this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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Thank Christ they didn't end up with the same button layout... I'm sorry, but Y is at the top and A is at the bottom. I don't even care that I grew up with the NES and Gameboy. That backwards shit is just wrong.
iirc, PlayStations in Japan flip the functions of X and Circle around. Circle is generally an "accept" button while X is generally a "back/cancel" button. Now I heard this many years ago so it may not be true anymore.
I think it makes sense when you consider where A and B are on the SNES controller. And it also makes sense for them to have moved back to the right face button (in the US) when you consider the Xbox 360 released a year prior to the PS3 and was kind of a runaway success.
That's fair. While NES and Gameboy were my first gaming experiences growing up, PS1 (and later PS2) were the real workhorses of my childhood, so even to this day, my mind views all face buttons as the PlayStation "glyphs" or whatever they are called. When my brother and I discuss controls in games, we both default to "press square" instead of 'X' (or 'Y' if you're Nintendo).
Makes me glad that Nintendo decided to (mostly) go with the icons (the four dots with one colored in) in their games to indicate button presses. Much easier to keep track of everything when they just show you the position of the button rather than just "X" and you have to find out if that means the bottom button, the left button, or the top button.
It's only wrong because the Xbox controller is more ubiquitous than Nintendo's controllers and thus became the new standard. As someone who also grew up on Nintendo consoles, I remember it took me a while to adapt to it, but since I shifted towards PC gaming it became my new standard too
It's wrong because A comes before B and X comes before Y and English speakers/readers read from left to right.
I have never owned an X-Box in my life.
At the end of the day they're just glyphs though. Maybe letters in a clockwise alphabetical order is the most intuitive for someone who has never used a controller before, but I've never seen anyone complain about the PS buttons layout after the initial "where the fuck is triangle" phase... except for that Japanese standard where X is "cancel" and O is "confirm"... because they deviate from what we are used to (and actually mimick the Nintendo layout regarding A and B placement, interestingly enough)
People don't complain about the order of the glyphs, because outside of videos games, there is no pre-existing, ubiquitous, order those glyphs will always appear in every single time you see them (which is constantly because they make up your written language).
A comes before B. A 3 year old can tell you that.
Square, x, circle, and triangle have no preset order.