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Classic Game Console Design Mistakes
Harry writes "Some bad decisions in game console design get made over and over. (How many early systems had nightmarish controllers?) Others are uniquely inexplicable. (Like the Game Boy Advance's lack of a headphone jack.) Some stem from companies being too clever for their own good. (Like the way the RCA Studio II and Atari 5200 drew their power through their RF switches.) Benj Edwards has rounded up a few classic examples, and has attempted to figure out what was going on in the designers' heads — and what we can learn from their mistakes."
Or the oldest mistake in the world, where developers/publishers DO NOT listen to beta testers and preview testers and PUSH their "better" ideas to the final gold cut even if they get told by everyone playing it that it's wrong/stupid/not enjoyable etc.
Hello, Star Wars: Galaxies combat system for probably the BEST example of being pig headed and pushing through a joke of a combat system even when EVERYONE playing the game says it sucks ass.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Some stem from companies being too clever for their own good. (Like the way the RCA Studio II and Atari 5200 drew their power through their RF switches.)
Anyone fancy some DRM? Or a bullshit non-standardized mobile adapter? I know imitation is flattery but...
Perfect System ;-)
My cousin had an Atari 5200. I recall him at some point noting his Atari being "better." But seemed every other time I saw him, the 5200 was away being repaired or some such.
My 2600? Never broke. Paddles did develop the jiggles, but I never lost a joystick. Then again, I never had Activision Decathlon.
His last article submitted to slashdot had 24 pages... and over half of the replys were people loudly complaining.
He's cut it down to four. Much more reasonable. (Though still unnecessary.)
FanFictionRecs.net
Correction: The Gameboy Advance SP had no headphone jack; the original Gameboy Advance did, as did the Gameboy Micro. But who bought a Gameboy Micro, anyhow... My first video game platform ever was an Advance SP. And I had to go buy a dongle to use headphones.
Am I the only one who liked the X-Box controller (to the best of my memory)? It fit in my hands great.
Nice that this article fails to consider that all of these technologies come from companies developing within their comfort zones, unaware another company was pushing the boundaries or under immense budgetary pressures to save every last cent.
In the author's world of retrospect, everything should be fantastic.
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
On the bright side, the 5200 joysticks included the world's first on-controller pause button.
Er, the Intellivision had a system-wide pause function that would pause any game when you held the "1" and "9" keys (I believe "3" and "7" also worked) on the keypad simultaneously.
If you want to get picky there was not exactly a button marked "PAUSE", but it served the same function.
Unfortunate, as long load times is one of the things that really irked me with the PlayStation.
They state that game publishes were reluctant to invest in cartridges, as CDs were less risky and had higher profit margins, but if the focus had been on making good games that people want to play rather than trying to weigh risks and balance game quality with profitability, they really shouldn't have had to worry about that.
Nevertheless, there were a few good N64 games and couple of great ones. Cartridges weren't a complete mistake.
No existe.
And yet the 360 controller still has a d-pad that bad.
Do I really have to try and prove that this isn't a fanboy, flaming comment?
The d-pad on the 360 controller is terrible, the triggers on the PS3 controller are a total joke. There, I hope that helps.
The 360 devs learnt nothing from the PS2, I can't remember if the Xbox d-pad is bad or not, I don't have any games that come to mind that need it a lot.
And hopefully future game console developers learn from the PS3 mistake. Don't make triggers that are hard to keep held down and feel like they are constantly slipping.
More contemporary (and popular) products have horrible design flaws. Kindle, where pressing back button loses track of dozens of pages you read since opening the book. iPhone, which has to be charged every day just so that it's thin. MacOSX, which makes access to trivial UNIX configuration files an exercise in frustration. Windows, oh well let's not even go there.
Problem 1: Poor Controllers, Problem 3: Ergonomically Hellish Controllers, Problem 4: Unreliable controllers. That and the fact power through RF is mentioned twice - this could have been a lot more concise without losing a lot of the facts.
My suggestion for the series: classic smartphone design mistakes: on the t-mobile g1, you need a humongous dongle with two mini usb slots (one for power, one for a headset), and two normal headset jacks. And with the battery life of the g1 you need to connect it to a loader as much as you can... Just search for htc yc a300 to see how ugly it is...
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
...had two (identical) momentary buttons on the top of the console, one for 'pause' and one for 'reset'.
I remember once playing Zillion, where you had to press the pause button to switch character. I had been playing for about 4 hours when I reached for the pause button and.....
