Then again, the controller is very close to the Playstation controller. In a lot of ways it is<\/em> the Playstation controller. Two thumbsticks. Four trigger buttons. Four action buttons. A directional pad. Three housekeeping buttons in the middle, with the center-most button being the great big brand button. <\/p>\n The one thing I don’t understand is the way the thumbsticks are not symmetrical. On the left side, the stick is forward, so when you’re using both sticks the right thumb is in its natural position and the left one is reaching. I’m not saying it’s bad or wrong, but it is odd and I wonder if this decision was made for a reason related to functionality that I haven’t yet uncovered, or if they just did it to be different. <\/p>\n (Different is<\/em> important. Sony and Microsoft are both calculating, devious creatures. They fight dirty, using trademarks and patents and lawsuits and exclusives to harass and thwart one another every chance they get. They spend a lot of money not improving their product, but in trying to make the other guy’s stuff worse<\/em>. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sony held a patent on “symmetric thumbstick technology” or something equally absurd and outrageous.)<\/p>\n Another interesting issue is the orientation of the machine. Both Sony and Microsoft depict their hardware standing upright in all of their promotional materials, but from surfing around I see lots of people who swear that You Should Not Do This. “A good friend” who works at Microsoft told them. Or someone in support. Or they saw “a study, someplace, that one time”. Or they once had their machine vertical, and then it caught fire and bathed their neighborhood in deadly neutron radiation and now they have forsworn the practice and live only to warn others about the Terrible Danger of Vertical Consoles. The vert \/ horz debate – like every single other aspect of console use<\/em> – is awash in anger and controversy. <\/p>\n Keeping this many machines cool, powered, tied to a suitable display, and properly ventilated is hard enough with them standing upright. Laying them down compounds this problem, and eats up many acres of desk space. Fearful that there may be some truth to the madness, I have stacked my consoles in the horizontal position, with the PS2 on the bottom, followed by the 360 and then the PS3. The oddball Gamecube would go on top if the Sith working for Sony hadn’t decided to make the top of the unit annoyingly convex. With the white Xbox stuffed between Sony’s black boxes, it looks like a big electronic Oreo. There is enough space between the units for airflow, although I do worry it might be tough to keep them cool like this in the summer. We’ll see.<\/p>\n
<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n