MaJoR Wrote:The N64 is vital in the evolution of controllers
Honestly, I don't see how. I think we would have been fine if it hadn't come along. If it wouldn't have been Nintendo, it would just have been someone else, given time. If anything, people looked at the N64 controller and saw how not to design a decent controller for 3D games.
MaJoR Wrote:But Dual Analog came before the first person shooter use for it. Dual analog did not have that in mind when it was made. Someone at Sony saw the N64 controller and thought "Hey, if we made TWO analog sticks, and put them side by side, this would work great for camera control, and we could say we're TWICE as good as their controller!" Then a developer got a hold of it while making a first person shooter and realized it's potential there you go. The N64 controller was vital to developing that next step.
Source? That just sounds like conjecture. Again, any company, whether it was Sony, Sega, or Nintendo, who provided a 3D system with analog joystick input would have been the "vital first stepping stone for later designs" by virtue of being first. In light of that, it's nothing to start blowing trumpets over. If the ill-fated Saturn had switched to analog joystick input, it would have been where the N64 controller stands. It's just timing. The merits of the actual N64 controller, however, are far less than its historical relevance.
MaJoR Wrote:Yet no one hates on the famicom controllers, the N64 controller gets it all.
Because the N64 controller is bewildering by design, rather than suffering from mechanical issues purely. Unfortunately, the N64 controller suffered from both, whereas the controller design of the Famicom (and NES) was acceptable (for the most part, anyway, the blocky NES controller is still iffy in my mind).
MaJoR Wrote:"Low point in controller design". FAH! It was a revolution in controller design. From the sounds of it, you'd have preferred they just made a SNES controller and done nothing to improve the quality of gaming.
Yes, I would have loved the N64 to have had something comparable to the Wii's Classic controller. You can add joysticks without resorting to bizarre controller designs.
MaJoR Wrote:Sure it had problems, but almost every control revolution has had those same growing pains.
Growing pains shouldn't make it into production, ideally. That's what QA testing and getting early opinions is all about. Sure the internet didn't really "exist" back then, but focus groups did. Nowadays, you see people like Valve taking great risks to make something just as revolutionary, but they've gone back to the drawing board to make sure they get this right the first iteration. It wasn't as if Nintendo introduced altered, alternate, modified, or updated versions of the N64 controller; they kept it the same for the system's entire lifespan.
MaJoR Wrote:The real low point in controller designs are the images I posted. Now THOSE are bad controllers. True failures in gamepad design are obvious, really. They are deadends. No one is going to look at a fairchild F and think of how similar it is to an Xbox 360 controller. It's not, not even remotely, because the Fairchild-F is one of the worst if not the worst controller designs ever imagined, and no one has ever borrowed from it's design. The same could be said for the Phillips CDi Paddle or the Magnovox Odyssey controller (ew). The Jaguar is the least horrible in this bunch, but it's really bad; and they had no excuse for it as it came after the SNES controller and it wasn't even trying to tackle the 3D revolution.
Who cares about other systems? I'm talking Nintendo. There's a reason why the great gaming crash in the 80's happened and Nintendo rose above it all, but every time I see your signature, a part of me always sighs when I look at the N64 controller. Revolutionary? Sure, in the sense that someone had to be first, but first != good. If they had spent a little more time, we really would have had something amazing in our hands (no pun intended). There's trying, and then there's getting it right.
MaJoR Wrote:I've studied it, and read several interviews from the era. The Virtual Boy controller did need the "prongs" for a very serious reason - it had the batteries in the gamepad. It was set up that way so you could strap the virtual boy to your head if you wanted to without it getting peeled off from all that weight. In the end no one used it that way and it looks weird in hindsight, but that was why it has prongs.
They could have gone for a totally different approach and have a controller (bigger and wider of course) that was similar to the GBA. I get that it needed batteries, but they could have designed a controller that did not rely on prongs. I mean, just looking at the controller, I can't see how lopping the prongs off (and rounding the bottom portion out like an SNES controller) would have adversely affected gameplay. At the very least, the prongs were unnecessarily elongated.