Damn You Muscle Memory / Video Games

Gaming Hardware Examples:

Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo and other game consoles

• Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, and controllers all have an "X" button, but in different places (See a video on this here). Nintendo can't even decide to stick with one location (see below). This can cause confusion for format-swappers when a screen prompt says Press X to Not Die.
  • To add to the confusion, the Xbox and Nintendo controllers all have X, A, B, and Y buttons on the right side. Except, as the above video shows, most Nintendo controllers arrange the buttons, clockwise starting from the top, as X, A, B, Y; while the Xbox controller’s arrangement is, again, clockwise starting at the top, Y, B, A, X. Again, this confuses format-swappers because, on most Nintendo, Xbox, and PC games using game pads, A is used to execute commands, while B is used to cancel them.
• The Super Nintendo has the default mapping for the "jump" button to B. All other Nintendo consoles use the A button instead. This may have been intentional as pressing A in Super Mario World will prompt Mario to execute the newly-introduced "Spin Jump" ability instead of his traditional jump, which has several advantages over it. Only problem is that's just one game for a console that released dozens of platformers. (Given the large number of face buttons on the SNES controller, many games mapped "jump" to both A and B.)
• The GameCube uses the Xbox arrangement of left stick up top, right stick down low. Single Z button above R, but no equivalent above L (L and R being analog buttons). Simple enough, though the buttons have a very asymmetric layout with the A button dominating the face and the others flanking it on three of four sides, rather than them being arranged in a diamond shape. Start (labeled "Start/Pause") is in the center, and there is no Select.
• The face buttons on the Steam Controller are in the lower right, where the vast majority of other controllers place an analog stick of some description. The right touchpad is where the face buttons "normally" go. Many many people can't get past this.
• The Wii Classic Controllers both use the PlayStation arrangement of both sticks down low, since the original Classic Controller is loosely modeled after the Super Nintendo gamepad, but with analog sticks and analog L/R buttons with inward zL/zR buttons. The Pro revision adds handles, changes the analog stick spacing, and moves zL/zR below L/R while also completely removing the analog functionality from L and R in a regression from the past two gamepads. - and + (Select and Start, effectively) and Home are in the center.
• The Wii U GamePad and Pro Controller move the analog sticks above the D-Pad and face buttons, unlike any other system. On the former, it's not so bad, but the smaller Pro Controller has the buttons so inward at an unusual angle that it's bound to cause more than a few muscle memory problems. - and + were moved below the face buttons with Home being on the bottom for the GamePad, while they are still centered on the Pro Controller.
• The Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons and Pro Controller revert back to Xbox convention with the right stick below the face buttons. This was likely done to keep the right Joy-Con's analog stick on the left side when used in individual mode while also keeping SL and SR on top, but when both Joy-Cons are docked directly into the Switch, it makes the right stick a bit difficult to reach compared to the old Wii U GamePad. It can also make games designed for PlayStation-style controllers nigh-unplayable; SUPERBEAT: XONiC on Switch can often have players reaching in the wrong direction to hit analog stick notes. Most damningly, though, is that the - and + buttons are now toward the top, whereas the Capture and Home buttons are down low. Don't be surprised if you wind up hitting Home when you meant to hit - or +!
• Sony decided to swap the X and O functions for international audiences, because Japan takes O to mean 'Yes' or 'Accept' while Western audiences would likely take X instead. Many developers seem to unable to figure out the coding for "soft" OK/Cancel buttons and the "hard" X/O buttons, resulting in about a quarter of the titles for the PlayStation library using the wrong buttons for your region. For the PlayStation 5, the X button is now used for the enter command in all regions including Japan. This can confuse Japanese PS5 players because of the meaning of the letter X in Japanese. This will also inevitably confuse players used to Nintendo controllers.
• Anyone who uses a Commodore Amiga for the first time and plugs a joystick or gamepad into port 1 is bound to get frustrated when it doesn't work, because due to port 1 generally being used for a mouse, the Amiga convention for the "player one" joystick port is port 2! The second player, if the game permits it, uses port 1 instead.
  • Double Subverted when playing Lemmings in two-player mode (a feature in the Amiga original cut from most ports), since it's one of those rare games where player 2 also uses a mouse. (The Atari ST version limits player 2 to a joystick, however.)
• Slapping the PlayStation 4 "Share" button thinking it's the Select button on an older generation DualShock controller is a common anecdote among longtime PlayStation users. Much of what would have normally been assigned to the Select button in previous generations has been moved across to the DualShock 4's clickable touchpad. This is exacerbated if one uses a DualShock 4 on PC, where most games do use the share button as Select!
• The PlayStation 5 interface has a few examples compared to its predecessor.
  • On the PlayStation 4, quickly tapping the PS button returns you to the console's home screen, while holding it down brings up a quick menu that offers various functions like adjusting the volume of your headset, or putting the console in stand by. PlayStation 5, for whatever reason, reversed these, with a quick press bringing up the quick menu and holding the button down taking you back to the full home screen.
  • On the PS4 home screen, you can use the L1 and R1 buttons to move to the far left and right ends of the row of icons on your home screen, respectively. The PS5 home screen has separate tabs for games and media apps, with the L1 and R1 buttons being used to switch between them, so trying to go all the way to the right to access your full games library will simply switch you to the media app page.
• Going back a bit, Sega's first western console, the Sega Master System, had the pause button not on the control pads like almost every other controller, but on the console itself! This could lead to you accidentally resetting the game (since the reset and pause buttons were right next to each other). When Sega brought the Master System back to Japan to replace the precedessor Mark III, they remedied this by replacing the reset button with a rapid-fire button.
• The original Xbox's controllers have black and white buttons in addition to the standard ABXY face buttons. Many fighting games with six attack buttons were obviously designed with the original (giant) Duke◊ controllers in mind, where the black and white buttons are above the other face buttons. Meanwhile, on the later Controller S, the buttons were moved to below the other face buttons, beside the right thumbstick.

Specific Video Game Examples:

