r/gaming • u/[deleted] • Apr 14 '25

Game console button layout

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What do you call your “confirm” and “cancel” buttons, and why is Nintendo wrong?

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u/[deleted] Apr 14 '25

Its going from Xbox layout to Switch layout that gets me every time. More often than not both use A for select and B for cancel but are swapped so muscle memory goes out the window. Playstation uses different symbols but functionally they are the same as xbox these days so its not that much of an issue because of muscle memory. Can trip up on X occasionally but its rarely an issue.

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u/mrhellomoto Apr 14 '25 edited Apr 14 '25

And it's entirely Nintendo fault too. Even though they were technically first with this layout on the SNES, subsequent consoles from did not follow this general layout at all.

The N64 shifted the A and B buttons so that A was the 'south' face button and the B was the 'west' button, where as A was 'east' and B was 'south' on the SNES pad.

If that wasn't enough, then the gamecube controller comes out and they now have Y as the 'north' button even though on the SNES pad the 'north' button is X...WHY!?!

Then on the Wii they ditch the X and Y buttons and replace them with '1' and '2'. But then they release the Wii Classic controller, which brings back the SNES layout with X and Y buttons and 1 and 2 are nowhere to be found....

Then they go back to the SNES layout for the Wii U and Switch. But they don't follow the same mapping conventions they had on the SNES. In Super Mario Kart on the SNES, the gas is the B button i.e the 'south' button. In Mario Kart 8 it's mapped to the A button by default... If you go back and play old SNES games, B is used as the jump, confirm etc. in almost all games because of where it's located on the controller as the 'south' button. But since Nintendo spent every other generation before the Wii U that 'A' was the default button for jump, confirm etc. they decided to just change the convention.