There’s always been a minor niggle at the back of my mind when I played the Nintendo DS. “They’ve got it backwards,” I thought, “The A button should be on the left and B on the right. That’s how it’s always been… I think.” A speedy investigation showed that my memory was a little foggy, and that the answer was significantly more interesting than that. Therefore, I present to you a brief history of gamepad button mapping.

Nintendo: BA for Life

The NES was the first console to move away from the joysticks of the Atari generation, opting instead for what would become an iconic design in gamepads. Despite my previous complaint, note that A is indeed mapped to the right of B. D’oh!

Following their ancestor’s example, nearly every Nintendo console is mapped this way. This includes the SNES, Virtual Boy, Gamecube, every iteration of the Game Boy, DS and Wii Classic Controller. The only dissenters are the Nintendo 64 (bottom right picture), which also experimented with a 4 way C button and a Z button on the back, and the Wiimote, which maps A and B on different surfaces entirely.

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Blizzard announced the Wizard class for their upcoming action RPG title, Diablo III, at this year’s BlizzCon event in Anaheim, California.

Joining the Barbarian and Witch Doctor classes so far, the Wizard is a formidable spell caster that can control elements such as frost and wind. Watch as the Wizard beckons a legion of demons and unleashes the wrath of her power. Diablo III will be available for the PC and Macintosh platforms.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - YouTube, the world’s most popular video-sharing site, will start to sell music and video games and experiment with new advertising formats to grow revenue, executives said on Tuesday.

The Google-owned business is taking the first steps toward building an e-commerce service through which it will sell music, films, TV shows, video games, books, concert tickets and other media-related products featured on the millions of videos on YouTube.

Visitors to YouTube.com can buy songs from music videos they watch on the site by clicking on buttons that take them either to Amazon.com Inc’s MP3 store or Apple Inc’s iTunes store.

YouTube users will also be able to buy video games, such as Electronic Arts Inc’s sci-fi game “Spore” through the Amazon link.

Amazon and iTunes will share revenue with YouTube when users buy content through the partnership.

Investors have been asking Google when it would start to generate meaningful revenue and earnings from YouTube, for which the Web search leader paid $1.65 billion in 2006.

Google does not break out YouTube’s financials, but analysts at Piper Jaffray Research estimated that the video site would earn about $200 million in revenue in 2009, compared with estimates of around $27 billion for Google.

Until now, YouTube has mainly pointed to advertising sales as its main source of income. It is still experimenting with a range of formats to take full advantage of the massive popularity of the site, which has nearly 13 hours of video uploaded every minute.
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According to our main homeboys / homegirls at GameDaily, Microsoft has confirmed that it’s dropping the price of that big, delicious Xbox 360 hard drive from the dizzingly high $179 to a totally thrifty $149. According to a Redmond rep: “We reduced the price of the Xbox 360 120 GB Hard Drive to $149 in conjunction with the recent Xbox 360 console price drop. We believe this offers consumers even greater value when selecting accessories that meet their individual gaming and entertainment needs.” Hey, no need to explain — we like things to be cheaper.

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