Action

• The various Parkour based games, particularly Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia, inFAMOUS and [PROTOTYPE], all have separate ways of navigating your way around the city. It can be quite jarring to jump from Assassins Creed, with its semi-realistic approach, to Prototype, where the protagonist can run up walls at will.
  • Switching from Prototype to Assassins Creed can be just as frustrating, where you are used to sprinting up walls and you suddenly have to tackle the walls like a Badass Normal person. Although it can lead to some unintentional hilarity when you fling Ezio off a building and expect to be able to glide.
  • Switching from Prototype to Crackdown is tricky too. You might want to remember that you can't eat people, X is switch weapons and you can't air dash/wallrun.
  • Going from Assassin's Creed II to Uncharted ends with a lot of platforming sequences ending with the thought "Why didn't Drake automatically jump that gap?"
  • Infamous has a parkour system based on jumping - press the jump button to jump up and grab, or to push yourself up a wall. You'll automatically grab any handholds and balance on any ledges you come across. This is a jarring contrast with Prototype's wall running.
  • Worse is going from Prototype to just about any other sandbox. Flinging yourself off an absurdly tall building is usually a last-ditch form of entertainment in games, but in Prototype it's your main method of getting around. This can harm you.
  • Moving from Prototype to [PROTOTYPE 2] also results in problems, as the button layout for several actions (including gliding, air dashing, sneaking, and shields) has been changed around. In particular, the buttons used to stealthily consume people in the first game drop all cover and draw military attention in the second.
• Ace Combat: Namco switched two buttons between every game up to AC5 and Ace Combat Zero: the Select button switches weapons and the Square button toggles the minimap in Ace Combat 5 and vice versa in Ace Combat Zero. Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception does the same as Zero.
  • Try going from Ace Combat 5 to AC 6. For the most part, the controls are the same...except the "change to special weapons" and "display map" buttons are swapped again!
    • The Ace Combat 6 default of throttle on LT/RT and rudder on LB/RB, exactly the opposite of the PS entries that have throttle on L1/R1 and rudder on L2/R2. Fortunately, there's an option to reverse it.
    • Going from Ace Combat 6 to Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.. In AC6, A is cannon and B is missile. In HAWX, it's the other way around. Countless missiles were wasted. The PC version makes it better and worse depending on your controller, since you can rebind the controls to your liking, but the game is hard-coded to count button #1 as "confirm" on menus and button #2 as "back/cancel" - meaning which button you need to press to go through menus is going to appear completely random if you're not using something recognized as an Xbox 360 controller.
    • A lot of weapons in HAWX work just slightly differently than their counterparts in Ace Combat, also leading to wasted ammunition when switching between the two.^note In particular, the Semi-Active Radar Guided Missile in Ace Combat is not counted as "missed" until it runs out of fuel, allowing you to launch before you have a lock-on at targets in the extreme distance, or switch targets if a teammate steals your kill and have it go after someone else. Attempt to do either of these with the equivalent missile in HAWX and it's immediately counted as a miss.
  • Between 04 and 5, down on the D-pad changes camera view for 04, but 5 uses R3. Down on the D-pad for 5 affects the order given to the wingmen, while R3 for 04 turns the camera to be face-on with the plane and thus allow the player to see behind the plane.
• Going to Air Force Delta games after playing Ace Combat games has this effect until you change the control scheme.
• Assassin's Creed: Generally speaking, it can be difficult to replay an earlier Assassin's Creed title after playing the most recent ones since the gameplay and controls are updated and streamlined throughout its run; it can be jarring to play Assassin's Creed III, for instance, and then backtrack to Assassin's Creed II where the controls are significantly different.
  • Assassin's Creed has a problem with its camera stick, being the opposite of what is expected on the X-axis. Adding insult to injury, you can only invert the axises in the "look" mode. They fixed the problem in the sequel, though it means that once you've started playing the sequel, you can never go back to the first game, not just for the controls, but also for all the fixes that you'll be missing.
  • Going from Assassin's Creed 1 to Assassin's Creed 2 can be a bit annoying, despite how similar their controls are. One difference that comes to mind is the legs button (A). Remember how pressing the legs button would make you slow down to a halt, pretend to be a (heavily armed) praying scholar, and allow you to brush past paranoid guards? In AC2, trying to pull that move off will end up with you pick-pocketing said guard.
  • Similarly, Assassin's Creed 1's rapidly regenerating health makes fall damage relatively negligible, so falling is faster than finding your way down. Assassin's Creed 2 removes regeneration, so until you learn to gauge fall distance better, you'll spend a lot of time visiting doctors.
  • Revelations compounds the issue by changing the "head" button (previously toggling Eagle Vision, taunting in combat or speaking to NPCs) to the projectile-shooting button (projectiles previously were used with the attack button), the renamed Eagle Sense moved to a left-stick click, and the formerly "off-hand" button (pushing, shoving, dropping or grabbing) also serves as the button for Ezio's new hookblade weapon/tool... which is mounted on his weapon hand.
  • Assassin's Creed III: Blocking is changed to B on the 360 instead of RT. For those who don't play, this is a very major change, surpassing that Revelations made. Countering is done by tapping B instead of holding it down and then pressing X. Pickpocketing is holding down B rather than tapping A, with A now being used to gentle push through crowds.
  • For any of the multiplayer modes, the buttons are switched around from single player, leading to things like trying to run until you remember to hold down shift.
  • As Altaïr, you may try to leap from a rooftop to a tree expecting to swing from the branch like Connor, only to fall to the ground below and get hurt because that feature didn't exist in the series until the setting moved to North America.
  • Come into Assassins Creed IV after playing any of the previous games, and instead of drawing your swords, you're likely to find yourself throwing money to the ground.
• Astalon: Tears of the Earth: At first, the character-switching order of Athena's Bell is Arias-Algus-Kyuli-Arias. However, unlocking a Secret Character adds that character to the order, between Kyuli and Arias, which can wind up causing a player who needs Arias' abilities to slip up at a crucial moment.
• In Batman: Arkham Asylum, the explosive gel is the second gadget and the Batclaw is the third. In every other game in the series, it's the other way around. This can seriously screw up players who go from one game to the next, as this inherently changes the hotkeys to select them. The keyboard controls also have gadget hotkeys be unique keys while every other game uses a double-tap of the key to select that specific gadget.
• When Batman: Arkham Origins's PS3 version made a slight change on the controls by swapping Detective Mode from L2 to L1, and aiming and using gadgets from L1 and R1 to L2 and R2, so the Crime Reconstruction mechanic would work properly. This caused some backlash, with people demanding that the original control set should be made available even after a year from the release. It should be noted that the new controls are available on AA and AC as a secondary control scheme, so it's not like they would need to re-learn them constantly.
• In Batman: Arkham Knight, when driving the Batmobile, pressing the left trigger doesn't brake, it transforms the car into a tank. Luckily, this can be changed so tank mode is set to the right trigger and brake is restored.
  • Detective mode is "up" on consoles, and L1 summons the Batmobile. Gadgets are selected from a wheel here. It can take a while to learn the new location of DM, and getting used to the Gadget wheel.
  • In the previous games, Enter Vent, Corner Cover and Hang From a Ledge were all activated with the same button combination, which could lead to detection/death if the game so decided. While Hang and Enter Vent still suffer from this, Corner Cover is activated with a different combination.
• If you have a GameCube, and you enjoy action-adventure games of a persuasion similar to The Legend Of Zelda, heed this advice: playing Star Fox Adventures and then going straight to playing Beyond Good & Evil (or vice versa) is very unwise. Why?
  • The action-adventure-game-standard forward roll is X in SFA. In BG&E, X is mapped to item use, and B is a forward roll.
  • The Z-button enters first-person view in both games. However, to fire a projectile attack in first-person, you press B in BG&E. In SFA, you press Y.
  • In BG&E, R is "run." In SFA, R is "stop dead in your tracks (to shield)."
  • You select items and change the one you have set with the C stick in SFA. In BG&E, you use the D-pad.
  • Finally? In SFA, your NPC partner controls are mapped to a menu. In BG&E, they're hard-coded to the Y button and context-sensitive. While you can set a partner command to the Y button in SFA, it remains the same, regardless of context. The Y button in SFA can also be used for items (which are always set to X in BG&E).
• Bionic Commando (1988): The original and Rearmed lacks a jump button, which is where much of the challenge of the game derives from.
• It's not unheard of for people new to the Castlevania games mistaking Hearts Are Health and wondering why said hearts are not healing them. The hearts serve as ammo for your subweapons while meat/beef are the items that give health back. Likewise, play any Castlevania game and go to Castlevania II: Simon's Quest where the hearts are treated as currency rather than ammo.
  • In Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, try playing as Maria for a while, and then switch to Richter. It can really throw you off, since pressing the jump button in midair makes Maria do a Double Jump, while Richter does a backflip. You will send yourself back into enemies/bottomless pits many times before you'll get used to it.
• Devil May Cry
  • There is a radically different button arrangement between the first game and all the others. Any player who played the first game for any length of time and claims they didn't press Triangle in an attempt to jump at least once in the third is lying to you. The HD collection switched it around for consistency... which means that anyone familiar with how the first game used to play is going to run straight into a wall.
  • DmC: Devil May Cry doesn't make things any better. Going from Devil May Cry 3/4 to the new will result in profound sadness as you constantly try and hold a lock-on button that simply does not exist. With the bonus of Devil Trigger now requiring you to click in both analog sticks, and the dodge buttons now dedicated to the old-school lock on and Devil Trigger buttons, and the circle button now being locked solely to the launch button, and the need to hold down L2/R2/LT/RT to switch weapon styles, and the d-pad to switch weapons (gasp for air)... My god. The list just goes on and on.
  • In Devil May Cry 5, both Dante and V have their respective Limit Breaks (Devil Trigger and Nightmare) mapped to L1/LB. Nero, on the other hand, has his Devil Trigger mapped to the D-pad. The first battle you use it, L1/LB does trigger it, but afterwards you have to make sure you don't blow off your Devil Breaker when trying to unleash your true power.
  • Speaking of 5, Nero's sword moveset in that is pretty much the same as it was in Devil May Cry 4 with one major change: his Split aerial slam attack has changed from R1/RB-forward-Triangle/Y to R1/RB-back-Triangle/Y. Forward-Y is now a diving meteor move called Payline that has an arc that is guaranteed to make you miss if you were trying to use Split.
• Double Dragon II: The Revenge features directional-based attack buttons where one button causes the player to attack to the left and the other to the right. Thus, one button does a standard punch combo, while the other button does a back-kick, depending on the player's direction. This is a huge contrast from the first game, which featured a more conventional "punch or kick" system. As a result, many players who were used to the controls of the first game and then jumped straight to the sequel had difficulty adjusting to the new control scheme, since the buttons for punching and kicking are switched whenever their character change directions. Technos used a similar system in their older beat-'em-up Kunio-kun a.k.a Renegade.
• Driver:
  • Some DRIV3R players found it difficult switching over to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, as in the former pressing the triangle button applies the brakes, but in San Andreas it makes you enter/exit the car - pain ensues for everyone involved if you happen to be driving at top speed when you press it.
  • Likewise, in most driving games 'A' on a controller is the handbrake, but in Driver: San Francisco it's 'B'.
• In God Hand, all the Action Commands are Invulnerable Attacks... except for the Stomp. So it's easy to reflexively hit the QTE and be rudely knocked out of it.
• Much like Cave Story, the original La-Mulana has a control anamoly where the player has to press Down on the keyboard instead of Up to enter doors/tents. This is changed in the 2012 remake to pressing Up on the D-Pad to enter doors/tents, which can ironically lead to Damn You, Muscle Memory! from players going from the original to the remake.
• The Legend of Zelda series:
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
    • The GBA remake of A Link to the Past (which is the version GBA owners were most likely to have played) maps lift and throw to R, similar to the Minish Cap example.
    • Said remake awkwardly has the inventory mapped to the Select button and the save dialog to the Start button — the inverse of the SNES version. Ironically, this change was probably made to avoid the trope, as Four Swords, which comes included in the same cartridge, uses Start to bring the menu. The developers probably thought that players would get confused if the menu was mapped to a different button in ALttP. Of course, it backfired badly, as most people never played FS (as it requires at least another player with a GBA, a Game Link cable and a ALttP/FS cartridge). People are more likely to have played other Zeldas than FS, especially the other GBA Zelda game, The Minish Cap, which sets the function to the Start button. However, "Save on Start, items on Select" has since become the standard for handheld Zelda games: Both DS games also use it, as well as A Link Between Worlds.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: The Switch remake added in the ability to store fairies in bottles for healing, but they don't serve as an Auto-Revive (something which they do in every other game in the series), so as not to render the Magic Medicine redundant.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
