CaptainCruch wrote:VideoGameCritic wrote:Intellivision control "phones" wires - could they make these any shorter? You practically need to keep the console on your lap to play it!
PS4 "sliver" buttons - too skinny to read the symbols; nobody knows what they do. Tapping one is different from holding it in for 5.24 seconds. WTF
Atari 5200 non-centering joysticks - this just may be #1.
Instead of 'Console Design Blunders' maybe you can narrow it down to 'Controller Design Blunders', since a lot of blunders since to to focus on the controllers! The wires of the Intellivision, the fragility of the Atari 5200 controller, the uselessness of the original CD-i remote controller, the gigantic Xbox 1 'Duke' controller.... (for good measure, you could throw in some third-party controllers too... PowerGlove like...)
As play control is a significant part of the gaming experience, I would have to agree.
For Console issues, we could list systems like the Sega Saturn, Sega CD and Atari Jaguar for being complex programming beasts, though as the industry was in a transition from machine code programming to the libraries such as the PSX offered, not sure if the blame can be put on the hardware itself. I have read many interviews where seasoned 80s machine code programmers loved the Jaguar, but anyone who was not familiar with multi-core processing could not wrap their heads around it...