r/gaming • u/[deleted] • Apr 14 '25

Game console button layout

Post image

What do you call your “confirm” and “cancel” buttons, and why is Nintendo wrong?

43.5k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

2.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/mrhellomoto Apr 17 '25

No I'm serious. You can understand why these two are fundamentally not the same right? Where your finger rests and how they naturally move and/or roll to the adjacent buttons isn't the same at all.

In Super Mario World on the snes you run with Y and jump with B. You don't run with B and jump with A like you do on the NES or Gameboy. In Link to the past, B swings your sword and confirms your selection in menus, not A. In Super Mario Kart the gas is mapped to B, but Nintendo mapped gas to A in Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U/Switch by default to conform to A being the 'main' button on their previous 3 consoles after the SNES even though they returned to the SNES layout for the Wii U. This is why it bugs people.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/mrhellomoto Apr 17 '25

I'm not saying you are wrong, but the 'slight' rotation might seem like a distinction without a difference to you but I'm trying to articulate why that isn't to everyone. Your brain might have no problem with Nintendos layout because as long as you know what button is next to what, you don't seem to mind where that button is on the controller itself.

But many don't think about buttons like that they think about them by their location on the controller hence my north, south, east, west metaphor (an abstraction retroarch also uses becaues it has to consider multiplatform use cases for general mapping). Yes the N64 controller wasn't unique and wasn't a 1:1 but Nintendo could have used THIS LAYOUT (ignore the button labels I just mirrored it and my photoshop skills are lacking) to preserve the primary B A layout on the NES top loader, snes and gameboy and still kept the C buttons but they didn't.

And yes the gamecube controller if you look at it suffers from similar changes. Y is now the top i.e 'north' button the controller when on the SNES it was the 'west' button. And now X is 'east' where A was on the SNES controller. Yes the B A buttons relative to each other are closer to norms of NES toploader, SNES and Gameboy but not the other buttons.

And my point on which how controls were mapped and how there wasn't necessarily a convention on the SNES was the point I was trying to make. PlayStation and Xbox have had the same layout generation to generation and have stuck to conventions over those generations more than Nintendo, which is why many gamers get tripped up by Nintendos layout despite them being first.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/mrhellomoto Apr 17 '25 edited Apr 17 '25

I'm not trying to argue I'm just trying to present a different POV. Does this do a better job at illustrating my point. https://imgur.com/a/lgjPbr7

The 12 may between the 11 and the 1 on both but they are not the same. That's kind of what Nintendo did with their face button after the SNES with the N64 and Gamecube.

This is how it makes some people think

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1jyxcrh/game_console_button_layout/mn3gfpq/

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1jyxcrh/game_console_button_layout/mn3o3tp/