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"Father of gaming" praises Nintendo, slams PS2 controller symbols
- Thread starter Oogami
- Start date
haha. I remember that game it was awesome especially when you started doing a combo and the stage started to explode and the music was awesome too I dare anyone here to find that game for less than $70. one of the best Enix game in PS1 easily.SolidSnakex said:
Porridge said:
Because complaining about violent videogames is counterproductive. It's great their are violent videogames, and they should continue to have them. It helps grow the market as much as any other form of videogame. Purely speaking about the female segment is one thing, but there's no point complaining about violent games. They're only good for the market. There are plenty of games that are not violent.
PkunkFury
Member
How can anyone think symbols are better than letters for people who have never used the controller before??? With letters you have a frame of order in your mind to remember them by. You can remember them as being in alphabetical order. The symbols have no frame of reference outside of a playstation game pad. You have to force yourelf to remember their position. I know a lot of you can use the playstation controller no problem, but think back to the first time you played Pa-Rappa the rapper or Um-Jammer Lammy or some similar game that actively forced you to relate your button presses to on screen shapes instead of asking you to press the "run" or "jump" button.
On this note Nintendo's old controllers have a similar fault because the A and B are backwards (WTF?) I remember this confusing me when I was 10 years old, but eventually I managed to get it in my head that "the letters are backwards" and I never had to look down at the controller again. I still had a frame of reference for the position of those letters on a controller, I just had to remember they were sequentially opposite. Still, ideally these need to be switched around. Square and Circle do not have a natural sequence by which anyone can be asked to remember them, therefore people new to the playstation controller have to start from scratch completey.
On this note, I love how the SNES pad had the X and Y buttons concave and the A and B buttons convex. I loved the feel of the concave buttons, and they did wonders keeping the two sets of buttons seperate. That extra bit of tacticle assurance was always their instantaneously reminding me I was on the twirl button and not the jump button (or whatnot). I'm appalled that none of the controllers carreid this tradition forward, the DualShock could use it the most. I guess the Gamecube tried with the bizzare B button and kidney shaped X and Y, but those are even worse then making every button feel the same. They are just too awkward.
On this note Nintendo's old controllers have a similar fault because the A and B are backwards (WTF?) I remember this confusing me when I was 10 years old, but eventually I managed to get it in my head that "the letters are backwards" and I never had to look down at the controller again. I still had a frame of reference for the position of those letters on a controller, I just had to remember they were sequentially opposite. Still, ideally these need to be switched around. Square and Circle do not have a natural sequence by which anyone can be asked to remember them, therefore people new to the playstation controller have to start from scratch completey.
On this note, I love how the SNES pad had the X and Y buttons concave and the A and B buttons convex. I loved the feel of the concave buttons, and they did wonders keeping the two sets of buttons seperate. That extra bit of tacticle assurance was always their instantaneously reminding me I was on the twirl button and not the jump button (or whatnot). I'm appalled that none of the controllers carreid this tradition forward, the DualShock could use it the most. I guess the Gamecube tried with the bizzare B button and kidney shaped X and Y, but those are even worse then making every button feel the same. They are just too awkward.
AND
Have opposite button layouts, switching X and Y / B and A. This is pretty confusing. If you grew up playing super nintendo xbox xan be a bit confusing because Y isis in a different spot. It's just kind of stupid to use the same 4 letters. Why didnt they use d/e/f/g? I don't see how Playstation controls could be confusing unless something like the Dreamcast used the same symbols but for different buttons. At least Triangle is always gonna be in the same spot no matter what controller your using, because no one else uses symbols. X is the only one that could be confused.
ShowDog said:
AND
Have opposite button layouts, switching X and Y / B and A. This is pretty confusing. If you grew up playing super nintendo xbox xan be a bit confusing because Y isn't always at the top. It's just kind of stupid to use the same 4 letters. Why didnt they use d/e/f/g? I don't see how Playstation controls could be confusing unless something like the Dreamcast used the same symbols but for different buttons. At least Triangle is always gonna be in the same spot no matter what controller your using, because no one else uses symbols. X is the only one that could be confused.
One way to remember it is that Nintendo is japanese; script is read right to left
while the xbox been american uses left to right.
With regards to the Playstation, probably the only thing I would've changed had I been the controller designer assistant or some such would've been to recommend circle as blue and X as red; just to reinforce the idea of confirm and cancel; making it relatively more consistent in all PS games.
