Games with the worst design flaws

Tornadoboy

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What games have the most annoying and/or fatal design flaws, that are destined to either look like crap without serious work or drop dead and are tough to fix?

My humble list:

Omega Race - Most common game with the biggest pile of cab corpses behind it due to its aweful leaky battery placement

Williams cabs like Defender, Stargate, Joust, etc - They gave me the idea for the topic, I guess the sides tend to crack alot because of the coating they used, their PCBs use unreliable memory which often gets substituted to avoid the problem, and of course there's the batteries...

X-Men, Lethal Enforcers, other simular by Konami - Have a crappy little custom audio module which is resin encased and was made with crappy caps that always go bad.

Alpine Ski and other simular 80's Taito games - Glass Marquees always flake like hell

Spy Hunter - Audio amp board inevitably needs to be recapped

Vindicators - Special weapons buttons wear out easily

Sundance and Barricade - Use an extremely rare vector monitor which had a defective coating on the tube, and would short out if there wrong things were done.

Shinobi, Aurail, Altered Beasts, Golden Axe, Turbo - infamous suicide batteries that would either kill sound or the game as a whole.

Looping and probably Sky Bumper - They like to thermo-cycle their TMS9995 processors to death until the legs literally fall off, and they're tough to find.

Battlezone and Red Baron - Made with very unreliable IC sockets.

Victory - Their PCBs always seem to keel over and are notoriously tough to debug, oh lucky me I have 5 :)
 
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There's another thread or 2 around with the same concepts... ;)
 
Capcom CPS2, CPS3 and others: Suicide Battery
Star Wars / Tempest / Millipede: Stupid ass marquee OVERLAY that cracked at every corner.
Centipede: Button "burst" in the wrong location (very minor but always annoyed me)
Marble Madness 2: Marbleman - Uses joysticks instead of trackballs
Stern Pinball - Going "on the cheap"
 
There's another thread or 2 around with the same concepts... ;)

Yeah yeah I guessed that without even searching, but I haven't seen any recently and figured why revive yet another old thread ;)

BTW, don't G08 vector monitors tend to go up in smoke, literally?

Marble Madness 2: Marbleman - Uses joysticks instead of trackballs

I hear they site tested it with trackballs originally but people supposedly didn't like them, what kind of drugs they were on to want MM with joysticks I can only guess.
 
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-Any PCB that has a daughterboard which plugs in 'chip side up' underneath the main board (e.g. 1943) making the ICs inaccessible for troubleshooting/logic probing

-Cabinets with no leg levelers (e.g. Stern, Nintendo), so the wood at the bottom of the cab rots and falls apart from sitting on a damp floor or being dragged across it.
 
I think the MCR games.....shitty plastic ribbon cables. I won't even attempt to power a boardset up if it has these on it. Not to mention those boardsets are mounted on metal plates, putting them back together is like a puzzle.
 
Anything and everything PC-based that uses that watchdog dongle you see in a lot of Raw Thrills games. They're always paired with the shittiest motherboards, and the watchdog won't like any other board, so it goes out the window quick. These are the same games that desperately NEED a watchdog, so arguments will break out between tech and owner and they'll spend a lot of time pointlessly down.

Drill-O-Matic, or Drill-O-FUCKIT as I like to call it. It doesn't have any way of knowing if the drill arm actually returned home. Big, big mistake. You pretty much have to reset it every few hours to keep it in a playable state.

Speaking of Benchmark... Big Haul. Just, Big Haul. It doesn't count tokens. Literally. It "keeps track" based on where the arm was when the coin dropped. This is NOT accurate. If you get the one customer that's anal about it and counts the tokens in the truck, you're gonna have to flat-out lie to their face, or junk the whole game, because that's just how it's designed.

Actually, pretty much any time Benchmark starts playing with stepper motors, the resulting monstrosity will be fueled by the tears of game technicians worldwide.

