#gaming hardware

these pics are two years old but i wasn't using this blog at the time. i re-shelled my old GBA SP, complete with a new screen and a fresh battery. i'd never done anything like it before, but it was a remarkably easy and affordable little project.

Varying console manufacturers have tried this, but it was never well-received enough to incorporate into future designs.

The Sega Saturn (1994) controller had six buttons:

So did the N64 (1996):

And so did the original Xbox (2001) controller:

Unfortunately, none of these really stayed with the six face button format. The Sega Saturn’s successor, the Dreamcast, had four face buttons and was the final console that Sega built. The N64′s successor, the Gamecube, had four face buttons and an analog stick. Similarly, the Xbox 360 dropped the black and white buttons to keep the number of face buttons at four.

I think the biggest part of the problem is that face buttons are manipulated by the thumb, rather than individual fingers. It’s difficult to place your thumb in a position where you can comfortably and easily reach all six buttons without introducing some potential confusion as to which button column you’re resting your thumb on. It gets worse when you’re trying to press two buttons at once (or, heaven forbid, more than two buttons at once). Instead, the shoulder buttons were the natural place to expand since players can dedicate a finger on each hand for each button, making simultaneous presses easier and minimizing confusion. If you look at arcade games and joysticks, their buttons are pressed by fingers and not the thumb, bypassing the confusion element. This is what allows them to support more buttons than a controller.

I think the nail in the coffin of the additional face buttons came from adding a right analog stick to the “standard” controller design. The analog stick feels notably different from the buttons which makes switching between the buttons and the stick easy to pick up, and game designers have established that using the right analog stick is mutually exclusive with using the face buttons at the same time. Since we use the right analog stick so much more today, there really isn’t a need for more face buttons.

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