22nd March 2006, 7:30 PM
Quote:I agree. I never laid a hand on that thing, nor did I read any reviews on it. All this "hate" over it seems like petty bickering over something untested. I'm fairly certain none of the people whining about it had either the human biology or engineering training to actually conclude that it was a bad design. That said, it's irrelevent at this point.
I don't understand those people anyway since they'd probably say that the Dualshock was actually a good design... comfortable, yes. But not well laid out, and quite ugly design-wise... really, the dualshock is not exactly one of the nicer looking gamepads I've seen... too bland and average looking. The boomerang was much more interesting.
Quote:Standardization is a good thing ABF. While the aspect resolution for TVs is changing, it should be changing TO something that is an accepted standard everyone can agree on. However, that said, we are on our way to an accepted standard. I'm merely suggesting the golden rectangle as a nice solution that won't really need tweaking (it is aesthetically pleasing in shape and seems "complete"). Look at the keyboard. You don't see a billion different keyboard layouts. You see maybe a few variations on a nice standard. Now, I'd say it may be getting time to start designing a new standard layout, something more optimized to speed up key pressing perhaps, but I am not about to suggest 5 billion different layouts. The downside is that every single time someone buys a new keyboard or changes the company they work for, they need to be retrained to type quickly again and are unlikely to ever type as fast as they might if there was a single standard.
Actually, most major titles do support a bunch of resolutions... and widescreen PC monitors used for games are a pretty recent thing, really. Only a few titles support it... (what does a widescreen PC monitor look like, anyway?) but more recent games probably support it, I bet. Though it is a bit trickier to go to that than it is for normal PC resolutions, where all you need to do is resize the artwork (or you should if you want it to look decent at different resolutions)... but not everyone wants a widescreen PC monitor, I'd think, so saying that will be the standard wouldn't be a good idea...
As for keyboards, you are right that there are some standards, but they aren't absolute -- you can have some other layouts if you wish, and it's all reconfigurable... and monitors do have standards kind of like that -- most people use normal resolutions like 800x600, 1024x768, etc. up to 1600x1200... the new thing now is widescreen resolutions, but I don't know much about how those work with games (given how widening the screen would greatly affect games)... can you have the monitor display a partscreen image for normal resolution games or something (like the GBA does for GBC games...)?