When I was very young, a friend of mine's parents removed the start and select buttons from the second controller to prevent Player 2 spamming pause. This sucked, because hella games used select as a necessary action for the game like changing weapons. So basically, if you were the guest player, you couldn't do everything you may have needed to do to actually play.

Double ugh.

Yes, needed to search for the signal every time

Very true, but 14yo me preferred 16h long gaming sessions. We even got that OG Xbox for Christmas, although my dad did have to prank us by first only putting the DVD remote under the tree and be like "yeah, so when you do get it, you have this upgrade already, isn't that neat??". Then he went up and got the final surprise gift: the OG Xbox. That actually might be the first time I remember being exhausted from hype. Wtf, me and my brother were so happy with it.

He never got to know this, but we already knew what was coming. We knew the secret gifts hiding spot they used, and took our time to professionally open and repackage that gift when our parents were out one night. We didn't even need to really fake our surprise, we were so hyped to be finally able to play on it.

We were lucky indeed, but we were limited on 'electronic entertainment' overall and had to maintain a logsheet of use.