flickering colours

Control Freak

So Sony has finally 'revealed' its worst-kept secret ever, the Playstation Move controller. Within seconds of the announcements (and before them too really) the Wii-mote rip-off claims started flying. This strikes me as such a predictable knee-jerk reaction to the leet kids out there who want to come off as superiour by being able to 'criticise' something and sound insightful. These critics act like this has never happened before, and further, that it is a bad thing... Let's have a look at a number of the controllers or 'gamepads' as they used to be called, and see who started copying who, when.

I'm going to start this discussion at the third generation of console, because the first two generations were so full of one-off consoles that had either IDENTICAL joystick and paddle controllers, or wildly different and practically unusable controllers. Many of these are virtually unrecognisable to gamers today and would be quite useless in modern games.