i like that they used pastel-ish shades for the buttons.
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i still donât get why western sony branches reverse x and o for menus though. itâs such a weird thing and they still do it after 25 years
til the playstation buttons are color coded
begins breathing heavily
hold for incoming 8000 word post pls
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iâm glad they still swap x/o. my thumb naturally rests on the x, so.
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the only real âproblemâ with The Shapes if you want to make one of them is the X / Cross conflict.
a further argument for their cuteness/elegance via wizardâs riddle:
- Circle
- Cross
- Triangle
- Square
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Itâs common knowledge the PSX was the product of a joint Sony-Nintendo hardware project that dissolved and that it was considered at some point as an SNES expansion. The first PSX controller that shipped is an expanded SNES pad: patent-dodging indented dpad and button diamond on a rounded rectangle. To add âbetter affordance for 3d controlâ they added the extra shoulder buttons (bit funny in retrospect) and the extended paddle grips to make up for new demand on finger use.
Hereforward Iâm referring only to O and X button placement. For context compare B and A on NES. When I say West/East I mean X/O.
The PlayStation launched outside Japan in 95. The dev kit was novel for the time: an IBM PC compatible add-on as opposed to a dedicated system, and reportedly sold at-cost for around 18k which is comparatively quite good. Sony was initially uninvolved in Western first-party dev and thrived by having a low barrier to third party developer buy-in. PSX as we know got lots of delightfully local and novel software compared to otherwise stringent/buttoned-down approval process of most home hardware platform holders of the day. The short release window, cheap media, and relatively-easy dev toolkit that slotted into existing pipelines meant all early non-Japanese developed PSX games were ports or cross platform projects (PC, Saturn, 3DO, etc.), the PlayStation in 95 being unproven among competing hardware in a market without a clear sales winner. On these other platforms, the Sega button layout was the established standard via the Master System-cum-MegaDrive legacy and itâs other 9-pin copycats: 1/A as Confirm on West face button, 2/B Cancel on East (considering C as tertiary).
Lack of standardization and the beginning of wider mouse adoption saw dedicated meta-button menus make a comeback in 95 (more common for NES, Arcade, LCD and old PC games). In 95 ALL western PSX games let you Confirm in menus using ANY face button, and the menus drill one way. Some let you return to root menu with Start. Iâve seen only one in-game menu that does exclusively X to confirm before 96, and only in the pause menu.
Japanese PlayStation software meanwhile, the system having gestated post-release for a few years and having system exclusive games, settled on the Nintendo standard: East button Confirm, West button Cancel. All Japanese games released in the west on launch in 95 work this way in all regions. While IBM compatibles were picking up steam in east Asia in 95, NECs PC line was more prominent, and their supported controllers as well as their competitors followed Nintendo style button order: East button being 1 (confirm), West face button 2 (back).
96 is the advent of the N64 pad (B is still on the left, but itâs North now and A is South) and the first instance of the now-ubiquitous layout canonized in the Dreamcast (and later Xbox) pad shows up on the Saturn 3D pad: the 6 button Sega layout is rotated to a more dramatic angle and we get the A/B/X/Y diamond. As ports to and from these platforms to PlayStation were frequent, it seems reasonable to assume this further entrenched Western devs in using South/Playstation Cross as confirm. An example to compare is 95 PSX Doom (any face button confirms) vs 96âs PSX Final Doom (X is confirm, O is back).
Also in 96, Sony started to get involved in first-party Western development and Naughty Dog became a Sony concern. Crash Bandicoot underwent a West-to-East localisation process that included swapping the Confirm and Cancel buttons in the save menu, as documented here: https://web.stanford.edu/group/htgg/sts145papers/jdelahunt_2004_1.pdf
This is often cited as the root of an explanation that is probably post-hoc psychosocial bullshit â that the disparity in Eastern and Western layout of Circle/Cross arose from cultural differences in marking âCorrect/Incorrectâ in paper grading, and resembling the opposite in standardized-test bubbles (Empty/Filled) in the west: The Japanese Side of the PlayStation Button Confusion This is a flimsy read to me: X and O certainly donât read âyes and noâ⌠gonna make my own stretch and assume if anything, that this explanation is a reach made popular by American English tutors having worked a hammer in Japan for whom every nail appears as a culturally-contextual marking mixup.
There is a hearsay rumour Iâve never seen substantiated that an early and commonly-referred-to bit of western development documentation put Confirm on X, which seems plausible. I need to look at the CD-player and other system level controls on PSX bios to compare, havenât done that yet.
Given the above historical context I think itâs reasonable for the disparity to be safely generalized to âbecause Segaâ.
The Dreamcast shipped in 98. From 99 onward, Japanese Playstation games localised for the West start getting their controls flopped to conform, for example FF8 is flopped, where Tactics in 98 and FF7 prior to that had not been. Hereafter almost all games get their controls flopped East/West when localised either way for PlayStation.
