It’s no
surprise, though- these days, everything has to be streamlined to sell.
Electronics now have as much pressure to stay in fashion as the clothes we
wear; just look at each new iPod. Actually, bad example, iPods are
old-fashioned now, it’s all iPhones instead. Who still has two separate devices
to play music and call someone in this day and age? (Me.)
I don’t think this is as new for games
consoles as it is for other technology, however. Let’s look back to only the
late 90s- remember those cream boxes with curved glass screens and their
matching cream towers? I’m pretty sure that even in the 90s, magnolia wasn’t
exactly the height of aesthetic genius. And it was a disaster for keyboards and
mice (mouses? Mice just doesn’t sound right for the electronic kind), which
showed up every tiny build-up of general skankery your greasy human hands left
behind, so that after about a month they appeared to have collected years’
worth of filth.
My point is,
PCs looked dorky.
Games consoles,
on the other hand, were quite a few steps ahead. This was the ages of the
Dreamcast, the Playstation, and the Nintendo 64. The former two were still in
the grey ages, but the Dreamcasts controller not only looked a bit like the
Millennium Falcon, but had a space for the little screen on the memory cards in
the middle. The screen had about 20 pixels and didn’t do a lot but who cares it was a controller with a screen
on it and that was mind-blowing. The N64 was way ahead, though- the
standard colour was a sexy teal-ish green because haters gonna hate and it was semi-transparent. You could
see through it because it had nothing to hide since it was awesome all the way
through. And the controller had three prongs because there just wasn’t enough
room on two for all the win the N64 had to offer.
The last part
is slightly subjective, but seriously, anyone that complains about the three
prongs has obviously never played an N64 game ever- every game just picks
either the D-pad or the control stick and sticks with it and never expects you to switch between them
like everyone is terrified might happen.
Basically, my
point is that games consoles had to look cool (or as we said in the 90s,
“wicked”. That was a bad move, I will never say that word again) even back
then. This was based on the generation of consoles before it- at that point,
gaming wasn’t just for nerds, gaming was cool, and if you had cool consoles you were cool. The N64 might look like a
squashed block of jelly now, but in its day it was…still a squashed block of
jelly, but the jelly tasted like rainbows.
Now let’s look
at the generations before and after that. The SNES and the Saturn had radically
different designs- while the SNES was still a grey box of grey buttons and grey
panels and general greyness, at least it had a bunch of “neato” (I’ll stop
soon) add-ons, such as the Power Glove and R.O.B. the robot (how well they
actually worked was irrelevant, I suppose). Meanwhile, the Saturn looks a bit like Knight
Rider. In the next generation, consoles hit some kind of gawky teenager phase.
I mean just look, seriously. The PS2 and Xbox are a pair of big black monoliths that
look like they had the ten commandments written on them once, and the Gamecube
just looks like a handbag. I honestly have no explanation for this, they’re all
ugly now and they were all ugly then. Bad examples.
Back to the
point I was trying to make. Look at the Atari 2600- see that wooden panel and
unsightly black grill design? Look at some TVs from the 70s. Yeah, everything
looked like that. Which is why it kind of stands out- the Atari was one of the
first home consoles, and so bringing games from the arcade to the living room
was still a novel thing. And yet it fits in nicely with your tacky 70s décor-
this shows that Atari cared about the appearance of their console, even way
back near the dawn of home gaming itself.
Which brings
us to today, and into the streamlined age. The PS3 is still a hulking black
monolith, but now it has smooth curves across the top. The Xbox360 is now a
hulking grey monolith with curved edges and some nuclear jacket potato logo, and
the Wii is a shiny, slimline white box with a neon blue light in the disc slot.
Well, at least Nintendo got it right. Everyone knows that all machinery in the
future is made of white plastic with neon lights, after all. The Wiimote
(possibly named by Jonathan Ross) is innovative- the idea of “being” the
controller was huge at the time, even if the idea has been milked dry by now.
The huge problem with it was the way it was exploited by third-party companies
for party games and spin-offs, and how unresponsive it could be. I still prefer
the 360 controller, purely on the grounds that it’s an actual classic
controller. As for the PS3, Sony haven’t changed the Playstation controller ever. And it’s probably the worst controller since those crappy
toaster-things attached to the Odyssey. I mean, pick up something with both
hands. It doesn’t matter what it is, just pick up anything. Where are your
thumbs? Are they craning down toward the bottom of the object? Or are they
pointed upward at a roughly 45 degree angle, about level with the first joint
of your index finger? That’s where the
left analogue stick should be. That’s how people hold things, it’s where
people have always held things, and it’s where the main directional control,
which has been the analogue stick ever since 360 degree control was possible,
has always been. It’s like people have been building submarines out of steel
for decades, and then Sony came along and said “Nah, let’s make them out of
bread”.
No comments:
Post a Comment