Remember having to put your PS1 on its side (or completely upside-down) or else it wouldn't read your games? The optical pickup mechanism of the early models of the PlayStation used a plastic piece as a guide for the sliding laser assembly, repeated motion degraded the plastic piece over time causing optical drift - turning the PS1 on its side forced the laser back to its correct position (yay gravity!).
Sony replaced that piece with a shiny metal guide in their later models, much like every CD-ROM drive has used for the past two decades or so.
The Sega Dreamcast was a great console. However, they made a mistake and used a crappy resistor that burned out if you put too many game pads in. When the resistor burnt out the console was unplayable. The fix for this was getting an 8hm resistor and replacing the orginal sega one. Then you could get back to playing crazy taxi and sega tennis :--)
How about bonehead decisions on the current consoles?
Like the PS3/X-Box analog stick "button"....who in the hell thought it was a good idea for the analog sticks to double as game buttons as well? It is impossible to NOT press these "buttons" by accident in the heat of a tense moment in any game. I can't tell you the number of times I've suddenly gone into "crouch mode" in Fallout 3 or activated my "search for power sources" mode in inFamous.
Can we get rid of this idiotic controller design, like right now?
I believe the logic behind the lack of a headphone jack was so that you could feel comfortable that Your Kid (who you got the Game Boy Advance-SP for) couldn't run the game system with the volume turned up and hurt their hearing.
Even if they snuck out and started spending their hard-earned game/candy/graphics board/DEScracker money on a headphone adapter, you could easily confiscate it without taking away their Mariopium.
In my experience, really bad design decisions aren't always motivated by idiots trying to push their hobby horse, but often because better solutions have been patented to death.
Case in point: electronic television guides. Every format under the sun is patented. Philips refused to submit to extortion for years and implemented one miserable scheme after another, until they finally got an agreement with a patent holder. Even then, the patent holder refused to let Philips implement the whole thing themselves but instead insisted it had to be their own, horribly buggy, implementation. You can still hear the tv-guys at Philips gnashing their teeth.
I fear it's sort of similar with these controllers: the good ideas were being patented, so the designers had to avoid them and come up with something 'original'. That doesn't always work out for the best, as demonstrated in the article :)
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Of all the crappy design decisions Atari made with the Jaguar, they're giving it crap over the controller? The controller was pretty comfortable and worked well for most of the Jaguar games. The crappy cartridge slot that was wearing out before mine hit year 1 of ownership, the incredibly awkward and unreliable CD drive, and hardware complexity that would stump Saturn developers would've all been better knocks to make on the Jaguar.
And as far as missing items, where the HELL is the sidetalker? The original N-Gage belongs on this list more than half the items listed.
Some other mistakes not mentioned:
/. Early production runs of the SNES shell used a cheap plastic that over time turned a ghastly yellow.
Sega Master System - as mentioned in a previous comment, the pause button was on the console (right next to the identical reset button) years after the Atari 5200 placed pause buttons on controllers. There were also only two buttons on the controller, while the competing NES had four.
SNES - previously mentioned on
PlayStation - a malfunctioning CD-ROM drive on early models that caused many a PlayStation owner to play with the PlayStation upside-down.
Dreamcast - a big controller with big analog triggers, based on the Saturn's analog controller. Developers didn't make use of the analog functions of the triggers and there weren't as many buttons on the controller as there were on the PlayStation. There was also only one analog stick on the controller as well. Similarly, the VMU wasn't used for much. And it drained battery power rapidly, even while it was plugged into the controller, making it useless for playing the few mini-games that were available for it. To make matters worse, the VMU used lithium "coin" batteries that were a pain to replace.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
I want the nextgen consoles to have a standby or hibernate mode like a Windows box. I would no longer have to issue fatwas against game designers who put save points three hours apart.
First of all, let's understand something here. The Studio II was the second programmable console released, ever. I saw it in a list of "10 worst consoles ever" the other day... a list which I consider invalid for never mentioning the horrible Arcadia 2001. Basically, the Studio II had nothing other than Pong machines to use as a reference, since the Channel F hadn't been around long enough. (FYI, both systems were designed by chip companies trying to hype their own chipsets, and the Intellivision was a 3rd-party use of a pre-existing chip manufacturer's chipset.)