    • Zelda's Lullaby was "left-up-right-left-up-right" on the N64, the Nintendo GameCube, and the Wii. For the 3DS version, the song is "X-A-Y-X-A-Y." To put that in terms of the button's positions, the song is now "up-right-left-up-right-left." All the other songs have also changed accordingly.
    • A lesser example comes from Kaepora Gaebora, who is the trope image and practical mascot of "Shall I Repeat That?". Sometimes, he'll ask "Do you want to hear what I said again?", but other times, he asks, "Did you get all that?" - two questions, two completely different answers to avoid the dialogue loop. You're never sure which one he'll ask, but you can be sure that the cursor will default to the one you don't want. Click too many times, and you'll have to listen to what he said all over again. Cue the Unstoppable Rage.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask:
    • Saving was done by playing the Song of Time, which would also send you back to the first day of the three day cycle. In the 3DS version, playing the Song of Time doesn't save your progress; owl statues now act as fixed save points instead of being a Suspend Save and feather statues were also added as additional save points. The location where you obtain the Stone Mask was also changed in the 3DS remake and the Great Fairies that gave Link double magic and the upgraded Spin Attack swapped places. All the bosses in each temple were also completely redone so that strategies and exploits used from the N64 version no longer work and you'll have to fight the bosses as they were intended. Such changes will trip up veteran players, including those who do speed runs.
    • Like in most Zelda games, you can give people items by assigning the item to a button, and then pressing the button while standing in front of someone. You can alternatively give items to people by assigning the item to a button, and then pressing the button while talking to them, which the game does tell you. What the game doesn't tell you is that you can't do the former with consumable items specifically. Other Zelda games have you do the former specifically, even with consumables, so this difference can throw players off.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games
    • Their graphics are so similar to those of the earlier The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, but your sword starts out on the opposite button from that of Link's Awakening.
    • The button combination used to save-and-quit in Link's Awakening is used to reset the game in the Oracle games. A player who starts playing the Oracles immediately after just finishing a run of Link's Awakening could end up losing quite a bit of progress...that said, A+B+Start+Select was always the standard "Reset" gesture for Game Boy games (since the GB didn't have an actual reset button); Link's Awakening was the deviant here.
    • Those same players will likely find themselves getting blown up by their own bombs a lot. In Link's Awakening, pressing the bomb button immediately places the bomb in front of you; you have to press the button again to pick it up and move it around. For whatever reason, Oracle does the exact opposite, where pressing the button causes you to hold the bomb over your head, requiring a second press to set it down.
    • In Oracle of Ages, one of the items you can get is the Mermaid Suit, an upgraded version of the Flippers which let you dive underwater to access new areas. For no good reason, this also completely changes the swimming controls from "hold a direction to move, mash A to swim faster" to "mash in a direction to move". Even within the same game, adapting is a chore.
  • The Game Boy games also have a problem for some gamers: most of the console Zeldas have a dedicated button for sword attacks, while the portable Zeldas turn the sword into one of the items that can be mapped to the action buttons.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, there's one dungeon with a bunch of Light And Mirrors Puzzles and two characters who can reflect light off items they carry. The buttons for each character to reflect light are different; pressing Link's button (the same button used for similar puzzles in Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask) while controlling Medli returns control to Link.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap uses the R button for lift/throw, which had been A in the SNES version of A Link to the Past , and wastes the L button on the game's fusion function.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
    • While all other 3D Legend of Zelda games have three configurable instant-use item buttons, the GCN version of Twilight Princess hard-codes the "Z" button to the Exposition Fairy, typically resulting in constant trips to the item selection in the same fight to swap out one of the two item slots left.
    • Instead of having all of the menu components simply under the Start Button, it was split into two: the D-Pad is used for switching equipment and the Start Button only goes to a basic menu that allows for viewing collectibles/stats, saving and changing outfits/shields. In The Wind Waker and Ocarina Of Time the D-Pad is used for controlling the mini-map.
    • In The Wind Waker, A is throw, and R is set down. In Twilight Princess, A while moving is throw, while A at a standstill is set down (like in Ocarina of Time). The resulting mixups that can occur are especially fun when dealing with bombs: either throwing them instead of setting them down and having them bounce behind you, or not throwing them at all and having them explode in your hands.
    • The Wii U remaster uses the GameCube version's layout as its default, with the Wii version's mirrored layout being used for Hero Mode. This becomes a case of this trope if you grew up with the Wii version, as it's somewhat easy to confuse left and right if you're inherently familiar with a town or dungeon.
  • You'd better start getting used to moving with the stylus if you've never played the DS games The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
    • The A-button is not for rolling, but instead for running. Shaking the Nunchuk while running triggers rolling. Thankfully, running is more efficient than rolling, once the player has gotten used to it. Prior to Skyward Sword, rolling was always the fastest movement option in 3D Zelda games, followed by... walking backwards.
    • People who were used to the very basic motion controls of Twilight Princess had some difficulty adjusting to the more precise controls for Skyward Sword. Likewise, adjusting to the waggling of Twilight Princess after getting used to the 1:1 sword motions in Skyward Sword can take some time.
    • Enemies that took one mindless slash to defeat in previous games, such as Deku Babas, now require some patience to kill as you wait to see how they will open their mouth, so you can slash accordingly.
    • Another annoyance is how the items are handled. In Twilight Princess, hitting the trigger (B) will equip the item, and hitting the button again will use it, and A will put the item away. In Skyward Sword, for some items (such as the slingshot), hitting B equips the item, and A uses it, while hitting B again puts the item away. Naturally, this leads to a lot of instances of accidentally putting away an item you're trying to use, or continuing to use the item when you're trying to store it.
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds: In Link's Awakening and the Oracle games, when swimming you can mash A to swim faster of press B to dive underwater. A Link Between Worlds reversed these buttons.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
    • There is no auto jump and it must be done manually, the B-button performs a dash instead of attacking with a sword (which now requires Y), pressing A while moving forward will drop a bomb instead of throwing it, and bombs must be manually activated instead of waiting.
    • And if you decide to start a new game, try to remember that you don't have a paraglider for a while.
    • While the Switch controller feels very natural most of the time, the L/R and ZL/ZR buttons can really cause havoc due to their close proximity. You're trying to tame that horse by hammering the L, but instead you kept hammering ZL, which just invoked targeting and caused you to get bucked off.
    • Boomerangs were automatically caught after being thrown and returning to Link. Not so here where you have to press A to catch the boomerang on the return trip or it'll sail past you and crash into the ground, leaving you unarmed as you now have to rush over to pick it up.
    • Done In-Universe as well if you try to make Link use a sword or bow when he has nothing equipped. He'll grasp at the air where it should be and then look surprised.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom:
    • The basic controls of this game is similar to Breath of the Wild, except for the part where you cycle your basic powers. In Breath, you choose your Sheikah Slate power by holding the up direction on your D-pad, but in this game, you have to hold down the L button instead. Pressing up on the D-Pad instead brings up the list of items you can throw or fuse to your arrows.
    • Unlike in Breath, you don't immediately get your paraglider after completing the Noob Cave. Be careful not to fall onto solid ground until you get it (however, Soft Water is in full effect).
• Max Payne 1 & 2 on the Xbox: All the same actions, entirely different button layout. The third game, despite more closely resembling Gears of War-style cover shooters, has such a very tiny amount of Regenerating Health — about enough to survive a glancing bullet or two, and only if you already have taken so much damage that a mosquito bite would kill you (completely red health bar) — that until you get this into your head, expect to have much trouble due to being over-reliant on that mechanic.
• The original Metal Gear Solid has the circle button to confirm decisions and the X button to cancel. This remained true for the sequels until Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, where X became the confirm button and circle is now cancel. This is made worse in the HD versions of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Players of the original PS2 versions are likely going to have a hard time for a few minutes adjusting to that, even if they've played MGS4.
  • Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes is a remake of the first game built on the engine of the second. However, since Metal Gear Solid 2 was originally on the PS2 and Twin Snakes is a GameCube game, the controls were changed to compensate for the GameCube controller's lack of analog buttons. For example, the player has to press the Y button while holding the A button in order to let go of their character's aim in Twin Snakes, whereas in MGS2 this was done by gently releasing the square button.
  • In MGS4, there's a brief dream sequence at the beginning of Act 4 where the player is thrown into the Heliport from MGS1, with the same graphics, engine, controls and everything, and the this can get the player killed if he's not careful.
  • The Windows port of MGS2 has a totally different keyboard layout from the port of the original... and the key customization doesn't quite work.
  • For people who played Metal Gear Solid 3, 4 and the HD version of Peace Walker, playing the HD version of Metal Gear Solid 2 can be extremely disorienting.
  • Go to the first game after playing 2 or 3 and marvel at the inability to dive roll or peek around walls, and first person view being mapped to Triangle instead of R1.
• Mirror's Edge on consoles tends to have this effect. 1. When you play the game after having played any platformer ever, it's hard to get used to using the left triggers for jumping and crouching. 2. When you play any platformer after Mirror's Edge, expect lots of deaths from pressing the wrong button and attempting to wall-run when you can't.
  • For the PC version, "R" is used to activate the bullet-time effect. Players of first-person shooters where "R" is reload who also tend to do so after any given battle may frequently trigger the bullet-time after all the enemies are dead.
• Ninja Gaiden Trilogy, a compilation of all three NES games in the series released for the SNES, has the attack and jump buttons assigned to B and A, just like on the 8-bit NES. However, the button layout of the SNES controller is a bit different from the NES, and since the X and Y buttons are used as alternate buttons to perform the same functions, this results in a counter-intuitive control scheme since most SNES action games use Y for attacks and B for jumping.
• In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the C button sheaths your sword. In Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, C throws your alternate weapon, and there is no "sheath sword" button.
• Rampage on the PS3 is a perfect port of the old arcade title. But the Square button is mapped to jump and the X button to punch, a total reversal of the system's conventions.
• Resident Evil:
  • Play Resident Evil 2 or Resident Evil 3: Nemesis on the PS1. Now, play Resident Evil – Code: Veronica X on the PS2. Just so you know, that button you are hitting to open the inventory does the same as the X button. It's Start now, so the only way you're not going to be disoriented is if you JUST came off the very first game.
  • Play Resident Evil 4 a lot using the sniper rifle. Notice how you zoom in using the C-stick and use the Y button to open up your inventory. Now play Killer7 and use the Sniper Pistol. The Y button is used to zoom in a pre-set distance, but that's no problem. Unfortunately the C-stick is used to reload, which is a fairly lengthy process. Not fun when you're in a tough fight, less so when you're zoomed in, as said sniper pistol takes even longer to reload when you're aiming.
• Sleeping Dogs (2012) in the 360 version uses B to grab an enemy, which is similar to several other games like [PROTOTYPE] and Assassin's Creed. Unfortunately, while those games let you throw the enemy by hitting B again, for Dogs it's... RT.
• The keyboard controls for Sorcery on the ZX Spectrum use Q and A to move left and right. Most other Spectrum games use the same keys for vertical movement.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection
  • Turtles in Time SNES had Select as the pause button. On PS4 and PS5, it's clicking the touchpad instead of the Options (Start) button, which is lopsided in the middle compared to Xbox or Switch. The buttons can be reassigned, but Start and Select cannot be bound to the same button.
  • A different pause button, which lists a menu for save/load/controls etc., is the right-hand shoulder button for all games in the collection.
  • For the two arcade games (not console ports), pressing Start/Options by default inserts a coin. The game then says "Press Start" so you must press Attack or Jump to start the game proper.
• The Wonderful 101 is an action-heavy game made by the team behind and in the style of Bayonetta, so you assume it'd have the same controls, right? Well, ZR does dodge and B (bottom of the diamond) jumps, but that's it. X (top) - punch in Bayonetta - is team attack here. The general attack button is A (right) and Y (left) disbands your Unite Morph and dashes. Makes sense in that A is also to confirm Morphs, but doesn't in terms of general action game controls.

