You may think you like it. If you're of a certain age, there's a fair chance you have fond memories of being huddled around a TV screen, screeching with fury as you got hit by a blue shell in Mario Kart 64, losing yourself in the frenetic chaos of multiplayer Super Smash Bros. or exploring Hyrule with wide-eyed wonder in Ocarina of Time.
Powerfull Force
Nostalgia is a powerful force, though and those warm waste memories of what is undeniably one of gaming's golden eras blinds you to the fact that you were doing all that with an abomination of a controller wedged into your hands.
Passion Gaming
Hate's a strong term to level at a video game controller, but I hate the N64 controller with a passion that must be unhealthy to direct at a bundle of plastic and wires. And, being of that certain age, it's a hatred I've carried since childhood. Yet, as time passed, the hatred had subsided, or at least moved to the background. This week, however, my rage has been brought back to the fore.
Analog Era
The reveal of the Analogue3D, an upcoming third-party console that not only plays original Nintendo 64 game cartridges, but makes them palatable on a modern 4K TV screen. Unlike the string of mini consoles released over the last few years, such as the SNES Classic Mini or Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Mini, Analogue's gear doesn't rely on emulation of games, but rather runs those original cartridges and uses an FPGA chip to essentially emulate the hardware of the original console.
It's not Analogue's first attempt at reviving classic hardware, having previously launched the likes of the Analogue Pocket, a Game Boy–shaped handheld that plays original Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance carts. The Analogue3D looks to be a promising bit of tech too. Analogue says it's built around “a 220k LE Altera Cyclone 10GX, the most powerful FPGA Analogue has ever used in a product,” offers region-free support for N64 cartridges from anywhere in the world in NTSC or PAL format, an inbuilt version of the Nintendo Expansion Pak (an N64 accessory that doubled the console's available memory from 4 MB to a whopping 8 MB, improving performance on select games), and outputs in 4K, or original display modes maintaining “true CRT reference quality” with “immersive scanlines and shadow masks.
Controller Romance
Chiefly in that it seemed designed for that small subset of humans with three hands. Its spread of functions over a trio of prongs made it boxy, unwieldy, and—crucially—ill suited to the increasingly complex controls that games were beginning to demand in the waning days of the 20th century.
Its left grip was positively minimalist, with only the traditional D-pad and a single shoulder button. The right housed the primary A and B buttons, four smaller C-buttons, and the right shoulder button.
Then there was that damned middle prong, where the analog stick, start button, and trigger-like Z button on the underside lived. Unless you had truly gargantuan hands, it was nearly impossible to reach all the controls at once. The N64 controller's defenders will point to its versatility, proclaiming as if it were a virtue that you could hold the outer prongs for traditional 2D games, the middle and right prong for 3D games (at the cost of squishing your hands awkwardly close together), or, in vanishingly few cases, the left and center grips. To which I say this: No other controller before or since has demanded players conduct such a degree of ergonomic gymnastics to figure out how to play a game.
Yes, in many ways the N64 controller was a pioneer. It was the first mainstream joypad to incorporate an analog stick, integral to the new era of 3D games—but even then Nintendo's designers somehow didn't foresee the need to have a second stick to control camera views. The quartet of C-buttons could often approximate the function of a camera stick, but just as often it would be used for input controls instead.
There was a bit of a hack available—select games, such as Rare's GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, could allow one player to hold two N64 controllers, using the middle prong on each one to approximate twin-stick controls, but it was so unwieldy as to be little more than a gimmick. In the end, Nintendo's great innovation was almost immediately improved upon with Sony's Dual Analog Controller for the original PlayStation, which launched a mere 10 months later.
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