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Not a bad list. I had actually been thinking about the worst controller flaws the other day. Here are some controller issues that piss me off:

1. Odyssey-2. On the early models, the controllers plugged into this system, thus making a broken control easy to replace. After the initial production run, someone decided to hardwire the controllers to the console. A few other 70s/early 80s consoles did this too, then they realized it was fucking stupid. Odyssey-2 might have actually been the last console to do this, but I'm not sure. Knyte can look up.

2. Dreamcast. Who in the fuck decided that the wire should connect to the bottom of the controller instead of the top? This irritates me to no end, because it constantly gets in the fucking way. I know it's partially because of the VMU that this decision was made, but they could have found a way around it.

3. N64. The analog stick on these controllers were shit. After prolonged use, the stick would grind away at its base, becoming noticeably less responsive and leaving a chalky residue. And as if it wasn't bad enough the controls were prone to breaking, Nintendo SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED GAMES to break the controllers. Most notably, fighting Bowser in Mario 64 required you to spin the analog stick like a madman, severely hurting your controller in the process. Even worse was the Mecha Fly Guy you can buy in the original Mario Party, where the whole point was to see how many times you could spin the analog stick in a minute.

4. Sega Genesis. The three-button controller was somewhat innovative when it first came out, but Nintendo quickly shit on that with its far superior SNES controller. The fact that the three-button controller wasn't completely phased out when Sega debuted the six-button controller is shameful and obnoxious.

5. Any arcade game that used a trackball. Fuck trackballs.

6. Any old school console where all you got was one button and a joystick. It's really sad that developers thought this was going to be all we'd need. Just because it worked for a lot of popular arcade machines in the 70s and 80s didn't mean it would work for every game ever. More buttons = more possibilities.

7. The original Xbox controller. Did it need that giant fucking XBox logo on it? No, of course it did't. Fucking idiots.

GPFontaine wrote:

Nintendo decided to get away from the joystick and go to a gamepad. The birth of modern gaming began! It isn't Atari's fault. Nintendo just got it right.

Nintendo wasn't the first to deviate though. Intellevision's controller had a 10 button numeric keypad, three additional action buttons (technically four, but two were wired to the same circuit), and a weird directional disc thing that wasn't quite a D-pad, but certainly wasn't a joystick. There were others too, but Intellivision is arguably the most famous.

Taito's arcade game Sonic Blastman also had a very poorly conceived control system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Blast_Man

Hahaha, kancho. I remember reading about that on the "I Am A Japanese Schoolteacher" column on Outpost Nine like a million years ago. Apparently now he's got his own site, GaijinSmash.net.

FIST BREAKER 5000!

Honestly, SBM and its sequel, which never got a North American release, are two of the first arcade machines I'd try to hunt down if I had the money. Later, I would be sued by T-Pain, who would break his hand while drunkenly trying to play SBM2 at a party at my house.

A local Chuck E. Cheese's rip-off called Bonkers had one, and there was a good five or six feet of open space in front of the machine, depending on foot traffic. Whenever possible, I would run, leap, and punch the sensor as hard as I could, hoping the extra momentum would help. It never did. Then again, I had no upper body strength whatsoever back then.