As someone aptly put it: "Rick, you are, literally, a control freak."  I'm not going to argue this.  For me, controls make or break a game.  I don't care what it looks like at all, but the content has to be pretty much solid gold for me to put up with assy controls.  That's why I consider it insulting at worst, and lazy at best when developers fail to provide custom button mapping in console games.  Nintendo may be the worst offender here, but I've noticed an alarming trend in console games on the whole offering less and less in the way of customizing the control scheme.  Back in the day you had a few presets.  This was fine because your controller probably had all of 3 buttons.  But now things are far more complex.

As controllers got more robust in the 80s and 90s, companies put more control presets into their AAA games. Some companies went for complete customization, particularly Capcom with the Street Fighter series.  Nintendo held fast to their prescribed controls, which usually wasn't  too much of a problem because Nintendo manufactured the console -- so they designed the game around the controller to begin with.  For other companies doing multi-console releases and bringing atypical genres to consoles, leaving the player to decide the best way to control the game was a must.  I'd argue it's a must for Nintendo as well, but it isn't like they are ever going to listen to anyone.

In the current generation of games we're seeing a lot of retro stuff emulated, or redone with updated graphics.  We are playing these games on controllers that the creators of the games had no reason to anticipate.  So it is completely astounding to me that these aren't completely and totally customizable.  For example, the Q-Bert arcade rerelease on the Playstation Network requires you -- requires you -- to press diagonals to move.  Even the NES version of Q-Bert had a few control schemes because, what the hell, the arcade had a diagonal 4 way stick.  It doesn't take a wizard to mentally rotate the stick 45 degrees, so you had the option.  It was more precise if you had a working brain to use it. 

Worse than this is the Nintendo Virtual Console offerings.  The NES Super Mario Bros. series for example has you pressing b and a on the Classic Controller.  This would be fine except that y and b are positioned in the way that B and A were on the NES controller.  So running and jumping goes from a natural thumb sliding maneuver to a jump that costs you speed.  You have to let go of b to hit a.

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Not offering control customization isn't always such a glaring problem though.  But due to the sheer number of games out there offering a wide palette of control schemes, the enormous amount of gamers with vastly different gaming histories, and the variety of human hands and brains out there, there's no avoiding the fact that you aren't going to please everyone.  The best you can do is spend 10 minutes planning for custom button mapping in your stupid game.

And that's just it, it's 10 minutes of work.  I've written code to do it.  It's not complicated at all, especially considering I'm not one of these genius super coders that writes 3D engines and screen savers that cure cancer. Instead of saying "if player 1 pushes button A" you say "if player 1 pushes button HEY_EVERYBODY_I'M_A_MAGIC_VARIABLE_FROM_THE_SEA".  Then you create a menu on the options screen where you say "hay player 1 push whatever button you want for attack, seriously, even select, i don't give a damn what your problems are."

The offender of the week is Grand Theft Auto 4.  I have the PS3 version of the game, and I'm guessing the Xbox 360 version does this as well.  I won't argue this game may turn out to be the best game in the history of multicellular life forms, but what the freaking hell.  You get two control options, one of which is less precise because it uses the face buttons to accellerate.  The default control scheme isn't a bad set up, but I've shot out the window instead of hand braking enough times that I'd really like to assign the hand brake to the L1 button. You know, above the regular brake button.  And not above the accelerator button.  The accelerator button being the one I have to lift my index finger off of to hit the hand brake button.  The hand brake button being the one I need to hit at the same time as the accelerator button in order to do slides around corners. Obviously they saw this as a problem and wasted the X button on an alternative hand brake button, but that doesn't feel right to me.  In fact I'd rather that be the shoot out the window button.  Why would any player need two hand brake buttons?  What they need is the ability to place a single hand brake button wherever they want it.  This isn't rocket surgery.

Too bad the HUNDRED MILLION DOLLAR BUDGET for this game didn't include "have one of the minimum wage interns spend 3 billiseconds adding a button mapping menu".

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