Flip 2 Win. I still haven't figured out how to get the damn coin shooters to actually shoot straight, but I'm getting closer... I think it involves sacrificing a goat.

If you're willing to count "features" that shouldn't have been... the entirety of Pump it UP NX's menu system. Actually, PiU menus are pretty crappy in general.
 
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To be fair, most of these are age-related issues that creep up and make themselves known years after the game has outlived its intended lifespan. Yeah, some games were much better designed, but your average arcade cabinet really only needed 3-4 years of use. Most got converted by that point or rotated into storage as newer games came out.

But yeah, MCR cables suck.
 
Pole Position / Pole Position II PCB
I've already "fixed" it twice in the last two weeks, and it started acting up on me again last night.
 
What games have the most annoying and/or fatal design flaws, that are destined to either look like crap without serious work or drop dead and are tough to fix?

Taito games - Glass Marquees always flake like hell

Tell me about it...

BeforeFront.jpg


BeforeBack.jpg
 
Speaking of Benchmark... Big Haul. Just, Big Haul. It doesn't count tokens. Literally. It "keeps track" based on where the arm was when the coin dropped. This is NOT accurate. If you get the one customer that's anal about it and counts the tokens in the truck, you're gonna have to flat-out lie to their face, or junk the whole game, because that's just how it's designed.

Actually, pretty much any time Benchmark starts playing with stepper motors, the resulting monstrosity will be fueled by the tears of game technicians worldwide.

I hear that on both accounts, Big Rig Truckin' (Newer Big Haul), the damn "miss" sensor that gets messed up when you remove the token bucket incorrectly (bucket is too small so I have tokens everywhere) and the PCB is mounted up on the wall by the access panel that drops town and messes up the small connector on the top of it. Too many "miss" tokens on the playfield that bounces off the other items in cabinet. The dump switch that customers tap it thinking they should've won. I would've been happy if Big Rig Truckin' fell off the truck!
Wheel-A-Win where it has to be completely in the area to win and if a piece of fuzz that just happened to fall on the platter setting off the coin sensor giving free tickets or constant loses depending on which playfield it landed on.
 
Here's a bad design flaw.

Put two credits into Mappy.
Start a 1 player game.
Somewhere in the middle of the game, press the 1 player button.
Cuss.


Pirate Pete does something similar- I can't remember, but I think it messes up when you press the start button during game play.

Kerry
 
Williams cabs like Defender, Stargate, Joust, etc - They gave me the idea for the topic, I guess the sides tend to crack alot because of the coating they used, their PCBs use unreliable memory which often gets substituted to avoid the problem, and of course there's the batteries...

Um yeah, I'm going to have to disagree with you there.....

I think Williams got more right with their cab design and implementation than many others. Sure the sides crack, they're 30 yrs old, the memory was all that was available at the time, and the batteries weren't a problem unless the op was too lazy to maintain them.

What that RAM and those batteries gained for Williams was a very important daily and all-time high score table which BITD earned quarters. You weren't only playing the highest score from the last time the game was powered off like most others, you were playing to achieve a score that would stand and be seen for a long time.

All that RAM enabled game-play and greater numbers of enemies than other popular competing titles.

Other things Williams got right were, the monitor reflector for calibration, separate coin entry boxes for better location management, greatly expanded settings and calibration along with on-board self test & diagnostic displays. To this day if I want to converge a monitor, I'll often plug in a Williams board and run the test screen.
 
Um yeah, I'm going to have to disagree with you there.....

I think Williams got more right with their cab design and implementation than many others. Sure the sides crack, they're 30 yrs old, the memory was all that was available at the time, and the batteries weren't a problem unless the op was too lazy to maintain them.

What that RAM and those batteries gained for Williams was a very important daily and all-time high score table which BITD earned quarters. You weren't only playing the highest score from the last time the game was powered off like most others, you were playing to achieve a score that would stand and be seen for a long time.

All that RAM enabled game-play and greater numbers of enemies than other popular competing titles.

