So I bought the "Sega 3D Ages" remake of Monaco GP, one of my all-time favourite arcade games. It's an overhead-view vertically-scrolling racing game, pure twitch and reactions, fast and exciting and addictive. Mm.

The remake has an all-new version and a "classic" mode, but contrary to the advertising the classic mode isn't a port of the original coin-op - it's also a remade 3D version, and is a bit crap. But anyway.

The game needs the following controls:

- Steer Left
- Steer Right
- Accelerate
- Brake
- 45-degree turn left
- 45-degree turn right
- 90-degree turn left
- 90-degree turn right
- Turbo-boost
- Jump

There are four preset control setups. Left and right have to be on the pad/analogue stick, and the 45- and 90-degree turns have to be on the shoulder buttons. That leaves accelerate, brake, turbo and jump.

In two of the control options, accelerate is placed on the pad/analogue stick, a dreadful and unstable option that we all thought we'd seen the last of on machines with one-button joysticks, so we'll discount those.

In the other two, accelerate is sensibly placed on the X button (the South compass point on the PS2 pad, for those of you who don't have one handy). So you've now got one thumb on the direction pad, the other on the X button, and your index and middle fingers on the shoulders.

Brake, which you NEVER use in Monaco GP, is in both options, assigned to the square button (that is, the West compass point), so is fairly easy to reach on the zero occasions when you need it. The turbo-boost, whose effect is minimal, is placed on the O button (East), also easy to reach with your accelerating thumb.

Which leaves Jump, the most vital control after accelerate, on THE FUCKING TRIANGLE BUTTON, YOU UNBELIEVABLY STUPID FUCKING PRICKS.

Go on. Try it. Put your hands in that playing position then imagine you've got a split-second to hit Jump without losing all your speed and/or accidentally mashing the other buttons.

It defies belief, it really does. In the WHOLE OF SEGA, in all the production and testing and QA sessions this game presumably had to go through before release, absolutely nobody thought "Hang on, you'd have to be some kind of seven-fingered fucking mutant to play the game like this. Let's at least make the controls fully configurable so that ordinary, five-fingered people can, y'know, ACTUALLY FUCKING WELL PLAY THE STUPID THING".

What's my point? It's two points.

1. Never look forward to anything.

2. When debating things to do with the games industry, never, ever, ever underestimate the rank fucking cuntwitted stupidity and incompetence of videogame developers and publishers, the useless shit-headed pricks. If you set their cocks on fire and gave them a bucket of water, they'd drink it and try to piss the flames out.