Worst controller ever

[retroking1981]

i think all the mainstream consoles game pads are fine, id have to say that the snes pad must be by far the most influential. its still basically the main blueprint for pads today.

in terms of bringing something new to the table sony are awful, with the original ps they basically copied the snes pad and doubled the amount of shoulder buttons and evolved the megadrives curvy edges to introduce handles which are standard today. nintendo then came along with the n64 and its revolutionary analogue stick and what did sony do.... thats right copied nintendo again and double up on a nintendo idea and even threw in the rumble feature for good measure. dont get me wrong the dual shocks are great pads imo, although the ps3s pad has awful trigger buttons (another idea borrowed - sega dreamcast) compared to others.

the original xbox pad was an absolute disaster, proven by the fact that it was redesigned. after that i think the xbox pads have been great, although like sony they lack anything new. one thing i do have trouble with is their button layout. i was 10 when the snes came out and thus it is probably the console i have played the most over the years, and the way microsoft changed the buttons around just confuses the hell out of me. a,b,x,y in a different order than the snes wtf!! it wouldn't be so bad if they had different colours but they even copied that and changed them around. at least sony had the decency to label the buttons a completely different way.

sega pads have always tended to be ok, their best was the saturns redesigned one imo, the dreamcast one was good but in hindsight it wouldn't have stood a chance in that gen with one analogue stick. fps required a second analogue and it was far to popular a genre for it not to matter.

nintendos pads on the other hand always tend to bring something new to the table which is then copied by every other company. nes - dpad, snes - 4 face buttons and shoulder buttons, n64 - analogue stick. whats missing, thats right the gamecube, not an awful pad in itself but its clear nintendo was already in the frame of mind of trying the change the way we play games. this has since happened with the wii but the gc pad was obviously that period in between when they wasn't quite sure what direction they were going in. it didn't introduce anything new and the other pads in the generation stuck with the tried and tested designs, because of this the gc pad is nintendos worst imo.

one interesting thing to note is what companies have been forced into redesigning their pads. sega redesigned the megadrive pad to include 3 extra buttons to bring it up to the snes numbers and the saturn pad originally had rough edges which was redesigned to be more like the mds 6 button pad, they then introduced the nights 3d pad but by then the saturn was dead and no one cared. sony had to redesigned their original pad to introduce rumble and analogue features and just recently again with the ps3, and finally microsoft with the original xbox pad.

sorry for the rant and sorry if ive repeated myself in places. like i said at the beginning i think overall the mainstream pads are all fine but for me the worst has to go to microsofts pads for their dodgy button layouts opposite to the snes. please remember that this is just my opinion but theres been to many times where ive died in a game when ive been looking down at the pad trying to figure out where y is... i mean green... oh bugger its yellow on this pad... GAME OVER!