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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."
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.
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.
The guy also seems to be remembering history through rose colored glasses. And I quote: "It took a long time before one innovator clearly came along (in this case, Nintendo with its NES pads) and provided a truly easy-to-use, accurate, sensitive, and comfortable solution."
He obviously doesn't remember the NES pads, or is confusing them with the SNES pads, because those little square brick NES pads were the definition of cramped hands. The first truly long term comfortable controller I ever held in my hands were the Sega Genesis original 3 button. The curved shape made it easy to tear through some Altered Beast or Super Thunder Blade. Anybody who gamed for hours with the original NES pads knows the lovely hand and finger cramps that would come after hour 2.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The guy also seems to be remembering history through rose colored glasses.
Do those glasses produce eye-strain-inducing three dimensional images as well?
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
I must agree, only for me it wasn't cramped hands, it was "Nintendo thumb". My thumbs would get completely sore playing on the standard NES pads after about an hour. I ended up buying a NES Max, which was much, much better but shouldn't have been required. When the Genesis came along, it had basically a perfect controller out of box.
...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.....
Or you can simply buy a 5$ adapter to plug your PS1/2 on your computer (USB) and use the actual PS controller. (linux even supports PS3's wireless controller)
Segmentation Fault in "Life, Universe and Everything" at line 42. Don't Panic.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
The 5200 was internally based on the 400/800 computer system (in fact, the insides were near identical, albeit with some minor memory map and OS changes that killed direct compatibility). The 400/800 was miles better than the 2600- unsurprising when you consider that it was originally meant as a next-generation successor to the 2600.
I've never used one, but from what I know, the 5200's problems primarily stemmed from the horrible external hardware design (particularly the controllers) and lack of 2600 compatibility.
The former wouldn't have been a problem with the 400/800, which used the same style controls as the 2600, and the latter wouldn't have been such an issue, since they had plenty of pre-existing software.
Atari later released the XEGS (XE Games System) that- unlike the 5200- retained compatibility with the 400/800/XL/XE series it was virtually identical to. However, that was the late-1980s, and another era.
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