AA poll on worst joysticks

[sku_u]

I voted for Intellivision. I'm surprised CV doesn't have more of a share of the votes. Those joysticks stink.

[Christophero Sly]

The 5200 and 7800 sticks are both akward to hold and both have terrible button placement in my opinion. The non-centering aspect of the 5200 stick isn't all it's made out to be...soft buttons placed on the side of the controller is a worse feature. It's a close race, but I give the nod to the 7800 sticks as being the worst ever...but then again, I've never played an INTV.

[Gabriel]

I'd say that the Colecovision controllers are easily the worst ever, and that's the way I voted on the poll.

[pissant]

Well, I have a Coleco, Intellision I and II and an atari 5200. Actually, the 5200 just showed up in the mail today (4 port complete for $16!), and I was blown away by it. All this cr*p about the joysticks sucking on the 5200 is complete crap. They fit nicely in my hand, the fire buttons are easy to hit, the joystick knob is nice and beefy, and the analogue action is not bad at all! Yes, I have pacman and it works pretty well. Although frogger weirded me out a bit... (having to hit the fire button to jump... strange).

 

I gotta say that both the intv and the coleco suck majorly when compared to the 5200. That includes the super action controllers on the coleco. Those things are just nasty. The first thing I did when I picked up my coleco was to wire up a snes style gampad to it... the stock controls are that bad. The intv (as previously stated) have the absolute worst fire button placement in the WORLD. My hand goes into convulsions just thinking about it.

[Video]

I actually had a tie up between 5200 and Intellivision. I had to do a cointoss and the 5200 lost. I'd truely say, that if it wasn't for wearing out all the time, the 5200's wouldn't be so bad. After all, you can get used to things like non self centering (especially if the game was programmed with that in mind) But if the stick or buttons wear out on you, you cannot forgive that.

 

Intellivision's disc just sucked, I thought about building a stick for it many times, but where do you get a 16 position joystic from? Build it yourself I guess, I've never found one. Other than being horrible controllers though, at least the intellivision disk pad thingy didn't wear out. I have two systems from the early eighties and they still work fine (and the original INTV 1 has hardwired sticks)