Analog stick

The analog stick has greatly overtaken the D-pad in both prominence and usage in console video games.

The initial prevalence of analog sticks was as peripherals for flight simulator games, to better reflect the subtleties of control required for such titles.

Today many analog sticks can also be pushed in like conventional face buttons of a controller, to allow for more functions.

The original configuration of the Wii U GamePad controller had twin analog "Circle Pads" positioned symmetrically above the D-pad and face buttons, but was reconfigured to have twin clickable analog sticks several months ahead of the system's planned launch.

The use of a second analog stick alleviated problems in many earlier platform games, in which the camera was notorious for bad positioning.

In Namco's Katamari Damacy and its sequels, both analog sticks are used at once to control the player's character.

This phenomenon, commonly called drifting, causes undesired gameplay effects, depending on the current game's controls, such as constant movement of the player character in a single direction or the game camera being skewed towards one particular angle while the affected stick is unmoved, and can only be corrected by performing particular actions that would restore the affected analog stick's neutral position back to the center of the analog stick.

However, its non-centering joystick design proved to be ungainly and unreliable due to the filing,[12][13] alienating many consumers at the time.

During that same year, General Consumer Electronics introduced the Vectrex, a vector graphics based system which used a self-centering analog thumbstick.

In 1985, Sega's third-person rail shooter game Space Harrier, released for the arcades, introduced an analog flight stick for movement.

[17] It was intended to replicate the HOTAS controls found in Sega’s arcade games at the time, such as After Burner II.

On July 5, 1996, Sega released Nights into Dreams for their Saturn console in Japan; bundled with it was the Saturn 3D control pad which featured an analog pad intended to give the player more fluid control over that game's flight-based gameplay.

The analog pad used magnet-based Hall effect sensors, which was a unique implementation of the technology that was carried forward into the design of the Dreamcast controller as well.

[citation needed] The Saturn's analog controller was previously mentioned in the June 1996 issue of Computer and Video Games magazine.

[21] On April 25, 1997, Sony introduced the world's first dual stick controller for its game console, PlayStation.