So you see, it's got the controllers built into the main console unit, and one wire for both the RF and power. But in actuality this design meant that the console was the controller! And the RF-powered idea was a clever idea to reduce cord clutter. If you're picking up the whole console and using it as a controller, you don't want a second wire getting wrapped around things.
As for the 5200, Atari was trying to cram as many patents as they could into that thing, and most of them were crap ideas that went into the controller. But this time, Atari wasn't just trying to reduce cord clutter, it was also the first system with an automatic RF switch. It's just that unlike Nintendo, they tried to do the switching with clunky relays. Atari were thinking in the right direction, but got it backwards. You give power to the RF switch, not the other way around.
However, both the Studio II and Atari proved that you could put DC and RF on the same wire, which is what made automatic RF switches a standard in every console since the NES.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Why did he moan about the comlexity of development for the Saturn while the only thing that he complained about the Jaguar was the iffy controller. The Jaguar's architecture was nearly complex than the Saturn's, and also VERY difficult to develop for unless the developer(s) ignored(mostly) some of the extra processors(like they do on the DS)... Not to mention the super low quality of the Atari development tools, featuring items like incomplete/non-existent documentation/tools/etc.
and trying to keep it as low as possible, is why bad decisions are made.
Absolute statements are never true
I'm a Xbox fanboy, but MS's decision to eliminate the standard hard drive from the 360 still baffles me. I know they wanted to save a buck, but it's still rare to see a console manufacturer actually take a step BACKWARDS from one console generation to the next. It basically meant that developers couldn't rely on the hard drive for caching (the way they could on the Xbox 1), and so now I can't walk through Oblivion without getting annoying texture pop-in's. Though they've largely improved on this by allowing hard drive installs and moving to phase out the harddrive-free SKU, it was still a bonehead move that left the 360 way more crippled than it ever needed to be.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I want the nextgen consoles to have a standby or hibernate mode like a Windows box.
This is on the DS and PSP, as well as in select Game Boy Advance games. Or are you asking for a separate hibernation file per title and per user? That could get real big real fast.
I would no longer have to issue fatwas against game designers who put save points three hours apart.
Yet people still bitch about New SMB's save points because they can't squeeze in a round of Nintendogs or Animal Crossing 2 while New SMB is sleeping.
Wow
It looks like this guy just discovered the angry video game nerd video files, spent the weekend watching them all, and rehashing every complaint made in those videos for hardware on his own site in text format with the humor stripped out.
I would say it is a good list, if it wasn't for the fact I've seen all of these problems complained about in one place before
Both made consoles that merely pushed the graphics while overshooting the regular cost for a console due to pushing too hard and without checking if the customers really care about that improvement, racked up MASSIVE losses (Sony has lost all the money they made from the PS2 on the PS3!) and got pushed into a minority role as they were bested by a competitor who skipped the graphics pushing and instead went for something the customers could appreciate more. Now THAT is a design mistake.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Like every Game Boy model before it, the original Game Boy Advance model did not include a built-in light for its LCD screen.
While it was Japan only, the Game Boy Light did have a backlight. http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/Game_Boy_Light
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I've always assumed the design of the Intellivision controller was based around a touch tone telephone handset. Familiarity to a common household item would encourage people to try the console. It worked for my parents. Their one and only video game console was the Intellivision. My mother's BurgerTime scores were legendary. They didn't purchase or really even try another console after that.
Would I be committing an act of heresy here to say that modern controllers have too many goddamn buttons? Starting with the original Playstation, it became the trend to build aesthetically pleasing near-symmetrical controllers with as many buttons as the human hand could possibly come into contact with in zero gravity. The thinking, familiar to OSS geeks, is, "We'll just put that there, because maybe someone, somewhere, sometime will want to use it." The result has been every developer trying to find a way to use every button on the controller. And since they keep multiplying, generation after generation (dual analog sticks, dual shoulder buttons...) more and more useless features keep being crammed into games in place of intuitive and intelligently-designed control schemes.
Yes I'm old. Old enought to remember when the MCP was just a chess program. But not that old. Deride it as you will (and it is easy to forget those five-minute CD-ROM load screens) but the last controller I really liked was the N-64's. It was designed to support a lot of different play schemes (thumbstick, D-pad, trigger, buttons) but it forced the developer to only use some of the controls at a time. I preferred that. Pick up the controller, learn five buttons, and then play the goddamn game.
Am I the only one?
Splitting an article over four pages.
What were they thinking?
Beetle B.
