It's Under Control

I'll be the first to admit that I am no good at old school video games. I've been too pampered by these newer games that I've developed a new standard. Old games are tough, nobody can deny that, but They are tough for a myriad of reasons, one of which being that developers were under the idea that a game would most likely be the player's only game, and they would ramp up the difficulty to make the game last longer. That is true. For me, part of that difficulty comes down to the controller.

The old NES controller only had two buttons, and the directional pad. The other two buttons were primarily used for bringing up the pause screen or a quick change of equipment, essential but not the primary functions of most games. This was a limitation of control. It made sense, for the time, as most games were based off of the simplistic controls of their video arcade counterparts. Most arcade games only had a joystick and one or two buttons. Again, the design philosophy behind these games were that they were to be so difficult that the player would lose and lose, thereby extending the life of the game. Games were just things to occupy time for a few hours, and meant to be something more of a toy than what they would eventually become.



Video games apparently caught like wildfire, as the NES sold 61.91 million units since its release in 1983. That's quite a lot. As gaming grew to be something more than just a thing to keep the kids occupied for a few hours, so did the necessity for a more advanced controller. Gaming was getting more advanced with new emerging technologies. Video games could do more, and players would need a way to do more with them.




The way in which controllers have evolved, allows for players to have more control over their games. The amount of control that players have over the characters in the video game still has a great deal to do with the games' programming. However, with more buttons, analog sticks, and even a little bit of motion control, players have more functions to work with. With these functions players can do more within the game space. For most, all of these buttons seem a bit intimidating, though I feel that all of these buttons are out of necessity. Because each button corresponds to something within the game, the player has more control.

I think that I'm no good at the older generations of video games, mostly because I have been pampered by these fancy, new controllers with their multiple buttons, and games and their expansion from being something that challenges the player to engaging them. With the older generation of games, design philosophies were different, technology was different, and controllers didn't offer much control. Yet, they did what they had to, and they survived for their generation to bring us new and better things. Games, as well as their controllers are constantly evolving, and with that comes exciting new possibilities.