Oh those pet peeves

[beatbandito]

As much as I love Sony, it is ultimately entirely their fault for deciding to switch X and O input standards for dumb and bad cultural reasons.

[Thad]

That's not quite what I'm talking about, but it's related.

The SNES wasn't really consistent on what button was the primary button; it tended to vary by genre. Platformers and other action-based games typically used B/Y/A as primary/secondary/tertiary inputs (usually jump/attack/special), while RPGs and other menu-based games typically used A/B/X (usually accept/cancel/menu).

X for cancel and Circle for accept is dumb, but it at least gives a consistent answer for which button is the main button.

Course, nobody ever uses the lefthand button as Cancel, which is always vexing when you're playing a two-button game and map the primary button to the bottom and the secondary button to the left and that feels like it's supposed to when you're whipping draculas but is wrong when you're navigating menus.

And once designers figured out the whole analog triggers thing, the right trigger became a popular choice for primary button, particularly in shooters and racers, which obviously is correct but Nintendo still thinks Mario Kart should have the gas pedal on the same button it did 30 years ago because Nintendo gonna Nintendo.

[nosimpleway]

As a lefty pulling a trigger with my right index finger to shoot a gun feels about as natural as pushing one of the face buttons to jam the accelerator, makes no difference to me.

While LPing Terraria I got a cramp in my finger a couple times from all the long farming sessions, just gripping the controller with my off hand and holding down the trigger button to swing a weapon.

[Büge]

*attempts a left-handed fistbump, misses*

[Thad]

I think the reason the diamond layout outlasted other layouts is that every face button is adjacent to two others. The problem with putting them all in a row like on Genesis is that then you're faced with a conundrum -- if you use C as your primary button, then A is two buttons over, which is inconvenient; if you use B as your primary button, then you're using a middle button instead of an outside button as your main, which feels wrong. (I'm mostly talking about platformers here, with the buttons mapped to the standard jump/attack/special, which was usually C/B/A on Genesis. It works fine in games where you don't use your special frequently, but it's a problem in something like Earthworm Jim where you use both your attacks frequently. Or Castlevania: Bloodlines, which is why that one defaults to B as jump so that both your attacks are adjacent to jump, but again, putting jump on the middle button never quite feels right.)

The GameCube layout with one big button and the other three surrounding it was interesting and worked pretty well for a lot of games, but I think ultimately the distance between B and X made it less versatile than the diamond layout.

[Thad]

You know what's funny is I fired it back up and used an Xbox controller this time and I did fine with the button prompts.

Apparently my muscle memory takes the feel of the specific controller in my hands into account. Same game, same prompts, works fine if I'm holding a controller that actually has those buttons in those places, throws me if I'm holding a controller with different button labels. It's not like I'm looking down at the controller and actually seeing any of the labels on any of the buttons, I just know the difference between an Xbox, PlayStation, or Nintendo controller by feel.

[Niku]

I play PC games with an SN30Pro so yeah, Xbox prompts consistently fuck me up.

I like the Switch solution of just showing the diamond with the button highlighted.

[nosimpleway]

Last time it was a big problem was Bug Fables, where there are action command popups and if you miss them you are basically helpless in combat

[Thad]

God damn it what is so hard about putting TV shows in the right fucking order on physical media or streaming?

I've already complained about X-Men and Thundercats at length. Disney went to the trouble of scanning (and fucking cropping) Rescue Rangers to 1080p, but couldn't be bothered to put the first 5 episodes at the beginning instead of the middle of the first season for some damn reason.

Even shows that are super-episodic and don't have a lot of continuity get snags over what little continuity they have. There's an episode of Duckman where Grandma-ma is replaced by a lookalike; in the DVD order (and presumably the original air order), the episode where this plot point is resolved and the real Grandma-ma comes back comes after an episode where she's the real Grandma-ma reminiscing about her family history.

Batman: TAS...actually does have the episodes reordered closer to production order than original air order, and mostly works out great! Except it still opens The New Batman Adventures with Holiday Knights, which clearly takes place after Little Girl Lost.

IIRC Clone Wars lets you can choose whether to watch those in original air order or in the story's chronological order, which is pretty neat. More shows should do it like that. I can understand why it doesn't work on physical media, but it shouldn't be a difficult thing to implement on a streaming site.

[Thad]

There's a lady who leads meetings I'm in sometimes who has a verbal tic where she says "thaaaaaan". Like really stretches out the "a" sound. Even when she is saying "then", a word which does not have an "a" in it.

I acknowledge that it's terribly petty that this annoys me, but it does.

[Thad]

I don't care how you pronounce GIF. Say it however you want.

But "It's a hard G because it stands for graphics" is the argument of an idiot.

[nosimpleway]

The G is silent.

"hey guys check out this animated if"

[Mongrel]

So like, gnat? Sure. See? There's precedent!

Alternately, we could go with the occasional instance in euro languages where a g is pronounced with a y sound.

[Thad]

Or maybe a click, like gnu.

[KingRoyal]

I don't care how you pronounce GIF. Say it however you want.

But "It's a hard G because it stands for graphics" is the argument of an idiot.

This always was a flat argument for me because it's not a rule that we apply to any other initialism. We don't pronounce PIN like "pine" because the middle word is "Identification"

[Thad]

I don't care how you pronounce GIF. Say it however you want.

But "It's a hard G because it stands for graphics" is the argument of an idiot.

This always was a flat argument for me because it's not a rule that we apply to any other initialism. We don't pronounce PIN like "pine" because the middle word is "Identification"

The punishment for saying "it's a hard g because it stands for graphics" should be that someone follows you around and pokes you with a stick every time you pronounce "jpeg" with a "p" sound and says "It's j-feg. The p is for photographic."

[KingRoyal]

I'm gonna start saying it "j-feg" now

[Friday]

all i know is this topic always leaves me vaguely miffed, similar to how i feel when i read about republican grift. I asked my furry friend how he pronounces it, but he was mid-yiff and couldn't tell me if his way of saying it was diff.

Anyway, I'm still on the fence if the saddest scene in gaming is doing the DLC before you fight great grey wolf Sif. Emotionally, she's quite the difficulty cliff.

Sol Badgif.

[Büge]

The G is silent.

"hey guys check out this animated if"

le Château g'If

[Thad]

Alternately, we could go with the occasional instance in euro languages where a g is pronounced with a y sound.

Oh, I get it.

Yiff.