Who's in control of my videogames?

My wife doesn't play videogames. She thinks there are too many buttons to push and too much stuff to do, so I introduced her to Animal Crossing. She absolutely loved it, both because it was cute, but also because of its simplicity.

Now, I never had as much trouble with controls. I was always quick to pick up on things (maybe because I read the directions first) starting with the Atari 2600, straight on through to the Super Nintendo. Then I started noticing a disturbing trend...too many buttons.

The Nintendo 64 screwed me up with the trigger down beneath, as well as the d-pad and the analog joystick and the 6 buttons to the right and the start buttons. That's 14 buttons that you can push. My mind boggled. So much boggling took place that I never bought a Nintendo 64...I just couldn't hack it.

The Playstation, however, was still manageable. This one had two analog joysticks and bunch of buttons, but at least they made a little more sense, and I didn't have a problem with this, except for maybe the shoulder buttons. With 4 of these it was sometimes easy to forget which buttons controlled which functions. I mainly tried to play easy games that didn't have huge manuals.

The X-box controller wasn't so hot either. It introduced the black and white buttons, which were horribly placed, not to mention that the controllers were huge in size. It took four hands just to hold the bastard. They eventually introduced a smaller version for those of us with baby-hands.

With the X-box 360 controller they got a little closer to a great controller. The shape is nice and fits comfortably, the buttons are pretty intuitive, and it's got a glowing green button, something that the Atari 2600 definitely could have used. Maybe Atari would be in the top 3 of video game makers if they had included this option.

That's why I want to buy a Wii, it has like 3 buttons. How can you go wrong?