Neat concepts ruined by poor design

Sometimes you try games that have a very nice or even innovative principle concept. If the implementation is technically seemingly flawless with pleasant graphics and music that should result in a great game, right? Well, in some cases the whole thing is ruined by poor design. Let's take a look at two examples.

Fruit Ninja (on XBox 360 Kinect)

Fruit Ninja (XBox360 Kinect)

In the game you yourself act as the controller by whacking the air like a ninja to break some fruits. This is the kind of game that is always fun to try for the sake of novelty, and if it's good, it's worth an occasional revisit. Like with many other (non-mobile) games based on a single simple idea, the biggest potential comes from the multiplayer mode. Technically it works quite well: the biggest problem is just trying to avoid hitting your opponent physically. However, the real problem lies in gameplay. When playing the game, there are three thing you'll learn quite quickly:

1. Since it's easy to get all the fruits meant for just one of the players, the round winner is really determined by who gets to whack the special fruits that are meant for both players and also give more points than the other fruits.
2. There is so little time react to these special fruits that the best tactic is to constantly whack the air even if you don't currently see anything to whack.
3. Who gets the better opportunities to get the special fruits is very random.

These three combined means that you'll just whack the air constantly and hope to get more special fruits. Sure you aim your hits towards the fruits, it's fun for a while, and you can even say that you get some exercise, but it could be more. The number three in the list above isn't really that much of a shortcoming, since this is a game that's supposed to give you a fun time, not something that should offer a serious competition. But I think the bullet points 1 and 2 do make the game experience worse. If combos played a bigger role the special fruits wouldn't be the only thing that basically determine the best score. And if whacking the air recklessly would give you some kind of a punishment, you would actually wait for the fruits appear first, which would give a much more stronger ninja feel to the whole gameplay, and thus make the whole experience more fun.

Donkey Konga (GameCube) 

The basic concept is a fun one: play the congos to the music and use hand clapping as a game play element through the microphone that's located in the middle of the Congos. Admittedly the music selection isn't that broad and there may be other matters to nitpick about too, but the game does offer some fun. The problem is that once you find the design flaw, it enables you to cheat in a way that's so unnoticeable that you can even cheat by accident. Here's how it goes. Generally the gameplay has 4 types of input: left drum, right drum, both drums and clap. The problem is that if you're supposed to drum just one of the drums, you can as well drum both of the drums and the game doesn't mind. This means that at parts that seem tough where you have to switch between the drums constantly, the easy way out is to just drum both drums all the time. This takes most of the fun out of trying to actually follow the drumming instructions! This is such a fundamental flaw that it makes me ask: what were they thinking?