Games wise everything here is a knock-off of a famous arcade game of the time. They are well made and polished but all have funny little changes made to them to avoid litigation. Its version of Donkey Kong for example has you going after a gigantic criminal who's decided to scale a nearby building for some reason! Whilst its version of Pac-Man has you playing as a chicken who lays eggs, and has to fill the whole screen with eggs to progress to the next level!

This successor to the previously mentioned Cassette Vision was released in Japan in 1984 to compete with the newly popular Famicom. It actually also got a limited release in Europe, primarily I believe in France as the Yeno Cassette Vision, though I don't think it did all that well there.

As mentioned earlier the original Cassette Vision had been the major console in Japan before being dethroned by the Famicom, and with this newer, more advanced system the console makers Epoch were intending to regain their crown from Nintendo. As you can probably guess they didn't manage it.

Unfortunately apart from being able to push around a hefty amount of sprites the hardware itself wasn't really that impressive, especially in the sound department where its honestly a candidate for being one of the worst sounding consoles in this list! In other regards the hardware isn't so bad for the era though.

The game library was pretty small but there were some reasonable multiplats released on there for the time, as well as a handful of notable games of its own (though nothing particularly mind blowing).

The Jaguar (or Jagwar as some people like to call it), was the final console from Atari. Sadly, after a string of blunders over many years the first ever major company of videogaming was unceremoniously forced to exit the console market for good when this system failed.

Now, against my better judgement I kinda' like this system! Don't get me wrong its a pretty mediocre console, but I feel like it does at least have some small measure of charm (though I guess if anything will give you more appreciation for the Jaguar it'll be forcing yourself to learn about and play 100 different consoles for a list!).

Unlike most of the consoles here the Jaguar actually had a handful of key titles that were notable at the time. It was the first place where Rayman was announced for example, Tempest 2000 remains a beloved game in many circles, and at release its port of Doom was the best console version of one of the seminal games of the time, not bettered until the PS1 version arrived.

The hardware was reasonable for the time and the price was very competitive, believe it or not Atari was quite fortunate that this machine fell into their lap. Designed by the British company Flare, who were ex-Sinclair staff who'd previously designed the Konix Multisystem (a console that had been heavily covered in UK magazines but ultimately never released), Flare had the experience and know-how to design a respectable 3D polygon pushing system.

Unfortunately though by the 90s Atari was honestly not in any position to be releasing anything! Many people talk of how the system was killed by a lack of software support, and whilst its true there's little here of worth, the truth of the matter is that they couldn't really even manufacture or distribute these machines at the sort of levels required for success anyway! Atari actually fell down at the first hurdle and only managed to manufacture an anemic number of them at launch (which subsequently sold out).

There were other notable issues as well though of course, the hardware was rushed to market and as such was buggy, and whilst it had reasonable polygon pushing abilities it wasn't so well suited to texturing said polygons, which was to become more and more important as time went on. Atari had also done a bad job with the controllers (as per usual for the company really to be honest), they were unwieldy and even included their own number pad, a feature that everyone else had realised was a crap idea a decade earlier! Worse still the original version of the pad didn't even include side buttons, making strafing in first person shooters unnecessarily finicky.

This is the predecessor of the earlier mentioned Emerson Arcadia and like that system was developed by Philips and then leased out to other companies to produce under different names, this seems to have been the first model to hit the market.

The most interesting thing about this particular model of the hardware was that it actually incorporated a self-righting analogue stick in its pack-in controller. This was the first of its kind, predating and surpassing the 5200's controller that would arrive years later (and its actually a quite reliable controller too unlike that console's notorious one).

A late 1st gen console based on the popular arcade game Tank. This home version gives you a nice set-up with two joysticks for each player to control the tanks, with fire buttons on top of the sticks to shoot. This configuration allows you to use proper tank controls including rotating and reversing, which were not featured in the more famous console versions of the game (such as Combat on the 2600).

Another 1st gen console, this one arrived shortly before the release of the Atari 2600 in 1977, so things were moving at quite a fast pace by this stage.

The console plays variations of Breakout and a range of different electronic pinball games, with the paddle on the top controlling the Breakout variations and two buttons on either side of the console controlling the flippers in the Pinball games, which is a really nice touch.

The Video 2000 was a reasonably impressive 1st generation console that even used interchangeable cartridges, which was rare at the time. These cartridges were not however the ones we all know and love as they didn't actually contain any information on the cartridge, they just changed the behaviour of the console in minor ways.

So this one is very interesting. Its a motion-controlled console focused on sports and fitness games that was made and released by ex-Nintendo employees (staff members who had previously worked on the NES back in the 80s), and it was released... before the Wii!

Each game for the system included its own specific peripherals, such as baseball bats, bowling balls, tennis rackets, and boxing gloves and such, and there was even a fitness game featuring Jackie Chan that came with a pressure sensitive mat! I feel like Nintendo really must've been influenced by the console as it really is almost like Wii sports and Wii Fit before they existed.

Hardware wise this works like those late 1st gen system we mentioned earlier, with much of the hardware being in the cartridges themselves and not in the console, so whilst the released games didn't look particularly impressive graphically, had the console taken off the hardware in the games themselves could've been upgraded over time to provide improvements. The motion control in the games is... actually not that bad, surprisingly.