10 Worst 1st Party Controllers of All Time
What to Say?
Bad controllers are a dime a dozen. There is an endless sea of plastic crap that no one should be forced to play on ever. But often, a new controller will introduce two or three things that don't work and at the same time pioneer something that really hits the mark or introduces an idea that everyone else steals and improves upon for generations to come. In the mid to late 80s, it was the directional pad. In the late 90s, it was thumbsticks and rumble packs. In the early years of the 21st century, triggers finally were refined. The crystal ball says now we're going throw the growth phase where everything has motion control and make no mistake, there will be awful iterations of this. Sometimes the refinements to great new ideas take one generation as with the thumbsticks, or several as in the case of analog triggers. But we must wade through and endure the bad so that the good may come later. Often, we'll play through bouts of swearing and bitching about controllers, but we know we love new gadgets and ways of doing things and crave that next experience that connects us closer to the heroic experience we want from our games. Who knows what the next feature is that will build on that connection? While i don't know what it is, I do know what it's not and based on the list of terrible controllers above your next controller should have none of the following :
- Keypads
- Overlays
- Controllers that make phone calls
- Golden Discs
- Expansion Ports
- Controllers shaped like Super Hero's weapons (Sony nearly broke this one with the Playstation 3 batarang controller from two E3s ago)
- Digital Control
- Controllers that double as portable flotation devices
Any one of these things by themselves will probably negatively impact your play experience. Any two, will make you tear your hair out. Any three and the controller should include a cyanide caplet. Just in case.
Comment
Digg Me!About the author: Ronald Diemicke is a MobyGames writer, contributor and approver. Special thanks: Aeroguy from
GamingDump.com, Devin Shockwell from
the black moon monthly, MobyGames contributors
Servo and
Don Komarechka for the use of controller images.
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