5. Nintendo 64
To start off with let’s look at something very familiar for a lot of people that, whilst not the worst controller, was surprisingly bad for something so popular. Now, I’m not sure what kind of target audience the Nintendo 64 controller design team had in mind when they posed the concept of a trident shaped controller, but I’m sure it didn’t involve human beings in any way. This three pronged, button strewn lump of plastic was actually responsible for the rise of the analog stick now present in modern controllers and belonged to such a successful console that its actually confusing as to why it was so poorly designed. The excessive number of buttons meant that few games managed to incorporate all of them whilst the shape of the controller itself meant that, no matter which way you held it, you were never going to be able to access all of the controls unless you levitated the thing in front of you and just went at it. This is perhaps due to the fact that we, as humans, only have two hands and a limited reach on our frantically reaching fingers, though I accept that little details like not having three hands do tend to get lost in translation when it comes to getting the product out there and on the shelves.
As if things weren’t difficult enough already the rumble pack at the back of the controller that was added later on was such a hefty beast that it put the entire thing off balance. This made it even harder to handle due to all the weight now, helpfully, dragging the controller backwards. To round it all up, what was possibly most disappointing about the Nintendo 64 controller was its excessively flimsy and fragile analog stick that was tiny, easily damaged and generally defective as quite often it would become completely unresponsive to user input. As far as mainstream consoles went this is possibly the worst controller out of all of them due to the actual real need to grow an extra limb just to tackle your way through the simplest of games.
4. Atari Jaguar
Now onto something a little more… obscure. Looking at this, you wouldn’t know it was a game controller due to the fact that there’s nowhere to grip the mammoth 6 by 5 inches square of plastic and that it also looks considerably like a security pad that’s somehow fallen into your life. Why a 12 button number pad is essential for this console is completely unexplained as, unless you’re typing in long series of numbers , it literally has no purpose. Sure, you can open up menus using the tiny buttons but there’s a good reason why you don’t see number pads for menus on modern gen consoles. Its oversized and bulky form overall contains a D-pad, the ever useful 12 button number pad, three massive red buttons and your usual start and options button. Due to the positioning of your primary gaming buttons, the D-pad and the red buttons, you had to do all the work at the top of the controller and essentially ignore all the chaff uncomfortably positioned between you and where the action was.
The three red buttons, at a time where controllers were becoming more complex, was far too few and games just could not be played on this controller leading to very few games being released and, if you were one of those rare Atari Jaguar fans, a disappointingly modest game library. A pet peeve for many gamers also revolved around the need for overlays which, for a controller with so many buttons, was essential to know which button did what. The overlays often fell off of the controller due to its flimsy design leaving you completely alone in how to operate this cryptic bit of equipment. The Atari Jaguar never really got off the ground as a console and, despite the console itself being alright in terms of performance, the limitations that the controller posed meant that games were few in number and difficult to play. Basically what I’m saying is I blame this abomination of a controller for the failure of an entire console.
3. U-Force
‘Don’t Touch’ was the, uncharacteristically accurate, advertising campaign for the unusual but futuristic NES controller ; the U-Force. You’ve got to applaud the inventiveness of whomever came up with the idea of a hands free, sensor controlled device that would allow users to play their games in a sort of early Kinect fashion. After all, it takes guts to be this dreadful. Supposedly the U-force responded to your every command which quite literally made you the controller. This is now a concept we’re now accustomed to but you can just imagine how ground-breaking this must have been, how promising this would have looked. If only they knew then what we know now. You’ve got to admit, for something released in the late 80s this was incredibly innovative, but unfortunately it was a notoriously disastrous attempt at motion control gaming. If you believed that this ginormous slab of equipment, produced in 1989, for the NES, could accurately capture your movements and communicate them seamlessly back into the game then you’re either extremely optimistic or excruciatingly naïve.
