Something I was idly thinking about the other day, was games controllers and the number of buttons they had. Playing on my ZX Spectrum all those years ago, you had just one ‘fire’ button on your Kempston joystick and that was your lot. Obviously games have come a long way since then and their controllers have got more complex…

Number of buttons on game controllers has increased over the years

Something that really gets me down when firing up a game for the first time is finding out that every single button on the pad has been assigned a function, it makes jumping from game difficult when the reload button in one game, is ‘the lob grenade at wall and kill yourself’ button in the next. Maybe I’m just getting old!

So are we at that optimal stage? part of me thinks yes – the 360 pad for example is fantastic and adding any more buttons it’d start to get really daft. But if you went back in time and asked me in 1992 if the SNES pad needed 5 more buttons I’d have probably said the same thing.

Nintendo have really shook things up with regards to control schemes, with the Wii and the motion sensitive ‘Wiimote’. For once somebody really took a step back from the pad design (which fundamentally hasn’t changed since the NES days). They’ve come up with something new and different, however it’s not necessarily better – it’s really quiet specialised and fits certain types of game better than others.

Anyhow time will tell, if the XBox 720 (yup, you heard it here first folks!) will have a pad with 15 buttons, or if the Playstation 4 will have a controller with 20 buttons and fires real lasers.