this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Oh they're very good controllers! The problem is that they took Nintendo's button names (ABXY) and transposed their positions. It's utter chaos, and very hard for me at least to remember that A is B and B is A.
Playstation, by contrast, came up with entirely new button symbols, so it's much less confusing that O -> A.
The APIs for gamepad interfacing are a total mess now, with some based on button names and some on position (south/east/west/north).
I'm from the 80s and totally understand what you mean. That's a valid point, yes, its a total mess, especially for emulation where the button names collide. This was actually an "objectively" bad choice by Microsoft.
I agree with you, but Xbox just took the Dreamcast's layout, which means SEGA is the original culprit
:O I had I idea!!
Ironically, they were probably afraid of the very explicit litigiousness of Nintendo.
Two solutions:
Third solution:
Maybe they did some early testing and got feedback that people liked the button names being the same as Nintendo. Or maybe they read criticism about Sony using different names.
Maybe they were originally the same and then the legal dept depended a swap too late to change the actual names.
Maybe none of this stuff.
As you can see, I find the legal system to be a bigger threat and generally more frustrating than Microsoft.
Yes of course, I agree this is the rationale for sure. Still I blame Microsoft (and Sega as I've just discovered) for this.