Comment on i mean
pjwestin@lemmy.world 1 day agoIt’s gotta be Zoomers looking at it with no frame of reference. Anyone who played this at the time would have recognized the layout here; they were taking the SNES controller, adding an extra set of buttons to be more in line with the 6 button layout popularized by Sega, and then sticking a joystick in the middle. Assigning the c-buttons as directional was actually pretty insightful. They work for camera controls on stuff like Mario 64, but they also function as a top-row/bottom-row for strong-attack/light-attack on D-pad fighting games like Mortal Kombat.
hraegsvelmir@ani.social 8 hours ago
It’s not just Zoomers, I grew up when the big systems were PSX and N64. I thought it then, and it still strikes me as valid, that controller looks as though it were designed by some entity entirely unfamiliar with human anatomy. The fact that you could figure out what they intended is ultimately irrelevant as to whether or not it was a good design. The dual shock came out a year after the N64, with a much more comfortable to use anh intuitive design, and I think it’s telling that pretty much every major console since has used a controller that takes far more after the Dual Shock design in terms of placement and orientation of the joysticks in respect to other buttons.
pjwestin@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I just left two long comments about this, but tl;dr, there’s no DualShock without Nintendo inventing this derpy thing first. DualShock was an industry defining design, but they were refining the functionality Nintendo created.