The Student News Site of Shawnee Mission Northwest

SMNW

The Student News Site of Shawnee Mission Northwest

SMNW

The Student News Site of Shawnee Mission Northwest

SMNW

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The Coin-Op: Why you will never be the controller [Part 1]

Does anyone else remember the Dreamcast?  No, of course you don’t; that’s why Sega has been reduced to making the gameplay from Sonic Adventure fester and rot in an experiment to see just how much money they can make from fanboys alone.  Anyone who did play with it will remember how the corner would dig into the side of your index finger whenever you hit the L or R button.

Sega Dreamcast

Remember how if you wanted to hold the directional pad and any other button at the same time you had to use another hand? Remember how there was a screen right in the middle of the controller that could sometimes hold vital information that you’d never be able to see unless you held it right up to your face in the most awkward way possible since the graphics on that screen were somewhere on the level of a Virtual Boy having a violent color-related seizure?

Or how about something slightly more memorable?  How about the Nintendo 64 controller that was designed with the thought that suddenly and without warning everyone would grow a third arm out of their torso. It was like they were in on some sort of new toxic waste dumping plot and decided to profit off of it like the villain in a straight-to-DVD Van Damme movie.

Nintendo 64

But luckily for us Jean-Claude had the good sense to split-kick the lead Nintendo product tester in the face before we all lost an eyeball, and instead of a hand from our forehead, we got an impossible controller.

There’s a reason that the Playstation controller hasn’t changed ever, and that’s because the black box’s little baby PSP had probably the worst control scheme ever made for a handheld, and I’m including the $2 live-action Disney movie promotional games with two plastic buttons designed to mimic a blender on your hand.

See, a bad controller can ruin a game.  The Dreamcast was a GREAT system, with notably one of the best ratios of good games to bad games ever — it had classics, it had Marvel Vs. Capcom, it had MDKII, it had absolutely amazing games. On the other hand, the controller was horrible, the mode of operation was so unfortunately bad that it literally drove Sega out of business.

It takes a few bad button placements and one scarred for life hand for nobody to play your system again, and we’re hitting that same problem with the Wii, the Move, and Kinect.

Find out why in the second part.

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The Coin-Op: Why you will never be the controller [Part 1]