Fighting

• BlazBlue, the system is similar to Guilty Gear, but pressing all face buttons at once performs a Barrier Burst instead of preparing for an Instant Kill, which in Calamity Trigger cripples your defense for the remainder of the round.
  • Also, some moves' inputs were changed between Calamity Trigger and Continuum Shift; for example, Tager's Astral Heat is now 720+ D rather than the bizarre hold A+ B+ C and mash D it used to be.
    • And then in Continuum Shift, pressing all four face button performs a Break Burst, which works identical except instead of crippling your defense it uses special Burst markers (which you are given only two in the whole match). And then, in Chronophantasma, pressing all four face buttons triggers the Overdrive instead.
• In Capcom vs. games, the Shinkuu Hadouken is performed with Hadouken motion + two Punch buttons. In Street Fighter titles, it's done with two Hadouken motions + one Punch button. Going between the two series can be confusing.
  • In most, if not all, Street Fighter games, the inputs for Sakura's Hadoken and Shououken are the same as the commands for Hadoken and Shoryuken on most characters, but in the first and second Marvel vs. Capcom games, the input for her Hadoken is quarter circle backwards-punch and Shououken is quarter circle forwards-punch... unless you're playing as Sunburned Sakura (accessible through a button combination in 1 and a Hyper Combo in 2), in which case the inputs are basically the same as in SF.
  • Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite changed the input for most moves that used a Dragon Punch motion (forward, down, down-forward or backward, down, down-backward) to pressing down twice in quick succession, followed by whatever button the move uses, with the only moves that have the old motion being Ryu's Shoryuken, Doctor Strange's Mystic Sword, Firebrand's Demon Missile, and, somewhat strangely, Frank West's Outside the Box, a move introduced in Infinite.
• Evident between the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai and Budokai Tenkaichi series on the PS2. In Budokai, square is punch, triangle is kick, circle is Ki Manipulation, X blocks/dodges, and "double tap in a direction" is for dashes. In Budokai Tenkaichi, which is a fully 3D arena fighter unlike Budokai, square is kept as punch, but it also adds kicks and other moves in combos, swaps triangle for Ki Manipulation, circle for blocking, and X is now dash. Many times, you will find yourself getting punched repeatedly in the face as you forgot how to DOOOOODGE!There is also the fact, going from Budokai Tenkaichi to the Raging Blast series, where the block button is a face button to the block button being one of the triggers. Along with the fact that down on the D-pad is charge for Raging Blast while it's movement in the Budokai Tenkaichi series. This leads to a lot of moments where players would just move away or just stand there taking a blast thinking they're blocking or charging.
• A number of fighting games have similar control schemes but radically different systems and methods. There's no way in which you can suck at Guilty Gear that cannot be aggravated by having spent a long time playing Bleach: Blade of Fate.
  • Going from Melty Blood's four or five button setup to other, similar games can have similar results, from the merely annoying (Arcana Heart, with extremely different non-attack buttons) to the aggravating (Fate/Unlimited Codes, where the combo system tends to leave one open to counterattack).
• In Jojos Bizarre Adventure All Star Battle, the R1 Button is used to charge the HHA meter for Ripple-using characters when you hold it down; for Stand Users (whose HHA meter charges as they perform hits), one press of the R1 button turns your Stand on, and one more turns it off. This can cause mistakes at the worst times if you start using another type after using one type too long.
  • Old Joseph has both a Stand and Ripple, with the former taking precedence over the R1 button, while charging Ripple is pressing down twice, then R1, making it even worse.
• In The King of Fighters series, the LP+LK command has changed a few times. In '94 and '95, it's a standing sidestep. In the rest of the series, it became the more popular rolling mechanic. The trope really comes into play in '99 and Capcom Vs. SNK series. In '99, backward rolling pops you forward straight afterward, while accidentally pressing a button during forward roll brings you back into the line of fire. In the CvS series, there is no backwards rolling whatsoever, so KOF veterans can get messed up by this.
• Try playing Mortal Kombat on the PS Vita. Now go back to Midway Arcade Classics on the original PSP and play any of the Mortal Kombats. Watch as you do a crouching highkick everytime you try to uppercut someone.
• The two most prominent Mixed Martial Arts games available, Electronic Arts' MMA and THQ's UFC Undisputed 2010, use completely different control schemes that, oddly, both feel intuitive once you "get" them. The start of the animation to shoot for a takedown looks exactly the same in both games. You'll be flicking the right analog stick backwards futilely in an attempt to stop takedowns for hours, should you make the transition from UFC to EA.
• In early versions of Primal Rage, players usually had to press two buttons before entering joystick inputs in order to pull of each dino's special attacks. Later revisions modified this to standard quarter-circle and back-forward joystick inputs before pressing attack buttons.
• Punch-Out!!:
  • In NES Punch-Out!! you blocked by holding down, which blocked all attacks besides uppercuts and a couple other certain moves, whereas in SNES Super Punch-Out!! there's a low guard and high guard system which has holding up block attacks aimed at your head while holding no direction blocks blows to your body, with down now only inputting ducking. This will for sure trip up people playing either game for the first time after having extensively played the other game beforehand.
  • Soda Popinski is the first boxer who fights left-handed, marking the point in the games where you need to start relying less on instinct and more on strategy.
  • A unique quirk of Mr. Sandman in the NES and Wii versions is that when stunned, he instinctively protects his head, when every other boxers' gloves drop to cover their abdomen when stunned. The standard strategy of stunning boxers and then unleashing a barrage of punches to their head will be stopped cold, forcing the player to adapt and get used to throwing body punches.
• Samurai Shodown 2 on the Wii Virtual Console plays on the Classic Controller. It wouldn't be so bad if one could remap the buttons from those old games, but here Samurai Shodown 2 shows two problems. One is the original Street Fighter-like attacks. Six levels, but four buttons — so if you want the heavy shot, you hit both slash or both kick. Well, that's true to the original. But then the kick and punch buttons are reversed, causing..issues.
• You spent years learning how to play as Voldo in Soul Calibur? You perfected his move set in Soul Calibur 2? Well, good luck with 3 and 4: he's got almost all the same moves, but for no good reason all the inputs are changed. It's the same with Ivy.
  • Talim is much slower, and her moves have been reassigned.
  • Taki's original ground spark move change a couple of times. In SC1, the move makes the opponent fall behind her. In SC2, the opponent falls in front of her for more combo opportunities. In SC1 and 2, the motion was back+B+K. From SC3 and on, the motion became back+A+B.
• The Street Fighter series has you hold the opposite direction (backwards) to block. The Mortal Kombat series has a block button. The same thing goes for two Namco series: Tekken, and Soul Calibur.
  • In Street Fighter, the throw commands are all different between titles. In Street Fighter II, tap the stick in the desired direction while pressing HP (Fierce) or HK (Roundhouse). In Street Fighter Alpha 3, it's two punch or two kick buttons. In Street Fighter III and IV, it's LP (Jab) + LK (Short), and two punch or kick buttons is used for EX special moves. That same vertical arrangement will start a custom/variable combo in Alpha 3 if using V-ISM.
  • Different Capcom games have different inpt methods for super moves: most Street Fighter games are double input + one button (IE Down-to-Forward, Down-to-Forward, then Punch for Ryu's Shinkuu Hadoken); in games with multi-level super meters, the strength of the attack button pressed determines the level of the super. In the Marvel vs. Capcom games, it's single input + all three buttons (IE Down-to-Forward, then all three Punches together for the same move). Street Fighter IV uses the regular Street Fighter system, but on top of that you have Ultra Combos, which are double input + all three buttons (Down-to-Forward, Down-to-Forward, then all Punches for the Metsu Hadoken).
  • Also try playing any of the SF3 series or the P-Groove in Capcom vs SNK 2. Then try playing SF2, SF4 or another Groove in Capcom vs SNK 2. With no parry (done by tapping forward in time with enemy attacks) to counter the enemy, the character will actually drop their guard and walk forward into attacks!
  • In Street Fighter, Y (button to the left in the + configuration) is light punch, X (top button in + configuration) is medium punch, and L is hi-punch. B, A and R are the same with kicks, respectively. In Killer Instinct, L is light punch, Y is medium punch, and X is high punch, with the kicks switched around similarly.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • If you've been playing Pokkén Tournament for any extended period of time don't play Smash. The only things that are the same is that the R button is to block. Everything else is different. The jump buttons X and Y in Smash are the strong and weak attack buttons in Pokken respectfully. The Special attack button in Smash (the B button) is the jump button in Pokken. To throw items you need to use the Z button in Smash which isn't used in Pokken. Finally in Pokken the L button summons support, in Smash the L button is no different from the R button! If you played Smash instead of Pokken you'd be using specials when you need to jump, jumping when you want to attack, and hanging onto items indefinitely until you figure out which button gets rid of them.
  • In most Smash games, L and R are both shield, while the Z button (ZL and ZR in Wii U) is grab. However, due to the lack of a Z button on the original model, the 3DS version maps shield to just R and grab to L, which is more than a little annoying when accidentally grabbing instead of shielding gives the other player plenty of time to attack. Then Super Smash Bros. Ultimate swapped L/R to grab and ZL/ZR to shield...
• Go from a Super Smash Bros. game to any other fighter. Smash Attacks are a fine strategy... in Smash Bros. only. And what do you mean holding the triggers doesn't block like they do in Mortal Kombat?
  • Hell, only going between the six (counting the 3DS and Wii U games separately) different Super Smash Bros. games themselves is hard! Just try to go back and play the original game after getting used to any of the games released afterward and then realize that the original has no side-B special move, up/down throw, or airdodging, and also has no C-stick, all of which were introduced in Melee.^note But even then, only in multiplayer modes... trying to use the C-stick in Melee's 1P mode will bring about the same effect. Even playing as the same character in multiple installments, there are very noticeable differences between move sets, timing, and hit boxes between the different installments.
  • Ultimate brought many quality-of-life improvements to Smash's mechanics. Among the examples were the ability to perform any action out of a run by simply releasing the control stick into neutral (previous games forced players to run-cancel by crouching), simplifying the up-smash/up-b out of shield input (removing the need to begin with a jump-cancel input), and providing a macro command for tilting your shield without rolling/jumping/spot-dodging (by holding two shield buttons, or shield+special). Since Ultimate eventually became the highest-selling fighting game of all time, it introduced may new players to the Smash titles. However, many of these players wound up crossing over into Melee (particularly during COVID lockdowns, where Ultimate's poor netcode was in stark relief to the fan-made rollback mod for Melee), which lacks a great many of the features that have been innovated since its release.
  • Smash has its own internal version of this with Ryu: plenty of players have done things like walking off the edge of stages because they forgot that they aren't playing Street Fighter.
  • The inverse is true too: In many other 2-D fighting games, holding in the direction away from your opponent will cause the character to scoot backwards and block attacks. Not so in Smash Bros., which, perhaps more logically, causes your character to turn around and run off in that direction. Averted, again, with Ryu (and Ken, Terry, and Kazuya) in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate who, when there are only 2 players, automatically face the opponent at all times the way they would in a traditional fighting game.
• The Touhou fighting games Immaterial and Missing Power versus Scarlet Weather Rhapsody; the control schemes and sprites are just similar enough for you to be familiar while still being different enough that some controls are forgotten.
  • Immaterial and Missing Power has a declaration-based spellcard (super move) system, where you have to first declare the use of a spellcard before you actually use it. Then, Scarlet Weather Rhapsody and Hisoutensoku do away with this by using a more conventional instant use system. And then, Hopeless Masquerade goes back to the declaration-based system.
• WWE '12 revamped the controls from the previous games, moving grapples from the right stick to the X (PS3) button, run from L1 to L2 and action from X to L1 while the right stick is re-purposed for manipulating the enemy position.
• Streets of Rage 4 has some mechanics that can trip up experienced fans of the series:
  • The game has a dedicated button to picking up items, which can trip up veteran players who were used to using the attack button to pick up items. Luckily, there is an option that lets you change this behavior back to the old school method if you prefer.
  • Alongside the main cast, there are also retro versions of the same characters that appeared in the previous game and they play exactly as they did in those games. The SOR1 characters lack a special attack since they were not designed with it until the 2nd game. Pressing the special attack button has the character use their star move, which already has its own button. It's not unheard of for players to accidentally waste their star move when they pressed the special attack button to break out of enemy holds out of reflex.
  • Survival mode and certain hidden areas in the story have retro versions of enemies that appeared in previous games. Unlike the player characters whose retro versions still behaved as they did in the past, a lot of retro enemies don't quite behave as they did before. For example, the Big Ben enemies in the second game move slowly and take time to attack. Their retro versions in the fourth game has them moving a lot faster and attack much more aggressively, which can trip up veterans that were used to their old behavior.

