Here's my top ten list for the most annoying console problems and design flaws

10. The Red Ring of Death and E74 (Xbox 360): More of an annoyance then anything else, especally if you have a lot a games that you enjoy playing, but it's the hype that people have generated about it, that results in it inducing more fear and panic then anything else.

9. The Red Screen of Death (Atari Jaguar): This drives me crazy, I've got four Jag games, and all of them work perfectally, but every so often I get the snarling F-U Middle Finger Red Screen of Death from my Jaguar, usually it just takes cleaning the carts, or blowing in them, but every so often it takes about 10-20 minutes to get a game to boot up, had Atari delayed the Jag by a year maybe this wouldn't have happened.

8. The Buzzing Sound (Sega Genesis): This also drives me up the wall, an annoying buzzing sound coming from my Genesis Model 2, and I've tried everything to make it go away, including cleaning, swapping consoles, buying new copies of the games, and every time I get this buzzing sound in the background that throws my concentration off.

7. Backwards Compatibility (Nintendo Wii): This drives me crazy, I like playing gamecube games on the wii, but the backwards compatibility is so broken it's not even funny, usually it's as simply as putting an Xbox disk into a 360, or a PS2 or PS1 disk into a PS3, and away you go simple, and easy to exit from. But the Wii's backwards compatibility is a disaster, and trying to figure out how to exit a GameCube game when you're done is a chore in an of itself, and is something not detailed in the instructions.

6. Load Times (Sega CD, Playstation 1, or any CD Based system): Another problem that drives me nuts, the flow breaking load times, it's like everytime you play through a game, you get interuppted by a long load screen that takes forever to go away.

5. The Virtual Boy (Nintendo): Everything about this was a disaster, it's ugly, it's graphics are subpar, and is a blot on the game boy Designer's otherwise steller record. But more then anything it's design makes it increadibly uncomfortable to use, resulting in a stiff neck or sore eyes.

4. The Disk Drive (Playstation 2): Another thing that drove me nuts, I loved my PS2, using it as a DVD Player and playing the hell out of it with some of my favorite games, but one day it turnsout the disk drive finally gave out, and I had to get a new one, thanks a million Sony.

3. The Intellivision and Atari 5200 Controllers (Intellivision and Atari 5200): Who in their right mind approved these controllers, the Intellivision's controller is increadibly uncomfortable to hold, and hard to figure out, especally since some Intellivision games use the keypad as opposed to the disks. The 5200 holds the record for the worst controller design ever in a video game console, while it did have the innovations of start, pause and reset buttons, the joystick was constantally breaking, and finding a gold replacement is hard and expensive, often resulting in you having to wash your hands everytime you use it and keeping it in an airtight safe.

2. The Atari 2600's Switches (Atari 2600): For a classic system like the Atari 2600, there is little that can be seen as wrong with it, however there is one problem: many of the games require you to either hold the reset switch or play with the other switches in order to advance to the main game, and if the reset switch is broken many of the games become useless until it can be repaired or replaced. For a company that was ahead of their time, would it be so hard to have added a start button to the 2600's joysticks.

1. The Blinking Red Light and Flashing Screens (Nintendo Entertainment System): I know what you're all thinking, how dare you put the NES at the top of a list like this, for the record my complaint isn't about the games, or the NES's legacy, it's about the Model 1's HARDWARE. The cause of the Blinking light and flashing screens is two fold, first the connector pins and ZIF could easily become bent out of shape or corroded through heavy use, or the use of a Game Genie, and as a result the damaged pins would cause the 10 NES Lockout chip to go haywire, and while blowing into the cartidges was effective, it was only a temporary fix. A designflaw of this magnitude is as inexcusable as the RRoD is today, however where MS offers to repair the consoles for free, Nintendo did nothing, even though a recall was definatally in order, and the NES Top Loader should've been released as a replacement once it became clear there was a major problem.