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Time traveler accidentally moves a chair:
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Resident N64 pad defender here. It's fine to dislike the controller, but I'm never really sure if the "I don't have three hands!" complaint is a joke or just based on people who never played any N64 games or what.
You're not supposed to use all three prongs, ever. It's just a hedge-betting controller. Nintendo was afraid people wouldn't like the new, 3D style of game control and would demand a return to traditional D-pad input.
The N64 controller was their solution: if 3D movement is just a fad that dies out, well, move your hand over a couple of inches and forget about the analog stick. Now you've basically got a SNES pad with six face buttons and better ergonomics.
Obviously, 3D took over that whole generation and there's probably less than 10 games that need D-pad movement, so it ended up being fairly pointless in hindsight. But I can't argue with anybody who starts their design process with "What if gamers hate this new style of input?" because when don't they.
The fact that you're going to have to ignore a third of the controller at any given time is the reason why it's badly designed. The Sega Saturn 3D was in development at the same time as the N64 and pad came out two weeks later and had a much better design that allowed the D-pad and analog stick to be used with the same thumb, in a configuration that would continue to be used to this day.
The advantage of the N64 approach is that it allows both the D-pad and analog stick to be primary inputs. They're both ideally positioned under the thumb, because they're the only input the thumb needs to interact with. It's a tradeoff between the number of available inputs and ergonomics. Every other controller has to compromise on one or the other. e.g. The DualShock is obviously a SNES controller with two sticks slapped in the middle, but since it was an update to the standard (D-pad focussed) PlayStation controller, they're not at the angle where your thumb naturally rests. Successive PlayStation controllers moved the stick up and out slightly to bring it more in line with the thumb.
The Saturn 3D Control Pad along with other "modern" controllers like the Xbox line, GameCube and Switch have the opposite layout, where the analog stick is the natural resting place for the thumb and you crane to reach the less-accessible D-pad. With the benefit of hindsight, this is probably the "right answer", because most games since the fifth generation are designed around the analog stick, with the D-pad occasionally used as four additional action buttons which you either don't need at all, or only use sparingly. I don't know that this style of game (e.g. tactical shooters with squad orders on the D-pad) really did or could have existed in the N64 generation, so the lack of D-pad access ends up being irrelevant to the kind of games that were actually coming out in the era.
If you released a console today with the N64 controller, that would be a terrible idea, because there are the kinds of games coming out that expect you to have four triggers, two analog sticks and reasonably convenient access to the D-pad. But I can't think of any N64 games that were worse because you couldn't access the D-pad. What games needed those extra inputs? What games didn't get made because those inputs weren't convenient? Coming at it the other way, what games were released for the Saturn 3D Control Pad that wouldn't have been possible on N64?