Hack-and-Slash

• Die by the Sword is played with WASD and the mouse, except "A" and "D" turn, rather than strafe ("Q" and "E" strafe). This ends up being a much better choice for gameplay, since turning is more important to keep your sword pointed the right way, but initially it will throw you off.
• In Gundam Breaker, the R3 Button^note Pressing down the Right Analog Stick activates your Awakening (which makes your Gunpla perform an Ass Kicking Pose) and once you're in Awakening, pressing it again performs your Burst Attack. When Gundam Breaker 2 was first released, the Awakening pose would trigger even in multiplayer lobbies, meaning a poorly timed Awakening could waste an ally's Burst Attack by making it deal no damage. The very first patch removed the pose in multiplayer, but before players got used to the change, many would accidentally waste their Burst Attacks since without the animation, they would mistakenly think their Awakening hadn't triggered and they'd press R3 a second time.
  • The first two games had a problem with the PlayStation's usual Accept/Cancel setup: If you play the games on an American PS3, they use the Western setup (X to accept, O to cancel), but the screen display shows the Japanese version of the inputs (O to accept, X to cancel), which could trip up players. The third game in the series uses the Japanese inputs regardless of the system's region, but that could still cause problems for import gamers who haven't gotten acclimated to the change.
• Hyrule Warriors includes the option to use Dynasty Warriors controls (Y to attack, X to Strong Attack, A for Special attack, and B to dodge) or The Legend of Zelda controls (B to attack, X to Strong Attack, Y to Special Attack, and A to dodge), or to simply customize the controls to fit your liking. May the goddesses themselves help you if you ever find yourself in a situation in which you switch between the controls or worse, you play a Warriors game after playing with the Zelda controls or play a Zelda game after using the Warriors controls.^note Breath of the Wild and tears of the Kingdom do have Y as the attack button and B as the dodge button (even if you have to be locked on, and tilting the control stick left, right, or backwards), so it's not that bad in those cases.
  • The spiritual sequel, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, is locked into the Warriors control scheme by default, and you cannot change that. So if you played the original Hyrule Warriors with the Zelda controls or custom controls, prepare for massive amounts of frustration.
• The God of War series usually keeps the controls and gameplay the same but each game changes at least one thing just to trip you up.
  • God of War has the action button on R2, a dedicated shoulder bash attack on R1, and weapon switching is pressing R1 and L1 together. God Of War 2 changes the action button to R1 where it stays for the rest of the classic series. R2 becomes the weapon switch button, pressing the 1 buttons together is for a context-sensitive time slow mechanic, and the shoulder bash is removed.
  • In God of War 3, R2 becomes the button for using magic, the D-pad switches weapons, and L2 becomes the dedicated "item" button where you can use your bow, lantern, and boots on the fly.
  • God of War: Ascension changes the combat system immensely, with the most drastic change being the parry moving from pressing L1 when an attack hits to pressing X while holding L1 before the attack hits. Grab is also moved from O to R1 with O becoming the unarmed/side weapon attack button.
  • Averted for God of War (2018), which changes the gameplay so much it'd be impossible to confuse the controls for the previous games. The only controls that have remained the same are L1 for block and clicking both sticks to activate Rage mode.
  • God of War Ragnarök does this twice in regards to weapon selection. 2018 used left and right on the D-pad to draw, respectively, the Blades of Chaos and Leviathan Axe, or to sheathe that weapon and fight unarmed if it was already drawn. Ragnarok's default control scheme uses the same buttons to draw the same weapons, but instead uses D-pad down to sheathe any equipped weapon...until you unlock the Draupnir Spear, which takes its place on down, requiring you to relearn the muscle memory of tapping a weapon's direction to sheathe it.

Light Gun Games

• All of the arcade The House of the Dead games have you perform some variation of "point away from the screen" to reload. However the first game requires you to shoot outside of the screen, not point away, as the game hardware only determines where the gun is pointed at when pulling the trigger. The third game uses a shotgun controller that needs to be pumped to reload; pointing away does nothing. 4 and Scarlet Dawn have machinegun controllers that you shake to reload, but thankfully the point-away method still works.
• Time Crisis features a pedal that you step on to attack, and release to hide and reload. Virtua Cop 3 too has pedals, but instead of the pedal being used to switch between attacking and hiding, it instead activates Exceeding Sense Mode. A Time Crisis player who plays Virtua Cop 3 thus might instinctively step down on the pedal and drain the ES gauge by mistake, while a VC3 player who plays Time Crisis may forget to step on the pedal to attack, wasting time, or avoid staying out of cover for long because they forget there's no ES gauge.

MMORPG

• World of Warcraft: The expansion Dragonflight added the Dragon Riding feature, which is a bit more complex and requires more control and actions from the player than mere flying mounts, and it is only available on the new continent, the Dragon Isles. Many players who go outside the continent will machinally try to activate the Dragon Riding skills when using a regular flying mount, only to find out nothing happens. The absolute worst thing to do is to put the "takeoff" or "accelerate" bind of Dragon Riding on the same key as mount/dismount for the regular flying mounts (for obvious reasons).
• This can happen when switching between Toontown Rewritten and Toontown Corporate Clash, especially with both fangames tackle gag balancing and quality of life changes from Online.
  • Breezing through boss fights by spamming the Sound gag track is the meta in Rewritten, while trying to do the same in Corporate Clash puts the toons at a disadvantage.
  • Bosses such as the Litigator, Featherbedder, and Stenographer are able to ban gags from use, and will punish the toon that uses a banned gag. High Roller and Pacesetter are also able to manipulate gag order. Some can even be immune to Lure.
  • The Run button is bound to Shift by default, whereas in Rewritten, the Walk button is bound to Shift by default. Rewritten does have a run button, but its clunky, out of the way, and not as fast.
• Play Final Fantasy XIV, in which you can switch between melee tank, ranged healer, ranged DPS, and melee DPS whenever you want. It gets worse if you choose a different class with the same role and you keep messing up your rotations because you think you're playing the previous job.
  • Every time an expansion comes out, the development team adjusts the abilities of jobs for balance reasons or a change in direction of how to play them. In the case of Shadowbringers, every job's ability pool got heavily tweaked. While some jobs aren't affected as much, like only upgrading existing abilities, others require a complete retraining of how to play them. For example, Tanks used to have a combo for generating emnity and a combo for pure DPS. There was also a defense buffing/damage debuffing tank stance that generated emnity passively and a damage buffing DPS stance. Now, there's only the tank stance which only generates emnity (and a massive amount of it) and combos changed to "single target" or "AOE" (granted AOE abilities for tanks did exist, but only one or two that was used occasionally).
  • A mechanic in the final boss of Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers deserves a mention. Early on in the fight, several circles appear around the arena with circles above them in the air falling down to them. Normally something like this indicates that players need to stand in the circles when the objects land, and soak the damage, otherwise they will explode, hitting the entire party for high damage. In this fight however when the circles land, they won't damage the entire party, but will explode in a AOE, and anyone caught in it will receive heavy damage and a stacking vulnerability up debuff. And players will need to avoid them for nearly 30 seconds while avoiding other mechanics.
  • A mechanic in one of the raid fights marks players with the normal marker, but the actual attack is delayed. For first time runners, this causes them to do the mechanic as normal, but then fail it once it actually goes off.

Party Games

• Mario Party: The Top 100: Negative transfer will affect the player with any mini-game that has changed controls and/or objectives from its original appearance in a past Mario Party game:
  • "Face Lift" uses the touch screen instead of the buttons.
  • "Shy Guy Says" uses L and R instead of A and B.
  • In "Cake Factory", you have to press A twice to both grab and place your ingredient, instead of holding A to hold onto the ingredient.
  • "Dizzy Dancing", "Hexagon Heat" and "Tidal Toss" are affected by the overall change of ground-pounding controls from A>Z to A>A. "Bounce 'n' Trounce" changes the soin attack controls from Z to B. Additionally, the victory conditions for "Dizzy Dancing" change from being the player being the first player to catch the note (which ended the game) into being the player who catches the most notes
  • "Kareening Koopas" and "Crate and Peril" have you tilt the screen instead of using an analog stick.
  • The controls for "Mario Speedwagons" are reversed - that is, A to accelerate and R to shift gears.
  • In "Three Throw", you press A twice instead of B to throw. This makes it impossible to throw from the ground.
  • "Cage-in Cookin'" and "Dizzy Rotisserie" are affected by the overall change in ranks in mini-games.
  • "Balloon Busters" and "Dart Attack" do away with speech-based commands in favour of blowing into the microphone (or pressing L). Additionally, in the former, one player is eliminated at a time.
  • The change in camera angle in "Track and Yield".