Other things Williams got right were, the monitor reflector for calibration, separate coin entry boxes for better location management, greatly expanded settings and calibration along with on-board self test & diagnostic displays. To this day if I want to converge a monitor, I'll often plug in a Williams board and run the test screen.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying any of these games are crap, but the whole side-cracking thing I've heard more than a few complaints about over the years, I hear it's because of the clear coating they used and seems to happen to them all that haven't been kept under ideal conditions. I'm just sighting big mistakes that consistantly cause issues that pretty much happen on every game of that make, even the best games have some.
 
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Here's a bad design flaw.

Put two credits into Mappy.
Start a 1 player game.
Somewhere in the middle of the game, press the 1 player button.
Cuss.

What does it do? I couldn't duplicate it in MAME (unless I didn't do it at the right time, but I played thru 2 levels and the bonus stage and kept hitting 1 player button). I didn't get anything with Pirate Pete either.
 
What does it do? I couldn't duplicate it in MAME (unless I didn't do it at the right time, but I played thru 2 levels and the bonus stage and kept hitting 1 player button). I didn't get anything with Pirate Pete either.

Yes, please enlighten us. I couldn't get it to do anything on my Mappy. Maybe I wasn't doing it right(or wrong)
 
1) Crappy sockets killing most Galaga boards
2) Omega Race batteries
3) MCR (Tron, Kick/man, Tapper, ...) interconnects and board issues
4) Taito flaking glass
5) POLE POSITION amp draw and sockets and custom chips
6) Sanyo 20EZ monitor boards/mounts
7) Turbo analog power-sensitive graphic drawing circuit (and related Monaco GP)
8) Midway B+W mother/daughter board combinations
 
I hear that on both accounts, Big Rig Truckin' (Newer Big Haul), the damn "miss" sensor that gets messed up when you remove the token bucket incorrectly (bucket is too small so I have tokens everywhere) and the PCB is mounted up on the wall by the access panel that drops town and messes up the small connector on the top of it. Too many "miss" tokens on the playfield that bounces off the other items in cabinet. The dump switch that customers tap it thinking they should've won. I would've been happy if Big Rig Truckin' fell off the truck!
Wheel-A-Win where it has to be completely in the area to win and if a piece of fuzz that just happened to fall on the platter setting off the coin sensor giving free tickets or constant loses depending on which playfield it landed on.

I have had a couple of Drill O Matics. Still have one that actually works. They are a bitch to move when you're ready to junk them. They make money when they work.

I have one of Benchmark's newest pieces, Trap Door. It is making money, but whoever designed the actual trap door and prize chute assembly must've been on fucking ludes. I get a call from the location, saying that half the trap door is busted, laying in the prize chute. I find it hard to believe that the "weight" of a piece of jumbo plush could have caused this. Turns out, it is pretty damn easy to get a hanger type hook up through the prize chute to latch onto the trap door, to pull it down to release the prize! But I'm not convinced that that is what happend... I actually think the plush cracked the half of the door!

So I call Benchmark, tell them what I need. The parts dude was a nice guy. He then asks me if I think this should be covered under warranty. WELL F YEAH! I said! The game has been out on the street for 6 weeks, and critical pieces are breaking off of it! He says OK, and says that I may have an early TD, and that he will send me the anti theft kit with updated door. Problem solved, right?

WRONG! They send me the trap door piece, which is exactly the same thickness so it will probably bust again, and they send me the "anti theft kit", which is the exact same frickin prize door. The trap door half is 3/16 plexi. I have a mind to send the busted door to my plastic guy and have him make a new trap door out of 1/4" lexan since the Polocks (I'm quarter Polish, I can bust on my own kind) can't build the fricking game right before they release it to operators!

I've made some money with a few Benchmark pieces, but if it is going to be like this, they will end up on the shitlist like Sega and Namco (althoug I may buy a Key Master, ending my shitlist saga with Sega).

ENDRANT.
-Mike
 
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