Okay, we haven't done one of these for a while so here goes...
Most videogames are designed with the limitations of the hardware in mind. Most... but not all. Sometimes, game designers - for whatever reason - just don't consider the delicacy of the average joypad. In fact, a few titles seem to have been designed with controller destruction as a key priority.
So what games have you found to be the most openly hostile to your control pads? Maybe your joystick broke apart in your hands as you played, maybe frustration forced you to smash it continually against an antique fireplace? However it got broken, what was the game that brought about its demise?
Here are five to get you started...
Track & Field (Konami, coin-op, 1983) The original 'joystick waggler' had players slamming the stick left and right as quickly as possible to compete effectively in events such as 100m sprint and long jump. That was fine with sturdy arcade hardware, but when the game prompted dozens of home computer variants such as Daley Thompson's Decathlon and Summer Games, our plasticy peripherals couldn't cope. I once wrenched my Quickshot II joystick clean in two while playing Hyper Sports.
Street Fighter II (Capcom, SNES, 1991) All those quarter rotations on the d-pad combined with furious stabs at the fire buttons quickly wore down the brittle Super Nintendo joypads. Built like after dinner biscuits, these cute slabs of plastic could not cope with our grim determination to pull off at least five dragon punches a second.
Mario Party (Nintendo, N64, 1998) The original party game collection featured several mini-challenges which required you to bash buttons as quickly as possible. Even worse, these were interspersed with tasks that involved moving the analogue controller around in circles. It was a vicious double whammy that tested this innovative but essentially fragile stick to the maximum.
Soul Calibur (Namco, Dreamcast, 1999) The ground-breaking, utterly gorgeous Namco beat-'em-up put the most devastating yet easily accessible special moves on the Dreamcast pad's trigger buttons. These delicate protrusions had all the lastability of butterfly wings and were often rendered insensible by just a couple of bouts of Voldo-bashing. When I was working on a Dreamcast mag we managed to destroy every pad in our games room playing this.
Pro Evolution Soccer (Konami, PS2, 2000-) Not exactly physically demanding like the other games - instead, PES is utterly and uncompromisingly voracious, using every button on the pad in innumerable different ways. For days, new players can be heard shrieking 'What button is shoot?! What button is.... argh! Too late!'. Like chess, new combinations are being discovered everyday. I will not be surprised if a Nobel prize is awarded to the first genius who figures out the exact button combo needed to stop your player running toward a ball that's already going out of play and then giving it a little kick so as to concede a corner...