Have you tried playing Oblivion without a hard drive? Oblivion uses the hard drive, just as many games do even though it's not "standard."
In fact, not many games would have changed if the HDD was standard. Having the option to install the game would have been nice from the beginning, but I'm glad they didn't go the PS3 route in which HDD installs are pretty much mandatory.
Microsoft's only real sin was the 20GB HDD. They should have started at 40GB.
Many stores sold headphones that had the funny plug built in. And Fry's carried the adapter jack.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
One mistake they missed that plagued the 3DO and others was having to daisy chain controllers. In theory it sounds like a genius solution. In practice it usually ended up with Player 1 ripping the controller out of Player 2's hand if they happen to move.
I was quoted out of context in my autobiography...
BULLSHIT the Gameboy Advance didn't have a headphone jack. I friggin owned one, and I used headphones all the time. Now the 'SP' on the other hand...
Except on a Mac.
Breaking your stupid Top 15 list into 4 pages to maximize ad revenue. Fuck you.
Actually, 360 games have often used HDD for caching before the ability to install games existed. Even Oblivion used it.
The caveat is that games which wanted to use caching needed to account for players who may not have a HDD, so more work would be required to support players that may or may not have a HDD.
Allowing for models which do not have a HDD was not nearly as impacting as many have speculated.
Because at least with my 2600 the solid plastic center part would snap and joystick would no longer work. Actually atari sort replacements but it was pretty easy to take the controller apart and swap out the part.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I mean seriously that design was better than the 2600. You didn't have to go behind the tv to take care of things and only one wire came from the TV to your game system. (Of course the one place most likely to have a wall socket was behind the TV.) They made it more convenient with less clutter. Why did people complain? Because they couldn't swap wires from the 2600 to the 5200 because it wasn't compatible.(Which you could do with other systems.) Yes, the reason people complained was because they were too stupid to figure out you could just chain the switch boxes which is what I did.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
No soft reset on the playstation. Some games had their own but it wasn't required. That was annoying since if you hit the reset button on the system the PSX took quite a while to boot up. (Saturn had start+A+B+C for what it's worth which would always take you to the title screen.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I loved the box as technology. The thing where the power came down the line from the RF diverter was outstanding, and never a problem. I think I owned all eight games made for it as well. And the track ball. And the plastic thingy that let you mount both controllers together so you could play space dungeon. Hell, I still might. The thing survived, fully functional, for numerous moves over like 20 years, and every now and again I would plug it back in only to remember...
Its death was the controller. I opened one once and discovered that they basically had the X and Y potentiometers on the same circuit. I never did understand how it worked, but as near as I could tell the magnitude of change of resistance for X was way different than for Y so it could (sort of) tell what you were doing with the joystick. But _only_ sort of. Moving from the extreme corners to other other extreme corners was super obvious and worked okay. Trying to maneuver Pengo from the north side of a cube to the east side, so that you could then shove the cube west was basically impossible.
The fact that the four "trigger" buttons were stacked one above the other, two to a side, on the east and west sides of the controller, in side semi-recessed rectangles was "freaking impossible".
I eventually figured out that they wanted you to hold the controller in your left palm, use your left thumb and fore-finger to operate the triggers, while _gently_ and _unerringly_ operating the joystick with your right index finger. My response to this realization was "ch'yah right".
Then again nobody invented "ergonomics" till like five years later. 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
... make me feel old.
I remember the VIC-20, darnit.
22 columns of fuzzy text! AND WE LOVED IT.
Actually, no, we hated it.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
The heavy power brick with the plug built into it. So many systems have done this and it's just such a pain in the ass. (I think most of us have had experience of what a bad design this really is. Fortunately all the current systems try to get rid of it and use a plug.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Microsoft's only real sin was the 20GB HDD. They should have started at 40GB.
How about being a standard drive (more or less, it is a SATA with a custom firmware) in a funny case that is extremely overpriced?
$130 for 120 GB?
At least the PS3 is a standard 2.5 inch SATA drive. (Got a 500GB for $95 a few weeks ago for my (formerly) 60GB refurb)
But yes, on the PS3 the kinda mandatory installs are annoying. More so when there is an update available and it wants to download and install the update when I first start to play a new game. (All I remember was it was several hundred MB that it wanted to download. Having a 5 Mb makes it not so bad (600KB or so), but that is over 10 minutes for "several hundred" (10 minutes * 600 KB/sec = 350 MB) I just walked away for a while).