Probably would've swapped the position of the two as well, because the x lies in the primary position on the pad. In a game like Gran Turismo, it's the accelerate button; Confirm for gas, square to brake because its easier to hit than X.
DeadTrees said:
Because Up Down Left Right on buttons looks like shit.
The other idea would be to make them triangles pointing in their relevant direction, but again that looks like shit.
As for numbers, 1,2,3,4... who can decide which one is the starting button then which one do you move to and how do you move to it?
You've only got 4 buttons; there is no consistency to numbering them.
PkunkFury
Member
ShowDog said:
AND
Have opposite button layouts, switching X and Y / B and A. This is pretty confusing. If you grew up playing super nintendo xbox xan be a bit confusing because Y isis in a different spot. It's just kind of stupid to use the same 4 letters. Why didnt they use d/e/f/g? I don't see how Playstation controls could be confusing unless something like the Dreamcast used the same symbols but for different buttons. At least Triangle is always gonna be in the same spot no matter what controller your using, because no one else uses symbols. X is the only one that could be confused.
exactly, Nintendo's controller is also not quite right. Microsoft found the most intuitive configuration, yet somehow they were the last to make the controller. I'm willing to bet part of the reason we have 3 different configurations involves some form of copyright concern.
And of course we can all remember the positions of the four buttons, but people in this thread were actually arguing that using letters has no different context than random symbols. Thats flat out wrong. One of them is more intuitive for new users than the other, regardless of the fact that anybody can memorize them with time. The quote refers to the button symbols as a barrier of entry for people who don't play games, not as a force those of us who game regularly constantly struggle against.
If I asked you to press the giraffe button, which one would you press?? that is how it feels to be a new DualShock user when asked to press square. Sure it isn't difficult, you can glance down and find the giraffe button and press it. You may have to do that a couple of times for the first week or two you play, depending on how often the giraffe button is referred to by name. At least when asked to press the A button you can narrow it down to one of the left most buttons (and assume B is its counterpart on the right). And yes this isnt true cuz Nintendo put the A button on the right, which just doesn't make sense from an American standpoint. The reason for this may be because Japan doesn't use our alphabet, and they simply never changed it due to tradition.
PkunkFury said:
ABXY is just as arbitrary. Sure, everyone knows a after b and so on, but when the buttons are layed out in a diamond pattern there's no proper 'order' for them. Isn't it normal to read from top to bottom? Hence, shouldn't the AB row be above the XY row? And Nintendo has the buttons labled from the outside in. The fact is if you say to someone who si compleyely unfamiliar with videogames "press the a button" it makes about as much sense, in the context of the controller as saying "press the giraffe."
If you're trying to instruct someone regarding what button to press, as per your example, you're far better off going by position, i.e. the top button, the left button, etc.
PkunkFury
Member
Kangu said:
I acknowledged this in both posts; Nintendo's button layout is just about as screwy as using symbols. The fact that Nintendo changed the order of the alphabet (probably because they are based in Japan) does not make letters as arbitrary as symbols. Microsoft's layout makes the most sense. The diamond configuration makes the starting point arbitrary, but a user will create their own initial position within the diamond, then remembers the position of the other buttons in relation to that initial position. With arbitrary symbols it is that ability to relate one button to the others that is missing. Even with Nintendo's conrtoller you can relate the position, you just ahve to relate them in the reverse order. You can see this by thinking of the pairings. A and B are on the bottom, X and Y are on the top, for both controllers. The two pairs make sense together. For the dual shock, triangle and what are on the top? why? I can't remember when I'm not playing games to be honest.
Labeling the buttons with up, down, left, and right triangles would indeed create the simplest interface for that particular side of the controller, but I can see why all 3 companies avoided that convention, as you risk users confusing those directions with d-pad instructions
PkunkFury said:
Look, both your argument and Bushnell's argument suck.
All the button labelling schemes on the most popular control pads blow.
ABCD for fucksake.
Top row, left to right, Bottom row left to right, gives us
...B...
A....D
...C...
but wait! that could also give us
...A...
C....B
...D...
OH NO! PEOPLE AM LOSE!
Keru_Shiri
Member
:lol :lolZaptruder said:
Spastic Colon
Member
Why all this fuss over some throwaway comment Nolan Bushnell made? Geez.