Platformers

• Any number of JAMMA platform games, where you have a button for jump and one for fire. Swapping between the two control layouts is frustrating.
• Alex Kidd in Miracle World, the Sega Master System's answer to Super Mario Bros., uses Button 1 (on the left) to jump and Button 2 (on the right) to attack, the reverse of the order they're laid out in Nintendo's legendary platformer. This was done on purpose by the Miracle World's designer, Ossale Kohta, in a misguided attempt to set his game apart from Nintendo's. Zillion, another Master System game he designed, also uses the same button layout. Ghost House also does this, but not Wonder Boy (despite what the manual said). This was fixed with the Wii Virtual Console release, where on the Wii Remote, 1 is used to punch and 2 is used to jump.
• Castelian uses the A button for both shooting and jumping; you can't shoot on the move, and you can't jump when standing still. This is because the game was originally designed for computers with one-button joysticks.
• Cat Poke uses the WASD keys, but rather than for movement like usual^note That goes to the arrow keys. they correspond respectively to opening the menu, jumping, performing actions (such as poking the cats) and using items. Expect to get confused the first time you play!
• The platforming stages of Hudson Soft's Famicom game Challenger use A to attack and B to jump, which confused Arino at first.
• Cave Story:
  • Many people, after having played this game, will frequently press Z to jump in other games. For example, in MapleStory, Z is the key for picking up items (by default, at least).
  • As in most other games, pressing ESC will pause the game and bring up a menu. However, while in most other games pressing ESC again would close the menu and resume gameplay, in this it quits the game.
  • Most games use up on the d-pad or arrow keys to go through doors and an action button (usually shoot) to talk to NPCs. In Cave Story, both are mapped to the down arrow.
• Cuphead: When you play as Ms. Chalice in the expansion The Delicious Last Course, some of her controls are different from Cuphead and Mugman's. Namely, pressing jump while in the air will make her double-jump, whereas it'll make the boys parry. Her parry is her dash, which you would avoid with the boys since that would involve flinging yourself face-first into a projectile. In a Nintendo Hard sidescroller where memorizing enemy patterns is key, playing as Chalice for the first time will result in some frustrating deaths. However, the game does attempt to mitigate this with the chess bosses, which are specifically designed with Chalice's moveset in mind, to help players get used to her.
• Default Dan, an Indie game, exploited the hell out of this trope by setting it in a Bizarro World where spikes and pits are good, but coins and powerups kill you instantly.
• Deliberately invoked by the iterative level design in Give Up 2. For example, Floor 8 introduces a sweeping laser that will kill you unless you start running right immediately. Floor 10 moves the spikes so if you do hold right immediately, you land on them and die instead of getting a running start.
• Donkey Kong Country:
  • In the original games, the roll button is the same as the run button. In Donkey Kong Country Returns the two are separated. If you use the "classic" sideways Wiimote configuration, cue running into enemies and Bottomless Pits. Rolling is instead performed by - you guessed it - shaking the Wiimote (the 3DS remake fixes this). Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze brings back the old roll mechanic if playing on the Gamepad, which means shaking the Gamepad is not only tiring but does nothing.
  • Rocket Rush in Donkey Kong Country 3 is bad enough just based on its level design, but the controls really do not help. In the original SNES version of the game, the Left and Right buttons control the thrusters of the rocket rather than its actual horizontal movement, so pressing left will actually make you move right and vice versa. It takes some getting used to...and then you go from the SNES version to the GBA version, where the directions do correspond directly to movement (so pressing left moves the rocket left), and you have to get used to the controls all over again.
• Try swapping between Jak and Daxter and Ratchet & Clank games without tinkering with the controls. It'll cost you a fair amount of Ratchet ammo, because you'll be using the Jak punch button to shoot, and you'll crouch every time you try to fire with R1 if you're up to Jak II.
• In Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, the rolling long jump is an attack. In Jak II, it is not. Have fun launching yourself headlong into enemies! Want further fun? In the former, R1 is roll. In Jak II, it fires your gun!
• Kirby:
  • In most Kirby games, you can rapidly tap A to fly. In games before Kirby Super Star, though, you can only fly by holding Up.^note More accurately, you have to press up to start flying, and then you can tap the A button. However, you can hold up to fly without having to tap it as well. It's a lot more counterintuitive, which leads to many a player who started with the modern games falling into pits. Luckily, the later remakes of Kirby's Dream Land and Kirby's Adventure ("Spring Breeze" in Kirby Super Star and Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land, respectively) let you fly with A. On the opposite end, starting with Kirby: Planet Robobot, you can only fly by tapping A; Kirby Star Allies assigns Up to the Friend Ability actions instead.
  • Kirby Super Star used the classic SNES control setup of B as the jump button and Y as the attack button, with A to call a Helper and X to open a game-specific menu. Kirby Super Star Ultra for the DS sticks with control consistency for the series' other GBA and DS installments: A jumps, B attacks, X calls a Helper, and Y also jumps (the game-specific menus are now on the bottom screen). This can easily trip you up when switching between the two. Kirby Star Allies and Kirby and the Forgotten Land mitigate this by providing two control schemes, with one being consistent with the newer games and the other being more like Super Star (and most other Switch platformers).
• When underwater in The Legendary Starfy, Y is spin and B is dash, but when out of water, Y is both spin and dash, while B is jump. Thankfully, you can change the controls so that this won't mess you up.
• The Lion King. On the Genesis, Roar is mapped to the A button, which is the leftmost button on the controller. Jump is mapped to C which is the rightmost button. On the SNES, Roar is also mapped to A... which happens to be the rightmost button instead. And there is no C- jump is mapped to B instead. On the Genesis, B performs a paw swipe, which is mapped to Y (which so happens to be the leftmost button on an SNES controller) on an SNES. Switching from one platform to another results in hilarity, and perhaps copious amounts of the name of this trope being dropped. And you're completely messed over if you're playing the PC version with a keyboard. Yes, the controls can be reconfigured (and in the PC's case, a Gravis 4-button pad can be added, which makes the control no different from the SNES version), but most people jump straight into the game, thinking "I can handle change!", only to have this trope served to them.
• Ori and the Blind Forest and its sequel Ori and the Will of the Wisps have mostly identical controls, with one big difference — the bashing is remapped from Triangle/Y to L2/LT, which means people going from first game to the sequel often use whatever ability they mapped to Y instead of bashing, while going from sequel to the first game often results in people accidentally charging a jump/dash rather than bashing. Averted when played with keyboard and mouse, since in this case bashing is mapped to right mouse button in both games.
• The Last Faith is a Metroidvania taking most of its combat cues from Bloodborne. Other Soulsborne Metroidvanias, like Dead Cells and Blasphemous, base their control scheme on other 2D platformers, putting attack buttons on face buttons. This is an entirely different control scheme to most others Soulslikes, where attack buttons are usually the right trigger and bumper. The Last Faith splits the difference, putting primary attack on X and secondary attack on the right trigger. To make things worse, the secondary attack button uses the left hand weapon—which Bloodborne used the left trigger for. The Last Faith's default mapping to the left trigger is to use the equipped consumable, meaning a lot of people wound up wasting a Healing Injection when they meant to shoot something. Thankfully, patch 1.5 introduced button remapping.
• Maze Of Galious and Vampire Killer on the MSX use up to jump (and climb ladders/stairs), which might surprise players used to consoles like the NES; indeed, the NES counterparts of those two games use A to jump.
• An infamous example is the GameCube release of Mega Man Anniversary Collection, a compilation of ten classic games from the Mega Man series, all of which have the jump and shoot button positions switched from their original release. Mega Man X Collection fixes this... which makes going from Anniversary to X Collection a new problem because now you're used to the reversed controls.
  • Mega Man 9 has a different problem (on the Xbox 360); they mapped the subscreen (where you select your weapons) to "Select" instead of "Start" like in, oh, every other game. "Start" instead brings up the options menu, which you are far less likely to use while playing. This is a royal pain because shots disappear if you pause for any reason. So if you hit Start, you have to hit it again, then Select to swap weapons.
• Going from Mega Man X to Super Mario World, or vice versa. In Mario World, A is spin jump, B is normal jump, and X and Y are both run/attack. In X games, B is jump, A is dash and Y is fire, while X has no function. Have fun spin-jumping while trying to make a run-up to cross a large gap in Mario, or dashing into an enemy when trying to kill it in Mega Man X.
  • At least in X, you can also dash by double-tapping the D-pad in the direction you want to dash, so that takes some of it out. Though, you still need the A button if you're going to super-jump off walls.
  • Although the feature is usually passed over, X actually has customizable controls, averting this somewhat if you notice the "Options" menu on the start screen.
• Mega Man ZX and Mega Man Zero. While both games have customizable controls, the default set for ZX maps the attack button from Zero as the jump button and the jump button to the OIS System. Given that the latter uses a gauge, this can get frustrating very quickly. It's not quite so bad when you play ZX on a DS Lite, when A is so frustrating to hit without contorting your hand.
  • Similarly, X has the dash button in the same place as ZX's OIS System.
  • The buttons themselves aren't different, however the placement of buttons is completely different going from X to ZX. Thankfully, you can fix this through customizing the controls.
• Metroid
  • Metroid Dread changes how the wall jump works compared to the other games in the series - usually in Metroid, you wall jump by spin jumping at a wall, then as you touch it, flick the stick or pad in the opposite direction and press jump again. Due to Dread's much more precise air control, this has been changed into jumping at the wall then pressing jump again by itself, like in Mario games.
  • The speed of Morph Ball bomb detonation is different in every game, with some like Super Metroid taking a long time, and others like Metroid: Zero Mission having it almost instantaneously. Depending on how much one uses bomb jumping, this can really trip them up.
  • In the GBA games, the Speed Booster was changed to operate by simply running for long enough distances, no need to press any button to run, tripping up both players of Super who are used to the run button and players of the GBA games when they play Super who are used to its absence. Dread changes it again to pressing in the left stick while moving.
• Mighty No. 9's Wii U version uses B to confirm in its menus, and also A to cancel. B is also used to jump and A is to shoot, while the X and Y buttons do nothing. You can change the in-stage controls after finishing the prologue stage though.
• Muppet Monster Adventure: Being a Spyro the Dragon clone, several things can happen:
  • To glide, you press Triangle instead of X after jumping, just like with all the other powers. Similarly to Spyro the Dragon, pressing Triangle while gliding just stops the glide.
  • Similarly to Spyro: A Hero's Tail and The Legend of Spyro, the "charge" (spin) and "fire breath" (glove shot) buttons are swapped.
  • The running and attacking effects of charging are split: R1 is used to run and Square is used to make a spin attack.
• The Arcade Game Pac-Land has a wholly anomalous control scheme with no joystick and all movement handled by three buttons. When ported to consoles with two-button controllers, jumping was accordingly mapped to the D-pad. Fortunately, the TurboGrafx-16 version offers standard platformer controls as an alternative.
• Pikmin: Even after getting past the exact placement of certain buttons when switching from the Gamecube games to Pikmin 3 on Wii U, you may find yourself dismissing your pikmin when you were trying to call a few others over, as pressing "B" on the GCN controller is the button to call a pikmin while the "B" button on the Wii U Gamepad is used to dismiss your pikmin. "ZR" is now used to call the pikmin, and its closest locational equivalent, the Z button of the Gamecube controller, is used to switch between an overhead angle and a standard third-person angle.
• Psychonauts, to an extent. You learn several Psy Powers as you progress through the game, but you can only bind 3 powers at a time (to either Q, E, or the right mouse button) — thus forcing you to swap them depending on what you're up against. Want to Shield yourself? Whoops, you just wasted a Confusion Grenade.
• Ratchet & Clank: The later ones have optional, or sometimes default, lock-strafe mode. Then you go back to the first and second games, and that option no longer exists.
  • After getting used to the rather unusual "lock-strafe mode" that became the default in Deadlocked, you realize it is actually far more adapted for combat: since the shoot and jump buttons are not under the same finger as the right analog stick you can move and aim a lot more freely while shooting. And thus you will likely start to use it back in the third game, where it was optional but you wouldn't use it before because it was too disorienting.
  • Using the Plasma Striker in A Crack In Time takes a little getting used to for those used to the previous games' sniper rifles. In Going Commando and Up Your Arsenal, R1 zooms in, R2 zooms out, the right stick aims and O fires. In Crack, the right stick zooms, the left stick aims and R1 fires. Be prepared to waste a lot of ammo trying to zoom.
  • In the classic series, R1 has always been a secondary fire button, but most players use O instead. In All 4 One, R1 is the only fire button, and O is now mapped to the Vac-U. Hilarity Ensues if playing multiplayer and you keep sucking up your teammates when trying to fire.
  • Try not making a fatal fall whenever Ratchet has to navigate on his own, without Clank on his back. Gorda City Ruins are the first time you'll likely experience the unpleasant situation of jumping over a large Bottomless Pit, only to be reminded by Ratchet's helpless screaming that you can no longer glide due to Clank (and his Heli/Jetpack) not being on his back.
• Shantae: Risky's Revenge DX: The Jump button acts as a cancel button in menus.
• In Shovel Knight for Nintendo systems, B is jump, which is fine, but it's also confirm, not A as is customary on Nintendo. Granted, it does fit the NES theme by having jump be confirm.
• The C button of the Sega Genesis controller is used as jump for just about every Genesis platformer. However, every Simpsons game on the system awkwardly uses the B button to jump, and none let you change the button assignments.
• Going back to the original Sly Cooper game after any of its sequels will have you constantly hitting R1 trying to run, only to stop dead in your tracks to bring up the first-person Binocucom view.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • A mild example in the PS2 version of Sonic Heroes, as the Cross (❌) and Circle (⭕️) buttons were not switched from their Japanese functions (being no and yes, respectively) when brought to North America, making menus rather frustrating to navigate.
    • Averted in the PAL version which used Cross for selecting and Triangle for going back (as was the case for many PS2 games in the region at the time)
  • In Sonic Unleashed, the Homing Attack was changed from the A button to the X button (going by 360 controls).
    • The X button is also the Boost button. With the Air Boost Shoes you need to be careful executing Homing Attacks, especially if you're traversing over bottomless pits.
    • To add insult to the injury, there's the stomp move. In both versions of Unleashed, you can use it to quickly cancel jumps and land on grind rails, in order to save time. However, the Wii version of Sonic Colors makes you fall through the rails should you stomp on them, so, by instinct, you're gonna try to stomp on them and therefore fall to your doom. This is excusable in the DS version, since being a mostly 2D game, sometimes you actually need to get through a rail to go down.
    • Try going from Unleashed to Generations, or vice versa. Tapping the X button in the air to homing attack in Sonic Generations will cause Sonic (at least, Modern Sonic) to boost through the air and more often than not go hurtling directly into a bottomless pit. Similarly, going from Generations to Unleashed will be frustrating to inexperienced players; the A button does absolutely nothing in the air in Unleashed, so you don't even have a chance of boosting across the gap. You just unceremoniously plummet to your doom.
  • In Sonic Adventure 2, shoulder buttons control the camera. In Shadow the Hedgehog, the C-stick takes over this function and the R button allows the useless function of strafing.
  • Try playing the Sonic Advance titles after playing Sonic Rush or Sonic Rush Adventure... and not continue to attempt trick actions.
  • Sonic Colors on DS pulls a similar kind of control system change, to bring it closer to the Wii version's controls. Boost and Stomp buttons are swapped compared to the Wii Unleashed version. Going between Rush and Colors is even more jarring because they use the same engine, and one expects consistency.
  • The PC version of Sonic Adventure DX is difficult to get used to, as Z is to spin dash and X is to jump.
  • Sonic Generations seems expressly designed to invoke this trope, with its switching between classic Sonic (who can spin dash, but not do a homing attack) and modern Sonic (vice versa).
  • In Sonic Triple Trouble, Tails hovers when you press the jump button in mid-air. You want to fly? Hold up on the ground and then jump.
• Spyro the Dragon:
  • Both Ripto's Rage and Year of the Dragon allow Spyro to perform a flutter at the end of his glide to gain some extra height, but in the first game, the same button just makes Spyro drop like a stone. Players who are more familiar with the later games will probably lose more than a few lives by trying to make Spyro flutter when gliding over a pit.
  • It used to be that Square was Charge and Circle was Breath ability. They change it almost every game.
    • The Legend of Spyro: R1 is charge, Square is breath and Circle is Melee combat.
    • Spyro: A Hero's Tail: They didn't even give you the nice fancy extra things to take the place of these buttons and give a reason for moving them — they just switched the charge and breath. For no freakin' reason.
• In the Super Mario Bros. series, A is usually used for jump. However, many DS Mario games use B to jump and A to attack/throw fireballs, meaning that someone coming from Super Mario Galaxy to, say, Super Mario 64 DS, or from a past Mario game, can seriously end up slightly confused playing a DS remake/port/series game. Then there's the page quote at the top, if you ever find yourself playing Mario Clash on the Virtual Boy.
  • Yoshi's Island is pretty much under this as well. The GBA remake uses A to jump, B to eat enemies, R to throw eggs, and L to lock the aim. The DS sequel, keeping with the original SNES controls, uses B to jump, A to throw eggs, Y to eat enemies, and X to lock the aim. Particularly problematic if the player forgets and picks a tough level to randomly play in either of said games. However, the player can change Yoshi's Island DS controls to the GBA remake's layout, making this a subversion.
  • The exclusion of the long jump in Super Mario Sunshine annoyed many gamers who had to go through the retro stages without the aid of FLUDD.
  • If you know what's good for your DS, you won't play New Super Mario Bros. after New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Hint: what gimmick are Wii games (in)famous for?^AnswerShaking the controller. Not only that, but it often saves your life, so you'll be in the habit of doing it after almost every jump. Older Super Mario games will get the same treatment after playing the Wii game, but just controllers in that case. Also, your Wall Jump attempts won't work on any of the classic games. Well, they're not supposed to.
  • Old-school gamers may remember when Super Mario World first came out. In all the NES Mario games, A is jump and B is dash/shoot fireball/etc., but here A became spin-jump, B became normal jump, and Y became dash/shoot fireball/etc. (probably changed because of the way one's hand sits on the SNES controller). Many gamers will reflexively spin-jump everywhere, or accidentally jump because they wanted to start running, causing a lot of deaths because Mario won't jump high enough, or jump into an enemy. Avoiding this trope is the major reason why Super Mario All-Stars for the SNES lets you switch between two control methods, where you can have A and B be jump and X and Y be dash/pick up, or have A and B for jump and dash, respectively, simulating the old NES style, with X and Y both also used to dash. This was also later used in New Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo DS, though X is a secondary jump instead of dash
    • Players who’ve come from Yoshi's Island, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, or even Super Mario 64 DS will more than likely attempt a flutter jump while riding Yoshi- only to find themselves losing a life as they fall down whatever pit they were trying to cross because Yoshi didn’t flutter jump yet.
  • Super Mario 3D Land and Super Mario 3D World remove the option to switch controls, so A and B, and X and Y, are locked to jump and dash, respectively. This caused a fit among some players who preferred the secondary control scheme.
  • You can't Goomba Springboard in Super Mario Bros.. Good luck going from any other Mario game (including The Lost Levels) to that one!
  • Super Mario Maker changes up elements and tricks that were possible in in Super Mario World involving the spin jump. In World, you can do a spin jump off of Boos and Grinders. Here, you'll just get hurt instead. Also in World, Yoshi spits out fireballs after swallowing a Red Koopa Troopa. Maker doesn't feature this.
    • In Super Mario Maker 2, pressing a shoulder button while in midair in the Super Mario 3D World style causes Mario to spin in midair, giving him a bit of extra height and distance in his jump. As Cat Mario, however, these same buttons cause him to pounce, a downward diagonal dash that causes him to rapidly lose height. There have been many accidental deaths in the game's Super Mario 3D World courses from Cat Mario pouncing into a bottomless pit.
      
