I was doing some heavy cleaning in my Game Room today because the place has been in shambles over the past week because I have been pretty ill. I was dusting off the game controllers that were out in the open and I had a sudden moment of pure admiration as I was working on the face of the X-Box controller. The one that I have hooked up to the console right now is the revised, smaller controller from Microsoft and it is a thing of beauty. It certainly looks cute and it has something that the current controller for the X-Box 360 does not have: 6 input buttons on the right hand side of it. Sure, four buttons are good but some games do benefit from having more. I think we can all blame Sony for making the four buttons thing cool since the release of the first PlayStation but Microsoft should have stick with the old design when it comes to button-mapping. By the way, the Sega Dreamcast did fall prey to the whole 4-button hype as well. The 6 buttons are not intimidating and it is always good to have more options for developers to toy around with, especially when it comes to fighting games. Those extra buttons do look pretty darn sexy so I should choose some X-Box games to play with soon so I could purposefully rub my thumb all over them.
It may not have fancy lights glowing on top of it but the extra buttons are magnificent.
1 comment:
I found that some poorly-thought out combinations make 6 buttons awkward (though custom key mappings often fix this problem). I originally had a complaint of this kind with the N64, that sometimes I would need to hold down one button while pressed another in a very strained fashion. This didn't happen with all (or most) titles, but it did make some games difficult (I recall Starfox 64 in particular caused some problems, as holding the firing button to charge made some aerial maneuvers tough to pull off).
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