PkunkFury
Member
Zap,you just aren't getting it
Let me break this down for you. Let's take an SAT test:
A is to B as X is to ______
95% of Americans will say Y
Triangle is to Circle as Square is to _____
What will people say?
If you are a mathemtician you'll be adding up angles like mad and you might decide the answer is an octogon or something.
If you aren't maybe you'll guess trapezoid
If you play a lot of games, you will probably say X. That is because playing Playstation has conditioned you to associate these shapes in a particular order as a button configuration. An order that doesn't make sense to people who haven't played before.
You completely misunderstood my post with your ABCD arguement, because, as I said, the letters allow people to relate the button positions to one another based on the order they appear in the alphabet, not the order they appear on the controller. If my controller had your first layout I would mentally pair the buttons going up, the second layout I would pair them going down. It is a simple and stupid step that you do without realising it when you use the controller for the first few times.
I could care less because I understand how to use the controllers. I've been gaming for years. And I realise it is just a minor issue for gamers who want to be able to play the games anyway (like myself when I learned each controller). That doesn't make the label system any less of a hurdle for new users from a user interface standpoint. I just don't understand how you can't grasp that using a pre-ordered system to label something has an advantage over an arbitrary system for a new user. It's like people who refuse to except that moving all of the vowels to the home keys makes Dvorak superior to Qwerty simply because they've been typing in Qwerty their whole life and can do it "fast".
I think Bushnall's real point was the whole controller's have too many buttons thing that Nintendo is always harping on about, and the DualShock symbols were only referenced because they've become the standard face button description since Sony took over years back. I simply felt the need to jump in beacuse the fanboy idiocy people were spouting about symbols being superior to letters for labeling an interface has no real basis in human interface design
PkunkFury said:
Let me break this down for you. Let's take an SAT test:
A is to B as X is to ______
95% of Americans will say Y
Triangle is to Circle as Square is to _____
What will people say?
If you are a mathemtician you'll be adding up angles like mad and you might decide the answer is an octogon or something.
If you aren't maybe you'll guess trapezoid
If you play a lot of games, you will probably say X. That is because playing Playstation has conditioned you to associate these shapes in a particular order as a button configuration. An order that doesn't make sense to people who haven't played before.
You completely misunderstood my post with your ABCD arguement, because, as I said, the letters allow people to relate the button positions to one another based on the order they appear in the alphabet, not the order they appear on the controller. If my controller had your first layout I would mentally pair the buttons going up, the second layout I would pair them going down. It is a simple and stupid step that you do without realising it when you use the controller for the first few times.
I could care less because I understand how to use the controllers. I've been gaming for years. And I realise it is just a minor issue for gamers who want to be able to play the games anyway (like myself when I learned each controller). That doesn't make the label system any less of a hurdle for new users from a user interface standpoint. I just don't understand how you can't grasp that using a pre-ordered system to label something has an advantage over an arbitrary system for a new user. It's like people who refuse to except that moving all of the vowels to the home keys makes Dvorak superior to Qwerty simply because they've been typing in Qwerty their whole life and can do it "fast".
I think Bushnall's real point was the whole controller's have too many buttons thing that Nintendo is always harping on about, and the DualShock symbols were only referenced because they've become the standard face button description since Sony took over years back. I simply felt the need to jump in beacuse the fanboy idiocy people were spouting about symbols being superior to letters for labeling an interface has no real basis in human interface design
Ignatz Mouse
Banned
[ghostbusters]
Couple of wavy lines?
[/ghostbusters]
Couple of wavy lines?
[/ghostbusters]
Ignatz Mouse
Banned
DavidDayton said:
Perhaps not letely, but he did start two extraordinarily successful businesses-- and they both fell apart without him.
Ignatz Mouse said:
... please note that Atari was starting to fall apart whilst he was still part of it, albiet after he sold out to Warner Bros. and stayed on as president.
I believe the same thing happened for "Pizza Time Theaters" -- he sort of went on his AWOL-ish adventures and returned to find things in shambles.
Nolan was very good at starting things, but not all that great at maintaining them... I do wish he had taken Steve and Steve up on their "Atari home computer" idea, though.
Ignatz Mouse
Banned
DavidDayton said:
What a different world it would be today.