Few exceptions include MGS1-3/ZoE. MGS up to Ac!d (2004) retains the Eastern layout. When the changeover is finally made for the series on MGS4 in 2008 for PS3, the flop had become a system-wide implementation. As a result, the software button flop started to result in weird inconsistencies where layout depends on some combination of hardware locale and software title version. When you import PlayStation hardware and/or software post PS3 (which are generally not region locked), a mismatch may result in on-screen labels being wrong, button inputs being wrong, sometimes both.
As of recently you can remap controls on the PS4 at a system level, but not (as people have proposed as an ideal solution) per software title.
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I think super Mario kart is truly to blame for making the bottom button confirm and setting off this fucked up timeline
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Thank god for this post
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Iâm surprised that people express their exasperation at Sony over confirm/cancel, as Nintendo has always kept âconfirmâ on the right and I still need a blip of adjustment when I return to a Nintendo system.
Nintendo (in its SNES-based button layouts, get out of here, GameCube) appears to prefer to put confirm on âAâ but also relegate it to a tertiary action button, so it ends up reading as a âmenuâ button first. And I think PS1 games tend to follow.
It makes sense that games that are all menu, no action (JRPGs) are the ones that bump most directly into this problem and the fact that Sony rotated the SNES layout into an exact cross shape put them in even weighting; the SNES layoutâs 35-degree skew gives âBâ obvious primacy over âAâ.
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this is true yeah, as action games are concerned SNES games generally put primary action on B, which establishes some parity in placement of bindings relative to Genesis and perhaps this starts setting the expectation for southmost button as primary.
i suppose N64 B/A roughly equating to SNES X/B is further movement in that direction.
confirming with B of course âseemsâ (sounds?) wrong, irregardless of button placement. Steam Inputâs Switch Controller support comes with a default toggle to swap all A/B X/Y controls to resolve this confusion against XInputâs defaults, as well as some PC games that offer wider device recognition which is what sent me down the rabbit hole.
it tickles me that THPS N64 maps the PlayStation face buttons to C-Buttons, relegating A/B to menus.
tangentially a lot of contemporary best-practice ux documentation insists all digital directional input be accessible on analogue stick, and you wonât easily find a contemporary western developed game that requires directional (non-hotkey-like) input from dpad exclusively, tho it seems p standard fare in japanese titles still. thereâs a thought in there somewhere about precision of methodology and seperation of concerns vs. a flexible/unified layout that moves seamlessly between control modes (in this example, action v menu).
the snes buttons arent an exact cross shape? like when i snap on my libble rabble dpad it looks like a regular cross
i might be misunderstanding what the skew is
yea that threw me for a second too⌠i think what was being articulated is that the spatial layout is wider than it is tall, unlike the modern arrangements which are equidistant from the center point
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But thatâs the thing: if you play Sony stuff, you need to adjust on a PER GAME basis. Hell, even games in the same series, depending on where they release, will change this. For a current gen example, I have the Japanese version of the Garegga M2 port, so circle is confirm. The NA version of the Dangun Feveron M2 port (which has basically the same menus, just different font/colors to match the game) has X as confirm. This gets so annoying over time.
Hilariously, because Sony eventually made this mostly hardware coded on the ps3 and ps4, this makes some games actually unplayable across regions. Rudie talked about this on a hinge problems, I think, because he tried to play an NA release of a game on his JPN ps3, only because of the reversal of O/X, it meant that confirm changes on a per menu level, and sometimes doesnât even work.
Really, if sony would just standardize it (either way, IDGAF), it would be fine, buuuut Sony.
this causes horrific issues when switching between us and jp versions of games when speedrunning on sony consoles. it is next-level infuriating because it destroys your fucken muscle memory 
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What might be nice is if every console had system-level per-game button mapping
For accessibility and confirm/cancel semiotics, but mostly accessibility
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Itâs weird because for years developers have been saying that there is a set of virtual confirm/cancel buttons you can map to in code, and yet it seems a ton of developers either donât bother, whatever cross-platform tooling theyâre relying on isnât using it, or the virtual buttonâs mapping is determined when the game binary is built instead of when the game is started.
Also this shit not being a rejection flag for certification is baffling
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Yeah, I pictured it wrong in my head â the squashed layout combines with the graphic that groups B+A and Y+X to make it look like parallel tracks
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i figured it was the little borders around the buttons that made you say that ITS AN OPTICAL ILLUSION!
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itâs hard to overestimate how much goes forgotten and undocumented in how short a time in terms of best practice for these sorts of things, and also how much domain-specific knowledge remains region, company, team specific.
often what does/nât pass lotcheck is completely baffling to rookie devs, and the collective buzz around the Right Way to do things is most subject to whims of popular discourse more than any rigorous set of engineering principles.
in conclusion, you can block both directions simultaneously in MVC3 by holding left and right at the same time.
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