You Starting Something?

I've tried a few demos lately on the Xbox and PS3 where you get your fairly traditional 'Press start to play' intro screen. Nothing unusual there, except they really do expect you to press 'start'. You know, that tiny little button that seems to make it from one generation of controller to the next and nobody questions it. It's like they're trying to justify its existence by ignoring presses of the 'X' or 'A' button instead. I bet if you asked most gamers why they would use the start button it'd be to pause the game, so why don't we just have a pause button instead? I'm not even going to start on the 'select' or 'back' button as Microsoft likes to call it. I've never selected anything with it and 'back' never actually goes back. Even the Nintendo DS still features them although if they keep reducing in size at the same rate as between the DS Phat and DS Lite you probably won't even be able to spot them in the next version.

With many consoles retaining some form of backwards compatibility I guess it makes some sense to keep labelling these buttons the same to avoid any confusion, although people seem to be able to cope with the classic controller on the Wii for all kinds of formats. I will ask one thing though, if you still insist on calling it 'start' when we all know it's 'pause' I'll live with it but... don't force me to use it to actually start anything!

Click select to enter the GAMEOV3R forum or start to pause for a moment