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What is the Best Console Controller of All Time?
Mateo Slovinsky asks: "Is the XBox 360's controller the best controller of all time? CNet seems to think so in its line up of the top five gamepads of all time. If you expected the Wii's controller, you will be dissapointed. It's a brilliant piece of innovation, but there simply aren't enough games to judge it against the best controllers ever." Which controller would you pick? What controllers have not left your hands cramped after a marathon session of gaming?
Everything else has too many buttons.
It's great to see the SNES controller, it provided 6-button, finger-and-thumb controlling in about the most compact design possible. I see it as the bridge to all modern controllers, from the previous controllers like the NES, Atari,etc.
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Maybe they should have played some Wii games rather than just dismissing it.
It does not take a lot of games to notice that:
1. I no longer have to play games with my hands together as though I'd been cuffed.
2. Easy to distinguish buttons, not too many of them, with convenient support for things like "thumb+forefinger = grab", making controls easier to remember.
3. Broad selection of simultaneous actions. I can move and turn at the same time without trying to remember button combos.
The wiimote is, hands down, the best console controller ever. It's not even close. Can I invent a game that works better on something else? Sure. I can make games that are better on keyboard than mouse, too. Still, the dominant case is pretty clear.
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For me it will always be the Sega Megadrive - preferably playing Sonic 2.
This is not an objective opinion, I don't think that there can be one where the word 'favourite' is involved, but I spent so many hours with it in my hands that it's the one that feels right for me and all others are, in my mind, compared with it. I'm sure that, had my peer group been Nintendo, rather than Sega, orientated, then I would feel differently, but they weren't, so I don't.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
I started reading the article, and got through XBox360, PS2, and then N64 at 3rd place. That's when I stopped reading it. There's a general concensus among my friends that the N64 controller is among the worst ever designed, and possibly is the worst. Whose idea was it to make a controller that you needed 3 hands to properly use?
Am I the only one that cannot STAND the Dual Shock controller? In fact, the controller is one of the reasons I never finished many PS2 games...I just couldn't stand using the friggin' thing
For a while, I thought it was the Dreamcast controller...it fits perfectly in my hands, has a good weight to it, and the D-pad felt solid.
Overall, I would have to agree with C-Net...the 360 controller is AWESOME. The buttons and triggers have a nice solid feel, the thing just cradles in your hands, and it has a decent weight to it. My only gripe would be with the D-Pad...other then that though, the 360 controller is at the top of the list.
Nothing beats a good keyboard/mouse combo though;-)
Living With a Nerd
It's going to be very subjective. For instance, I *despise* the Dual Shock controller; the analog stick position feels completely unnatural for continued use and causes my thumbs to cramp after a while. I haven't had the same problem with the DC/GC-style controllers, where the analog sticks are more in line with the axis of a relaxed grip. I haven't used the XBox controller long enough at a time to know, but it falls into the same vein (the N64 escapes by virtue of the shifted grip when using the analog stick).
Thus, as people have insisted over the years that the PSX/PS2/PS3 have developed "THE GREATEST CONTROLLER KNOWN TO MAN", I cringe and figure that people have just learned how to contort their hands into an unnatural configuration for so long that they can't tell the difference. But then again, some people may find it comfortable, such as you do.
"With the PS2 controller, ... it's hard to tell which button does what."
And because of that, there is no constitancy. One game's jump is another one fire, one's map is another one's menu... For people like me who like to switch between many games on a regular basis (just this week, on the PS2 alone, I did some DQ9, FFXII, DMC3 & Lego SW + several games on PC & DS), it's a real PITA to have to relearn to use the controler every day.
This is one thing the Nintendorks software writers need to fix for the next Wii software update: include a goddamn calibration routine.
I have a 50" screen. I was getting really annoyed at how twitchy Zelda was, how twitchy the general Wii response for visuals were. If I pointed to the edge of my screen, the mouse zoomed WAY off to the side.
Then, inside Zelda, I found this awesome feature. It let you select your screen type (4:3 or 16:9), then it displayed a yellow bar. You lined up your IR bar ("sensor bar" my ass, it's a bar of plastic with a set of IR LEDs in it) with the center of it, sized up the yellow bar so it matched the IR bar, and the Zelda interface adjusted itself. Now, in my Zelda games, if I point to a spot, the little cursor goes right where I'm pointing.
NO other Wii game has implemented this yet. Red Steel, had they had this in, would have actually been playable. Trauma Center: Second Opinion would be playable. Wii Play would make a lot more sense in Duck Hunt mode.
Nor have they done us the simple courtesy of pushing a simple recalibration routine out over the system software, which would stop any other software company from having to do so.
Bad Nintendorks. No Cookie.
IMO, 'Feels nature/right' is sometimes very subjective. While some people I know like how the xbox360 controller is laid out, others find it award and uncomfortable. My wife had no trouble working a N64 controller, but it was a hellish nightmare for me. To me, the one controller that fits my hands and playing habits is the Dual Shock. There wasn't even any 'training myself to contort to the controller', as some have suggested, since I had no problem with it from the start. I am no ergonomics expert, but I'd venture to guess that people have hands of different shapes and sizes, and therefore no one controller would fit all... (I have yet to see an adjustable one, which may be an exception) Maybe one day the gaming industry will be big enough that they can release controllers of different sizes for one console.