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Over the years, there have been several consoles, peripherals, add-ons and wacky extras designed to drain the money from gamers. Some prove to be fantastic investments, like steering wheel controllers (I can't get to grips with them myself, but there are plenty of games out there to use them on), but there are others that left even spend-thrifty gamers saying "no thanks" or "why on earth did I buy that".

Super Game Boy

In 1994, people requesting a colour Game Boy had their wish granted - sort of. The Super Game Boy allowed you to play your Game Boy games in colour, but not on a hand-held. Instead, it plugged into the Super Nintendo and let you play them through a television.

Games that were specifically designed to be Super Game Boy compatible (Donkey Kong '94 was the first) used the full 256 colour palette of the SNES, all other games only allowed a maximum of four colours at once. These could be user-defined, but usually ended up looking garish and needed to be changed every few levels. Many SGB-designed games also boasted improved sound effects and bonus modes through the device!

The Super Game Boy. Was I the only person to own one of these AND a Game Boy Player?

An updated version, the Super Game Boy 2, hit Japan in 1998 (with the US able to purchase them via mail order), and Nintendo also resurrected the concept during the last generation with the Game Boy Player, which attached to the GameCube, allowing three generations of Game Boy games (Original, Colour and Advance) to be played on the big screen.

Game Guardian

Introducing the ultimate spoilsport add-on for grumpy parents sick of losing their TV time to consoles. Joytech's Game Guardian was a device that the Playstation 2 slimline console would sit in, and allowed parents to set a time limit for play. Once that limit ran out, the console would shut down.

It's a good idea in theory, as parents could set boundaries on their child's time spent staring at the screen, but can you imagine the anger, violence and tears that would ensue if a shut down kicked in and caused much unsaved progress to be lost? Somehow the prospect of square eyes and lost sleep seems the better option.

Game Guardian. Right up there with bedtimes and curfews.

No further Game Guardians have been produced for other consoles, and even Joytech themselves don't sell them through their own online store, which suggests that it wasn't quite as popular as they might have thought.

Fishing Rod Controller

This Dreamcast peripheral used motion sensing long before the Wii made it cool to do so, and had a reel control on the side that let you wind in your virtual line like an actual fishing rod. While this sounds like a whole lot of fun (and it was), the fact of the matter remains that fishing games have never been, and never will be, regular releases.

Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Give him a fishing rod controller, he can, erm, play Sega Bass Fishing?

As a result of this, once you'd exhausted the few games available, you were left with a controller that was next to useless, except for games that didn't require the use of the triggers (there weren't too many of them that didn't, but it did work quite nicely with Virtua Tennis). Perhaps even stranger, there were even official and unofficial versions, giving you a choice of what to waste your money on!