methods of input (Part 1)

I can’t believe that it’s twenty-five years on and we’re still dealing with Sony’s ill-conceived button name and color scheme

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Obviously it’s called the saltire button.

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I can eat a whole sleeve of saltires in a single sitting.

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the batsu/“no-go” button

Two of those are long-established Japanese standards, so if you’re going after style consistency, there’s not much else you can do than what they came up with

I agree that the Japanese games make sense, but shapes take longer to spell and say and can be confusingly named next to roman letters; who would prefer typing ‘triangle’ to ‘Y’? It’s deviating from a standard and making it worse.

Does anyone know what the official color names are? Pink & Salmon are what I’ve always said and they’ve never helped any child find a button.

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yeah with that attitude I definitely don’t think you’re qualified to teach sex ed

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I never had any issue with the shapes or colors, it really doesn’t matter at all. It’s the location of the buttons and what they do that matters. Bottom center is confirm, the right button is cancel, the top button should take you into the menu, and the left button should bring up a map or whatever. I really don’t like the letters, actually.

eta: my ideal configuration isn’t even in-line with what Sony’s designer was going for.

The circle and cross represent “yes” and “no,” respectively (which explains their common use as “confirm” and “cancel” in games; this layout is reversed in Western games); the triangle symbolizes a point of view and the square is equated to a sheet of paper there to be used to access menus.

It’s the pink button, though. Circle is red, square is pink.

everyone: ABXY is just a sane thing

me: do you see this?

this is a crime.

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I really want to get my hands on the PSX Dual Analog controller some day. Mostly because I really like how the top of the analog sticks are concave.

The official names of the PlayStation buttons are kick, punch, chop, and block.

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Duck duck jump
Turn and pose

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The Switch UI that just shows up/down/left/right for the buttons as arrows and/or as part of a diagram of all four is a huge boon for me. I am always fucking up going between Xbox and Japanese layouts.

Square should be yellow.

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Press Batsu to Jason

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sega’s ace attacker, a volleyball game. controlled with a trackball, a dial, and what i think it a springloaded, hand-shaped analogue stick

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oh good we’re talking about button iconography

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no, hold the vector normal to a plane button to make Mario run

ah yes how could I forget

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Because most videogames are different than other videogames, having quickly identifiable variables is probably the best, most useful maneuver.

But dear god is it boring.

I am not saying there’s any utility to PS buttons, and I’m definitely not saying I prefer them in all circumstances, but the shapes are just so goddamn exciting to me. When I found out that at one point Triangle was for “Viewpoint” and Square was for “Menu” I kinda flipped my shit.

I want all of my game controllers to have cute buttons more than I want them to be easily identified in a limited number of characters

(SuFami colors rule, sorry colorblind gamer peoples)

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the PS button symbols are a fucking masterstroke

a goddamned super genius looked at the console marketplace and saw everyone was using letters and throwing them in different ways and saw a way to both differentiate, standardize and create a marketing tool

we can all talk about the symbols and know what’s going on instead of having to go into arcane notation or runaround or deep conversations about how Nintendo knows the alphabet backwards

and then they’re colored! sure, that’s probably a leftover from the PSX being a SNES-CD frankenconsole but fuck, it’s good!

you can tell it’s good because stuff not explicitly based on a past paradigm rip Sony off. hell, arcade games steal the symbols

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circle should have been a check mark