Is there any retro consoles that you never lived up to their potential? where the games fell short of the hardware?.
Personally I feel that the NDS was under-utilized, as it was a fully 3d capable console, that was used mostly for 2d pixel art games, and platformers. When it was able to support full 3d platformers and even a fan remake of portal.
Original PlayStation for not shipping with dual analog sticks from the start. Almost all games had to be playable with non-analog controllers. As a result, dual shock support was mostly an afterthought. Especially FPS games were awful to play.
Imagine the games that could’ve been possible if all games were designed with two analog sticks in mind. We would certainly have fewer games with tank controls.
I think this is also the main reason why it didn’t take until PlayStation 2 for developers to realize that the second analog stick is awesome for camera movement (instead of awkwardly mapping camera motion to the shoulder buttons).
This was actually a major gripe I had when playing Jersey Devil on my PS1, once I found out about emulators I created a custom controller config for it that made it much more playable though.