Topic: A Circular Touch Screen

Can they please just make a circular Touch Screen in the Circle pad's place? Yeah, maybe it would feel weird, but it's worth experimenting right?

...DID THEY EXPERIMENT ON IT, BUT IT FAILED?

In place of the circle pad? Why? The only difference would be that you wouldn't have something to grip with your thumb, get any sense of depth out of when used (you wouldn't know how far you pushed it by sliding your thumb over a tiny space), it would probaby need to be larger than the circle pad to register movement due to large thumbs (which would exclude people with huge hands), and the point of a screen is to have something displayed on it, which you can't if your thumb is constantly covering it up.

Wouldn't a track pad make more sense?

Sounds like you wanna be looking at Valve's controllers.

Why not? I did not think of the size problem, but just simply moving your thumb in it (wow...not sound right) can be just as effective and harder to break and who would care about not seeing what is displayed. It would just be a picture of circle to indicate the thumb's current position. What is a track pad?

The textured pad at the bottom of your laptop used to move and click the mouse pointer is a track pad.

There's a reason why endless runners have sort of replaced traditional platformers on mobile devices. You just can't get precision or complexity out of rubbing up an LCD screen with your big, fat thumb. So a touch screen is a bad idea.

And for the size, I think the circle pad offers much more precision than a track pad would. When you get to a Steam controller, a track pad that size can (maybe) surpass analog in precision, but that's just not feasible for a handheld device.

Also, why is gripping it or getting depth of it a necessity for the design? Yeah, with out it, it will feel foreign, but not drastically different enough to say no at first glance. But my argument no longer matters since Valve already took the idea like that other guy said.

But it's not like you use the circle pad to aim or point like on the regular, touch screen. Its just four, (mostly eight) directions one will move it.

That would be a nightmare in pretty much everything besides top-down RPGs.

Why replace something that works well with an inferior input device?

Well, they replaced buttons...

Plus, you would not even have to manually move device. If you just touch where you want the circle representing the analog to be, that represents movement. Double tap the same area and hold it, that can be considered dashing. Why wouldn't one to at least try something before calling it an inferior input device?

The example you gave is very similar to a control method invented in the 80s called the D-Pad. But I digress.

Hear me out: I use a trackpad with my desktop. I love it, it's a wonderful control method. But I can't imagine it working so well on a 3DS. It has to be shrunk down just to fit, and it will quickly lose its effectiveness. My thumb is as big as the Circle Pas itself. Replacing it with a trackpad will make it much less precise.

So, what if we make it bigger? In theory, it could work. But making it larger will just make it more unwieldy and cumbersome to use, much like the SNES with its giant D-Pad (before we get off on that tangent, I do love the SNES controller, but I found it easier to control VC games using controllers with smaller D-Pads). Besides, handhelds are supposed to be small.

It would just end up being an expensive & less effective novelty compared to a regular circle pad or analog stick.

Also, the Xperia play did this years ago. No, it didn't work that well.

Because the Circle pad works perfectly fine.

Try to play a game on a Xperia Play. That cellphone had 2 touch thumb thingies instead of sticks.
Once you tried it, you'll see that replacing sticks with touch is a bad idea.
(I used to have that phone)

I think we need to see how well the Steam Controller does before we go saying Nintendo should copy it. I think it makes a lot of sense for what Valve is trying to do, but a future system with such an alien control method for Nintendo would just sabotage backwards compatibility. I say keep the sticks and do something more similar to the Razer Hydra for home consoles. As for portables, the New 3DS got it mostly right, just get rid of the nub and give it a proper second stick.

Every single mobile game I've played that uses a touch screen analogue stick has made me wish I could use it with physical controls rather than just a touch screen. Sure, touch screens are better for things like quick menu selection or gestures depending on the game, but for basic controls such as moving, I'd rather buttons or a control stick. I like having the physical feedback of pressing a button or moving a control stick, especially when it requires some sensitivity.

Good luck playing Smash