Hardware mis-steps

[Siri]

Dreamcast - Or, rather, Dreacast VMUs. You've designed and created a memory card that functions as a little gaming device in its own right. Great! You've given it a battery life of a couple of hours. Not so great.

following on with this: if you don't replace the batteries on your VMU (which is what I never did), you get a lovely screeching noise which is loud enough to shatter a few windows on boot-up. Why couldn't they just implemented two small beeps instead? bah

Also, the dreamcast's d-pad + 2D fighters = your thumb in ribbons after three matches.

Can't say I understood the idea of the NES Advantage's two-player switching either, apart from abusing mario 3's two player mode for more lives.

[Kogi Kaishakunin]

The Commodore Amiga CD32. Again, what was the point.

The control pad for that system was utter cheap ****.

I can also say the same for the stick that came with the Commodore 64 (I went straight for one of my Atari VCS sticks instead).

Has anyone mentioned the original XBox pad yet?

[HHarm]

A few that spring into mind:

Atari 5200 - The controller.... I mean come on! Did they even playtest the thing? An analog stick was of course a novel idea but pretty horrible in reality when the stick didn't center itself. And buttons were the worst part. They were tiny pieces of rubber really hard to press and the buttons would almost always stop working after a certain amount of play.

Intellivision & Colecovision - Controllers again. The stick of Atari 2600 was far from perfect its two competitors took the wrong direction from it. Both the movement plate of the Intellivision and the clumsy short stick of the Colecovision were horrible to use. And the buttons sucked badly too.

Commodore 64 - To hamper home piracy the tape games were recorded at the lowest possible volume. The result was that even the original games failed to load quite often. Of course the problem was more with the game companies. Commodore did release the Load It tape player that helped quite a lot but was still a bit cumbersome to use. Another design mistake with the C64 was that the cable connections weren't protected from unplugging and plugging the cables when the power was on. It was a pretty easy way to destroy the disk drive.

Amiga - As impressive as the Amigas capabilities were they really should have been able to make it more stable. The guru was meditating way too often.

Wonderswan Color - Not only is the dark screen hard to see but that it also lags makes playing any fast action game pretty horrible. Try playing Judgement Silversword if you can. WS Crystal fixed the problem.

[megabowl]

Amstrad CPC - One joypad port. Terrific. Though it did give you the option to plug a second one into the official Amstrad stick that came with it (handily meaning that stick needed to be replaced with a similar official Amstrad product every time it broke) that didn't work as the signals from the two sometimes collided. Given that they managed to put an analogue joystick port onto the GX4000 console only a few years later, it's a bit of an oversight

Sega Gamegear - Step outside door. Switch machine on. Do first level of Sonic. Visit newsies. Buy new batteries. Step outside door. Switch machine on. Do first level of Sonic. Visit new....and so forth.....

Atari Lynx - As above but 'Chips Challenge' instead of 'Sonic'

Gameboy Advance - I can't see the screen. And it's a couple of buttons short

Gameboy Advance SP - I can see the screen, but I can't use my headphones.....And WHERE ARE MY OTHER TWO BUTTONS??!!??

[tokyochojin]

Ａｃｔａｕｌｌｙ　ｉ　ｌｉｋｅ　ｔｈｅ　Ｇａｍｅｂｏｙ　ｈａｖｉｎｇ　ｏｎｌｙ　２（４）　ｂｕｔｔｏ ｎｓ　ａｓ　ｉｔ　ｓｈｏｕｌｄ　ｉｎ　Ｔｈｅｏｒｙ　ｋｅｅｐ　ｇａｍｅｓ　ｓｉｍｐｌｅ，　ｗｈｉｃｈ 　ｉ　ｆｅｅｌ　ｐｏｒｔａｂｌｅ　ｇａｍｅｓ　ｓｈｏｕｌｄ　ｂｅ．

Ｗａｒｉｏ　Ｗａｒｅ　ａ　ｐｒｉｍｅ　ｅｘａｍｐｌｅ．

[Ady]

I had to bump this as another one came to light over the weekend.

The internal battery in the Neo Geo Pocket Colour. It was a bad idea in the Saturn, too.

[Richard.John]

I am sure it has already been mentioned, but the omission of the back light on the first generation GBA. Not good.

[Freddo]

the analog sticks on the dual shock, its like they are designed to repel the human thumb as much as possible, i mean, who's idea was it to make it not only convex so you cant rest your thumb in it, but also totaly smooth !

honestly, its totaly beyond me how they made it to production, and to add insult to injury they are really lose and crappy too.

(it should be noted that the vaguely rare "analog" pad (no rumble) for the psx was different and had concave sticks that were genuinly good, what happened to that when they were designed the ds?)

[Richard.John]

The dual shock sticks are ****. Sony need to move them around, Xbox style, for the PS?

[dreamylittledream]

The Gamecube D-pad fulfils its purpose perfectly.

And what purpose is that eh? To be ignored?

Thank goodess for the Hori SNES-esque pad from using the GB player is all I can say.

So have we mentioned the ridicuous battery numbers and consumption of the Game Gear and Lynx yet?

[anephric]

I believe the Virtual Boy eats up batteries faster than either of the above two monstrosities. On a par with the Nomad.

Then again the VB wasn't meant to be portable, really. Stupid partially circumcised creation that it was.

[Baseley09]

PC Engine, having to buy an adaptor for 2 players lol.

They couldve at least had 2 ports on Bigger versions.

[sj33]

Funny, with all the fuss people made about the PSP battery life being only a few hours, we forget that it's rechargable... with the GameGear, you had to buy a 6-pack of AA's every hour or so. I think I ended up only using my GameGear with the AC adaptor.

[Corrupt Rose]

The Lynx only went for about 2 hours on what must have been 8 batteries as well. The people I knew with those kept them plugged into the wall, somewhat sensibly.

[Papercut]

6 batteries, and three hours for the lynx II