I've been lucky in that most of the games I picked up without hearing reviews about have either been really good games (e.g., Yoshi's Island, Wario Land 3, Link to the Past) or games that I have thoroughly enjoyed (e.g., Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja, Midnight Club, and then their sequels.)
I have played some games whose version on another system was terribly disappointing.
I'm a fairly committed Nintendo fanboy, but Iearned the hard way that there are some games that don't translate well to Nintendo consoles.
I've played the NCAA Football series on the PlayStation 2 (especially the Dynasty mode) for hundreds of hours when I was in high school. Once I had more time to commit to games later in college, I decided to get the latest game for the Wii (since that was my only console at the time. Although I'm not usually opposed to the Wiimote, it didn't work well for this game. And then the game was very shallow in terms of gameplay (e.g., variety of plays, recruiting, length of the dynasty, obvious flaws like playing two games in the same week of the season and not being able to change it in Preseason scheduling.) EA Sports just put a title out there to get a little money from the casual console, but it was a terrible version of the game.
This game wasn't as bad for the GameCube, but it was still a much more shallow game than it was for the PS2. You didn't have as much variety in changing the music, the cars and tracks were all bought using points instead of unlocking some of them by winning certain events, and most importantly, the steering wasn't as responsive. I decided to sell back both of them and get the versions for the PS2.
Â
Â
I learned that I stick to Nintendo for it's first-party games and a few others. I go with Sony for racing and sports.