In theory it read your hand movements as you glided your palm across the two screens which were then translated into actions in the game, in reality it detected basically nothing. And I mean, nothing. You would pay $70 for something which 9 times out of 10 simply refused to work. Anything it did manage to pick up was completely random and for what it was worth you may as well have been smashing the thing against the pavement rather than waste your time trying to reason with it. Maybe this sounds a little dramatic but these days finding a U-force controller is incredibly rare not only because of their age but also because of how many became… uh, inoperative. If you were one of those incredibly talented people who managed to get the thing to detect your movements then you were then faced with what I’m sure the developers referred to as, phase 2; get through an entire gaming session with it. Even with a working controller I challenge you to play a NES game as it was intended to be played using the U-Force. It does make you wonder whether the designers simply hoped that consumers would be able to get it to work when they themselves had failed so miserably during testing.
2. Sega Activator
Continuing on with our theme of motion gaming we have another delightful addition to the world of futuristic gaming controllers, this time from Sony who, thankfully, have improved on this subject by now. Sega Activator was released in 1993 and the basic premise is again motion control only this time, full body motion control. Essentially the ‘controller’ was an octagonal black shape that you put on the floor, plugged into the Genesis control port and the wall before standing in it and preparing yourself to became the master of kung-fu moves shown to you in the incredibly awesome TV commercials. You can see what’s coming; 1993, kung-fu kids in adverts, an octagonal plastic ring on the floor of living rooms everywhere… Yes, you’ve guessed it; what proceeded would have been a lot of desperate lurching and jumping about before the combined disappointment of thousands of children rolled across the country resulting in many, many calls to customer services from angry parents wanting refunds and/or replacements.
The Sega Activator was supposed to work by shooting infra-red beams from each segment up to the ceiling which then bounced back and, when the player interrupted a beam with a flailing arm or leg, this interruption would be communicated as one of sixteen inputs including not only which of the eight beams was interrupted but whether you’d hit it up high or low down. This is where things got confusing; each of the sixteen inputs corresponded to one of the Genesis controller’s buttons leading exhausted gamers to be flailing in every which direction trying to play at the same speed they would with their fingers. Now imagine trying to play Sonic the Hedgehog with this thing. Exactly. Worse, the Activator was incredibly inaccurate and basically impossible to use for any continued length of play as you’d have to repeatedly perform actions to have them recognized that not only screwed up your game but which left you panting on the floor whilst the ‘Game Over’ menu haunted your screen. On a positive note it could likely have been used as an intense fitness regime for the more health conscious of gamers. Is that positive note? I don’t know, but there’s got to be some selling point.
1. Fairchild Channel F
Faced with these I honestly have to say I wouldn’t know what to do with them. Are these controllers, joysticks, some sort of shoe buffer? Where are the buttons? Is that an analog stick? Why is that bit all ridged, is it so I don’t drop them? Why are there two, do I hold them both or is it for two players? If you’d given these to me and told me to play a round of bowling or baseball you’d likely see me start waving them about like a Wii remote but nothing would happen because, shamefully, these are actually a form of joystick. The odd triangular top bit is moved about allowing you eight ways of directional control and can also be pulled up or pushed down as an unnecessarily bizarre trigger-meets-analog-stick combination. The easiest way I can describe the action of using this controller is to imagine trying to open a particularly stubborn jar of pickles and you’ll get the idea.
Despite the controller looking like a single handed type scenario you do actually use two hands; one grasping the bar of the controller whilst the other clasps the triangular cap where you can then twist, push or pull it depending on what you want to do. Some games will also require you to turn it either clockwise or anticlockwise alongside your regular pushing it about in eight directions and the slamming it down then awkwardly pulling it up again which, I imagine, is difficult to do with just the palm of your hand. As if things weren’t bad enough already, the actual console to which these things are attached to looks like an old voice recording machine. Upon being given this I would have been seriously confused about what I was looking at and, more importantly, what you wanted me to do with two shoe buffers attached to a voice message machine.
For another of my Offbeat posts check out this, The 4 Most Unbelievable Rip Off Games Consoles including a Chintendo Vii and a Polystation 3. I mean, really guys?
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