REVOLUTION CONTROLLER HAS BEEN REVEALED!!!!!

[Weltall]

Pressure sensitive buttons/dpad? Did Sony really invent the idea? I quite definitely doubt it... and did it really make much of a difference anyway? Seems like it causes as many problems as good effects...

Can't think of anyone who did it sooner. And in some games, it works very well (MGS2, for example).

As for the D-Pad, the Gravis Gamepad (or was it the GRiP?) controller showed what it is... a joystick without the stick (that was a gamepad with a center hole thing in the dpad where you could screw in a mini joystick). So maybe Intellivision had it "first", but was that really so different from arcade games with standard eight-way or sixteen-way or whatever joysticks that in effect are just as set (on or off for each direction, not true 2-axis movement)? No, not really. It just gets rid of the stick. :)

I agree, and that's why I don't view the D-Pad as a huge advancement, regardless of who made it first. It was an improvement over the joystick, but it wasn't a groundbreaking innovation.

And the entire point of my post wasn't how great the advancement was, but that Nintendo did not innovate in the slightest by placing one on the NES controller.

The shape was an important advance. So was getting rid of the numpad... what an awful thing to have on a game controller... (Atari never learned this lesson, obviously, when you look at the Jaguar controller...) And as I said, they're all based off arcade sticks anyway... each system was a new step. Of course the NES didn't come out of a void. But it was also quite noticably different from what had come before (controller-wise), and that mattered a lot... the dpad made more sense than the Intellivision disc. :) The NES controller just looks so much cooler than the Intellivision one that it's absolutely no comparison... things like that matter a lot more to most people than things like 'but functionally it's a lot like the Intellivision disc'. :)

I grew up playing the Intellivision, and while I'd hardly call the keypad intuitive, it wasn't awful, and I mastered it by the age of two. Some of my favorite games would have been unplayable without it.

And just because a control looks 'cool' doesn't make it innovative, or even superior. As I stated, the D-pad of the Intellivision is more advanced than the NES's. There isn't one single aspect about the NES's D-Pad, besides it's look, that was any different in any way from what came before it.

Anyway, the Nintendo D-Pad was a big change from what came before, just like how discs or wheels or whatever are big changes from 2600-style "joysticks" that aren't really 2-axis, modern-meaning-of-the-word-joystick things. Intellivision is an atari stick... without the stick. Nintendo Dpad is like that... with a major redesign and directional-focused layout. Change. :)

How is it really change? It doesn't function any better. The only change is cosmetic.

Similarly, Genesis/Sidewinder/etc circular directional pads with raised parts or whatever to mark the four cardinal directions, as well as PSX-style four-button setups, aren't really true dpads either...

Okay, now I have no idea what the hell you're talking about. They're all the same exact concept with different physical aesthetics. They all function exactly the same way. The PSX's D-Pad isn't a four-button deal, either. It's just designed to look that way.

If I had to go by this post, you've never even touched half of the controllers you described.