AVGN's Top 10 Worst Game Controls

I am a fan of James Rolfe (creator of The Angry Video Game Nerd and the Cinemassacre videos) and recently he looked back on the terrible games he has played and put together a top 10 list of the games with the worst control schemes. (Warning: his AVGN videos contain extreme amounts of profanity)

His list is:

1. Action 52
2. Terminator 2
3. Kid Kool 
4. Toxic Crusaders
5.  Spider-man: Return of the Sinister Six
6.  Batman Forever
7.  Legend of Zelda: Wand of Gamelon
8.  Conan
9.  Winter Games
10.  Dark Castle

There were some common themes in his list:

• Platforming games that have less intuitive/less forgiving controls than Super Mario Brothers, the gold standard of how a 2D platformer should control (Action 52, Kid Kool, Spiderman)
• Many games did not allow you to steer yourself mid-jump, making it hard to land in a specific place or dodge enemies while jumping or falling.
• Games that mapped commands to the controller buttons in an unintuitive way
• Platforming games that reversed the A=Jump, B=Action control scheme from Super Mario Brothers.
• Platforming games that make up on the control pad the jump action instead of another button on the controller (Conan even mapped jump to up and a long jump to down).
• Toxic Crusaders made one of the attack buttons the Select button on the NES controller, which is far away on the controller from the game's jump button. Reaching for the Select button meant that sometime the Pause button gets hit, accidentally pausing the game mid-action.
• In Wand of Gamelon, one button combination is both "open item menu" and "go through door" depending on where you stand on the screen. If you try to access your items near a door, you will instead go through the door.
• In Dark Castle, down+B ducks but only for a second. To stay crouched, you have to hold up+B.
• Overly complex controls/interactions
• In Wand of Gamelon, you have to strike Rupees with the tip of your sword to pick them up instead of just touching them like in every other Zelda game.
• In Dark Castle, you can throw a rock. However, to aim the rock you rotate the character's arm clockwise or counter-clockwise to throw in different directions.

His complaints fall directly in line with tenants of good interface design:

• Controls for similar devices/situations should emulate each other, so the user can rely on past experience to gain mastery of a new device quickly
• Controls should allow the user to excel at their desired action, not to hinder or prevent his/her desired action
• Control schemes should take great care when overloading the same action to have different results depending on the context of the action
• Controls should be as intuitive as possible

A game with bad controls can become a bad game at best and completely unplayable at worst. Games are no different than any other interactive problem - if the user cannot perform the actions he/she is attempting because the user's desires cannot be properly translated into actions, then he/she will either find something else that can or abandon the interaction all together.