      Also in the same game, the SMB2 Mushroom changes the character into their Super Mario Bros 2 form where they can't jump on enemies to defeat them and they attack by picking them up and throwing them as well as gaining a super jump. Picking up enemies and objects requires pressing down and B, something most players who played the original game won't get right away since they are used to just pressing B alone. Likewise, super jumps require you to keep holding down to maintain your charge whereas the original game only required the player to hold down for a few seconds and can let go once they are charged up.
• Super Mario Galaxy players reflexively use their spin attack in the air as a form of Double Jump. Several levels in Super Mario Galaxy 2 are designed to punish this behaviour.
  • A few level have platforms that swap between two positions every time you use the spin attack. You will have a platform move out from under you and plummet to your death because you just couldn't help but spin when above it. Many times.
  • One of the Green Stars requires taking a Cloud Flower from the first section of the level to the third section. The Cloud Flower creates temporary cloud platforms when you spin, but only has three uses, and you also lose it if you get hit. So you need to get through the majority of the level without getting hit and resisting the impulse to use the spin attack more than twice, since you need at least one cloud to reach the Star.
    • In the level with the final boss, there's a Green Star at the 3rd Checkpoint where you need to use TWO of the clouds. The only source of Cloud Flowers in the level is on the previous planet, and it's annoying to get through it with two remaining.
• In all other Super Mario games where you play as Mario and Yoshi is a Power Up Mount, Yoshi is controlled by having Mario (or Luigi or whoever is playable at the moment) hop onto Yoshi. Not in Super Mario Odyssey, where jumping onto Yoshi just causes Mario to bounce atop Yoshi. Instead, Yoshi is controlled by having Mario throw his cap at Yoshi.
• Super Meat Boy is a game dedicated to deconstructing this and Player Tics by killing you whenever you fall into this.
• One of the major complaints of Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness was the fact that not only were the roll and jump controls completely reversed (Jump is Square and Roll is Circle in the previous games), but the huge problem that there is, unlike the previous games, NO WAY TO CHANGE THE CONTROLS.
  • Several of the controls swap between Legend and Underworld. On PC, the default Jump key changed between right-click, and the Space bar.
• Some platformers with a Grappling-Hook Pistol will have you press up to reel yourself into the hook, and down to extend the line, usually lowering yourself and giving you a good swing. Umihara Kawase inverts this, having you press down to reel in and press up to extend the line! It's even worse if you played Bionic Commando recently, since you have no dynamic control over the length of your bionic arm once grappled to something, the method to reel in is to press the arm button again, and pressing down lets go and drops you down, likely into certain death.

Puzzle

• In first-person puzzle game Antichamber, pressing the escape key at any time will return you to the map room, resetting the puzzles so you can try again. This is great, except when you are deep into puzzle solving and need to pause the game - you slap "ESC" (The menu/pause button in most games with a similar control system) because you are needed in Real Life and *poof* all your recent progress is gone!
• Baba is You implements this as a key mechanic; in order to solve certain levels, you have to fully understand the rules therein and the ways you can change them. And the rules are not necessarily likely to conform to the conventions of other Block Puzzle games, or even the rules of previous levels. For example, one very early level looks impossible to solve—you're trapped in an enclosure of walls and need to get the words "Flag" and "Win" over to make the rule "Flag is Win", but they're surrounded by grass that is impassable because "Grass is Stop". The solution is to walk outside the walls to access the words. After all, there was no rule actually saying "Wall is Stop", despite what prior levels would have you believe.
• Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes crosses this over with Failed a Spot Check on the Needy Vent Gas modules (which require you to periodically drop what you're doing and vent all over again):

VENT GAS? Y/N
YES
VENT GAS? Y/N
YES
DETONATE? Y/N
YES
Oh, Crap! BLAMMO!

• Switching between the many official and unofficial versions of Tetris can cause this. The time just after switching games where the player is still adjusting has been given the name "tetlag".
  • It can be jarring to play the NES or Game Boy versions of Tetris after playing a later version, which have mechanics like the Hold slot, being able to spin pieces even after they've landed, the 7-Bag randomizer^note The game will take the 7 possible Tetriminoes, then randomize the order. Once all 7 have been generated, the game does it again. This ensures that there is an equal quantity of every piece and eliminates strings of the same blocks, and the now-standard color scheme for each piece shape.
  • Bullet-Proof Software's version of Tetris for the Famicom used the down button to rotate (counterclockwise rotation only, of course) and A for hard drop. A dubious choice, even considering that this was the first console version of Tetris ever. The release on the AtGames Legends Flashback changes the controls to better match modern versions.
  • Some Tetris clones map sideways movement to left and right keys, soft drop to down, and the only rotation key to...up.
  • The Mirrorsoft MSX version, meanwhile, maps rotation to space and hard drop to Z, the opposite of modern games, which generally use space for hard drop and Z for left rotate.
  • Tetris: The Grand Master 3 has this thanks to the game giving the choice between TGM and guideline style mechanics:
    • Classic Rule: Pieces spawn horizonally pointing down. First button rotates counterclockwise, second rotates clockwise, third rotates counterclockwise. Also, while most modern games have a "hard drop" function that immediately drops the current piece and locks it in place, TGM instead has "sonic drop", which drops the piece but doesn't lock it until the lock delay expires, which can confuse players used to the more conventional hard drop.
    • World Rule: Pieces spawn horizontally pointing up. Four of the seven tetrominoes have their colors shuffled around. First button rotates clockwise, second rotates counterclockwise, third rotates clockwise. And the first and second parts also apply to any "official" modern Tetris game. This isn't Arika's fault, notably. The guideline requires that the rightmost rotation button be CW. Before Arika was simply following their established convention, and kept it with the classic rotation rule.
    • Tetris: The Grand Master 4 was slated to replace the third rotation button, used by some players to achieve a quick 180-degree rotation, with an instant autoshift button.
  • Switching between the arcade versions of Tetris The Grand Master 3 and Tetris Kiwamemichi requires the player to adjust to the different hold button position — while TGM uses three rotation buttons with hold in the next row, Kiwamemichi uses two rotation buttons and hold as the third button.
• The Witness: The puzzles in The Challenge change each time you have to restart it. Pausing the game will count as a fail.

