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Gears of War guyCliff "CliffyB" Bleszinski makes hardcore games, but isn't too hardcoreto say that there are too many buttons on controllers these days.
"I hope if there's a new Xbox that there'll be fewer buttons on the controller," he told CVG recently.
"Thisis purely me speculating in my own realm of game development, but ifyou look at a controller right now it looks like an alien spaceship,"he added.
Of course, as Nintendo's found out, Bleszinski has a point here. Too many buttons=too scary for grandma.
Butnow I'm scared. It's beginning to dawn on me that my beloved dualanalogs (which I've enjoyed since Sony updated the original PlayStationpads) may be in their twilight years. What will the next generation ofcontrollers bring? Will they all be remote/"nunchuck" combos? 3Dglasses with headpieces that read your thoughts? Will toes somehowbecome involved?
CliffyB elaborated, "I think you could dothings with a built-in camera or a little motion sensitivity. You lookat the Wii controller with less buttons - they added functionality bydoing waggle. Not a lot of games use the waggle well, but Super MarioGalaxy for example uses it perfectly. Zak and Wiki uses it rather well."
Eventhough I'm scared about the next generation of controllers, (you canalmost bet on something radically different from Sony and Microsoft), Iimagine that the console makers are a billion times more scared.Probably just about as scared as Nintendo when it introduced the Remote.