Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I did not purchase this through Amazon, but rather I bought the Multiplayer Bundle at a retailer. The only difference with the Multiplayer Bundle and the one listed here is the Multiplayer Bundle comes with a game and extra controller for $179.99. I felt compelled to write this review because I based my purchase of this on many of the 4 and 5 star reviews on Amazon and I feel like what they describe in their reviews and what I actually got are two completely different things. I was excited to buy this for my 4 year old and my 3 year old. They watch me play games sometimes and really enjoy it and get into it and have played the Wii a little bit, so I was excited to get this for them to play while learning. Setup was easy enough, Nothing more complicated than plugging in a few cords. Connecting to my houses wi-fi was also a breeze. It updated the firmware after registration was complete. After the update, I noticed there was no sound anymore. Weird, but I rebooted the system, turned on and off my receiver and that solved the problem, but was a foreshadowing of the problems to come. Setting up their profiles was also easy and fun. They get to choose their own background and profile picture, which they enjoyed. Then we put in one of the games (Jake and the Neverland Pirates) I bought to go with the system they got for Christmas. That's when everything went horribly bad. First, let me say the room was well lit, as per the instructions and other reviews on here have said. The Jake game requires you to use the controller as a pointer. The pointer is so unresponsive and barely even registers movement unless the child is literally about a foot away from the camera. When a button is pressed, there is about a 1-2 second lag before it registers that a button was pushed, which for a toddler/child is extremely frustrating. It was frustrating for me and I'm a 39 year old man who has been playing video games since 1982. Next we somehow got the pointer to navigate to a camera based portion of the game. It worked okay, but we looked like blurry blobs on screen because of the extremely lo res camera. Still, I was giving it a chance, even though I was thinking how terrible this was going and how I can't believe they charge $179 for this. Then it started crashing. Completely stopping the game we were playing and returning to the home screen. Even though the cartridge was still in the console, it wasn't recognizing it. I turned off the system and back on again and it recognized the cartridge. Booted it back up, sat through the long loading screens, started to play and it did it again. Two more times of this and I then found myself explaining to my 4 year old that we had to take back her big Christmas present (from Santa) because it wasn't working and it wasn't very good and that we would find a new game for the Wii instead. Awesome. The system is completely underpowered. The overpriced $30 games (seriously, major blockbuster games on adult consoles that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make cost $60) are really nothing more than static backgrounds with other static images on top of the static background that are sort of animated. Free flash games from 15 years ago have better graphics. The controllers feel like cheap plastic. The camera, which is a major selling point emphasized by the manufacturer, is extremely lo-res and lo quality and is reminiscent of the early web cams from the late 90's in terms of design and image quality. All forgivable I guess, but when the system doesn't even play the games after only 10 minutes of use and starts crashing, that's unforgivable. Literally 10 minutes of use before the system started to crash and not recognize the cartridge. There are so many better options out there for less money. I feel like many of the 4 and 5 star reviews are from people who either received the system for free from Leap Frog to review or are from moms or grandparents who have never played a video game in their life and have no basis for comparison. If you've ever even turned on another video game console before and then turned this on and started playing it, you would immediately see that the LeapTV is vastly overpriced and underpowered and does not even come close to fulfilling the things it promises on the box and in the high rated reviews. I'm not saying the highly rated reviews are shill reviews but seriously, how could my experience be so vastly different than these people who rated it so highly? My experience is almost identical to every one of the 1 and 2 star reviews which are outnumbered 10-1 by the 5 star reviews. At any rate, I am taking this back to the store and counting it as a lesson learned. The potential of the LeapTV is there in theory but it's not even close to being realized yet. If this were 10-15 years ago, this would be on par with what you would expect, but this in 2014 at this price, yeah, no.