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The overall design of the N64 controllers was, let's face, absolute garbage. The thing had three grips and twenty different ways to hold it, but none of them were very comfortable. It worked, but it was cumbersome.
About the time Mario Party came out, my brother and I had become accustomed to the controller design, and were comfortable handling any game using the controller. First-person shooters, platformers, and so on, posed no problems whatsoever.
Side note: my brother and I became strangely proficient at eating three bananas at the same time.
Listen to this: my brother picked up Mario Party on a whim. Like I mentioned, we were masters of the N64 controller at this point, and since it was the first iteration of Mario Party, it was still fresh and intuitive, meaning we played the game nonstop.
There was one mini game that required the player to rotate the analog stick in a 360 degree motion. We foolishly used our thumbs at first, but after realizing this just wasn't fast enough, we placed the center of our palm on top of the analog stick. We would then move our entire hand in a circular motion, following the 360 degree pattern, but as quickly as possible.
One time, while playing this particular mini game (the name escapes me), and putting to use our "better" way of rotating the analog stick, my brother cried out in pain. He showed me what happened: a blister had formed in the center of his palm, as it turned out, but he didn't realize it. This happened because we played Mario Party more than we probably should've, and even enjoyed ourselves more than we probably should've.
Like I said, he didn't notice the blister, so when he started rotating the stick with the palm of his hand, he was rubbing the analog stick directly against his blister. And as you probably already know, putting pressure on a blister usually results in the blister bursting. And that's what happened!
My brother had a pretty nasty burn in the palm of his hand, and because of that, we began putting a sock over our hand for protection whenever that particular mini game popped up (again: the name escapes me).
Two things happened after that event. The first being we didn't make the same mistake twice. The second was my brother gained sole-ownership of that particular controller.