Rhythm

• A typical beatmania IIDX cabinet has the turntable on the left side of the keys for player 1, and on the right for player 2. Now, play on one side for a few weeks, then try playing on the other. Thankfully, the official home version controller has its keys on a detachable faceplate that can flip 180 degrees, emulating either the left or right side of the arcade version. Players with two controllers can leave one controller as is while flipping the faceplate of the other to experience the joy that is 14-key.
  • If you're adept at turntable-left style, going from IIDX to beatmania III, where both players are in turntable-right setup, can be jarring, though the "Center" option allows one to play with the keys on the right and turntable on the left. Those making the transition in the other direction can at least specifically choose Player 2 side.
  • Finally getting to play beatmania IIDX 20 tricoro? Have fun with:
    • The mod select screen, which starts off with the "beginner" mod screen ("assist" mods only) and requries a button press to switch to the more traditional mod screen.
    • Said traditional mod screen shuffling around the placement of button assignments for mods (for example, chart options get moved from key 2 to keys 3 and 4). On the plus side this means you can move up and down a particular mod sub-menu instead of only being able to move through the options in one direction.
    • Hi-speed no longer being adjustable on the song select screen—you can only do this in-song now.
    • Hi-speed numbers behaving differently. At least they correspond to direct multipliers unlike in previous versions.
  • Music game simulators may have different timing windows or methods than the actual game. For instance, in DanceDanceRevolution the window for getting a Perfect is slightly early, but in StepMania it's slightly late,. Lunatic Rave 2 uses absolute time based timing windows that either grow or shrink depending on the judge difficulty of the BMS file. IIDX uses timing based on the monitor's refresh rate and the timing window is based on how many frames before or after the note has passed the marker when the button was pressed.
• DanceDanceRevolution and Pump It Up are two Rhythm Games which are played by stepping in arrows, but the disposition and quantity of arrows in each one for songs of seemingly similar levels can be very different. And Pump It Up introduces mines and hand plays much earlier.
  • Pump It Up's arrows are on the dance-pad equivalent locations of the 1-3-5-7-9 keys of a standard keypad. DanceDanceRevolution's arrows are where the 2, 4, 6, and 8 would be. Enforced, as Konami has patented the 2-4-6-8 dance pad, requiring all other companies to make alternate schemes.
  • Making things even worse, sometimes a song is used on multiple games between different game series. These songs can be essentially the same but have drastically different steps. Sometimes this happens even with the same song in a series as the company "tinkers" with the song steps to make things harder or easier. Orion.78, for example, has totally different timing in later DanceDanceRevolution games than it did in earlier versions.
• DanceDanceRevolution in particular has multiple menu control schemes for different platforms. For examples:
  • Arcade (SuperNOVA 2 and older): Left triangular button to go up or left, right button to go down or right, square button to confirm. Hold both left and right buttons then press square button to sort songs (some versions only require left + right) or go back at options menu. Down arrow twice to increase difficulty, up arrow twice to decrease difficulty. Right arrow twice to switch to edit data for currently highlighted song, left arrow twice to back out of edit data selection. To access options menu, hold square button when confirming a song selection; exiting the options menu starts the song.
    • DDR X now has a new cabinet with added vertical triangular buttons for menus, meaning Left+ Right+ Start is still sort at the song selection menu, but no longer works for the options menu because it's been replaced by the up button.
  • PS2 (Japan, DDR EXTREME and older): Left to go up or left, right to go down or right, O or Start to confirm, X to go back or toggle in and out of edit data selection, hold X to quit. Up twice to decrease difficulty, down twice to increase difficulty. Hold O or Start when confirming song to access options menu, and exiting the options menu starts the song.
  • PS2 (Japan, DDR SuperNOVA and newer): Same as above, but to access the options menu, move difficulty selection past the bottom of the list and hit confirm while difficulty is on "Options". Exiting the options menu kicks you back to the Song Select menu. Edit data is usually in its own folder.
  • PS2 (US): Same as PS2, Japan, SuperNOVA and newer, except X or Start to confirm, triangle to go back.
• DJ Max Portable 2 is a rhythm game; in 4 button mode, the middle columns use the 'upmost' buttons on both sides of the PSP, and in 6 button mode the middle columns use the right button on the d-pad and the left button on the right.
• The Guitar Hero series and Rock Band have similar "guitars", but totally different timing.
  • Guitar Hero III has a larger timing window and a completely different hammer-on system than Rock Band. In GH3, there was no limit to how early you could hit a hammer-on or pull-off as long as it came after the previous note. However, in Rock Band, taking the GH3 course of action would result in the loss of your note streak as, rather predictably, you're hammering on/pulling off to a note that isn't there yet.
  • There's also different timing windows between the various Guitar Hero games themselves. Switching from Guitar Hero III, with its relatively large timing window, back to GH2 or forward to one of the more recent titles can cause some frustration.
  • Drums are even worse. For Rock Band, there are four drum pads laid out in an arc. For Guitar Hero, there are 3 drums and 2 cymbals positioned above the drums. And even if you use one drum set for both, it'll really mess with you because the drums are charted differently (in Rock Band', pretty much each drum other than the red can be a tom or a cymbal, while in Guitar Hero each will only be a tom or a cymbal, meaning that using the Guitar Hero set while playing Rock Band can require you to play a tom roll on a cymbal, which just seems completely wrong), meaning that a song will have a completely different feel from one game to another.
    • In Rock Band while drumming, the noteboard shakes every time you successfully hit a bass kick. In Guitar Hero, the noteboard shaking means that you missed a beat. That can really mess you up.
  • When Guitar Hero and Rock Band share a song, due to differences in note charts, players can be royally screwed over if they're used to playing the song in one game but not the other. A severe example of this is Motörhead's re-recorded version of "Ace of Spades", which appears on both Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero: Metallica; the note charts for it have absolutely nothing in common.
    • There are a few songs that have altered charts within a series as well (such as Through the Fire and Flames, which was changed in Guitar Hero 3 and Guitar Hero: Smash Hits as well as in Rock Band 3/4 and Rock Band 4's Rivals update [That's right - This happened within the same game!]).
  • It gets worse when you mix Guitar Hero/Rock Band Guitars and actual Guitars.
    • Reversed when you consider Rock Band 3, for which you can choose to use an actual guitar for a controller. After heavy playing in the game, the sudden realization that you can play guitar away from the game is some serious Fuck Yeah Muscle Memory.
  • In a much less aggravating example, in Rock Band 2, when you browsed the song list, hitting the yellow button scrolls you to the next section of songs. In Rock Band 3, it's the orange button that does that, and the yellow one brings up the online leaderboard for the song.
• After getting decent at riffs of songs like "Cliffs of Dover" on Expert, it becomes impossible to play them on Hard.
• Do not attempt to play Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Arcade immediately after playing one of the console or handheld editions. If you must, play one of the easy songs to get used to the button layout (which is a horizontal line of four buttons rather than two sets of diamonds), or you will most likely get screwed.
  • The same can be said when playing the spinoff Project Mirai since the default icons uses the face buttons, one of which is an X^NoteFor PS controllers, the X button is at the bottom of the diamond. In the 3DS, it's at the top.. Thankfully, Project Mirai has the option to change the icons to use the directional buttons instead.
• Popn Music has two difficulty scales: The classic 1-43 scale used up until pop'n music 19 Tune Street, and the current 1-50 scale used in pop'n music Sunny Park. Preexisting charts are, by default, increased 6 levels; levels 1-6 are Easier Than Easy charts. A player trying to transition from an older game to Sunny Park may play easier charts by accident due to not being familiar with the new rating scale and forgetting to add 6, which is a little annoying but not so bad. However, someone going from Sunny Park to an older game seriously needs to make sure they are choosing the correct difficulties, as a six-level increase in difficulty is not to be taken lightly at all. Remember, level 43 on the older scale does not mean "fairly advanced chart" like in Sunny Park, it means "one of the hardest in the series!"
• Power Gig: Rise of the SixString
  • When using a Guitar Hero or Rock Band guitar controller, tilting the guitar won't activate "Mojo", the game's equivalent of "Star Power" in Guitar Hero and "Overdrive" in Rock Band, as Power Gig's default guitar controller lacks a tilt sensor. Also, the whammy bar can't be used to manipulate sustained notes.
  • In both Rock Band and Guitar Hero, despite using four and five pads respectively, the bass drum note uses a special gem spanning the target area. In Power Gig, the bass drum note is a gem in the middle of the track, which can throw off players accustomed to the Guitar Hero drum kit.
• This trope is why you don't buy third-party rhythm game controllers that strongly deviate from the first-party controller. Examples include the "Rave Discman" controller for IIDX and the first-edition MadCatz dance pad for Dance Dance Revolution. The latter, by the way, puts Select and Start directly above the Up tile, rather than above the much-less-used X and O tiles. Most DDR games assign Select+Start to Soft Reset. Guess what might happen every time you try to hit Up?
• Auditory example in DS Rhythm Game Rhythm Heaven. Some songs feature Suspiciously Similar Song versions of real life songs — specifically, Shoot 'Em Up is "Hotel California", Frog Hop is "I Feel Good" (more noticeable in the sax arrangement from tier 7) — which screws up people who automatically try and follow those songs, instead of the actual beat.
  • Similarly, in Elite Beat Agents, one of the levels is the song "Rock This Town". What can catch a player off-guard is that it's based on the Brian Setzer Orchestra version of the song, not the original Stray Cats version. The two have similar rhythms, being the same song, but the former is swing and the latter is rock, making them just different enough to wreck you if you get confused.
• Switch from Show by Rock!! to another mobile rhythm game without adjusting rhythm timing will lead to subpar note judgements or in case of Tokyo 7th Sisters, outright combo breaking. This is very pronounced with hold notes which end with a tap note: The former grants perfect judgement when the hold and tap notes are released simultaneously, but the latter will break combos due to possibility of the end of hold note giving good instead of great (perfect is practically impossible with it).
• Invoked in Space Channel 5 during the final boss. The whole game, you've been told to match the directions your opponents do, but here, you have to do the opposite, leading to many a mistake if you've practiced hard.
• If you are transitioning from consumer Theatrhythm Final Fantasy games to Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: All-star Carnival, remember that AsC has Double Triggers and does not let you change your party after the first stage of your credit. Conversely, if you are going from AsC to 3DS, note that if you play in Button Style, the game will not register any Slide Triggers if you're holding a button down (thus it is easy to hit a Touch Trigger and then miss the Slide Trigger immediately after it), unlike in AsC where 1. having a button held down while moving either slider is allowed and 2. that's necessary for the "Slider and Button" variety of Double Triggers.
• A common mechanic in most rhythm games is something called the hold note, where you have to hold the input down. The problem is what to do at the end of the hold note is where games differ. Most games don't mind if you keep the input down when the note ends, but some games, such as beatmania, require you to hold the note down and lift off at the end, even putting a note where it is to tell you that it's something you need to "hit." Switching between rhythm games that have a hold-note-lift-off mechanic and don't can be jarring, so it's best to assume every hold note requires a lift-off at the end.

Racing

• As an overarching issue, moving between various racing games forced players to adapt to using the left and right triggers or the face buttons.
  • Even before the Xbox, the Sega Saturn had the 3D Control Pad (Multi-Controller in Japan) with analog triggers, which first-party racing games used to great effect alongside the main analog nub. The Sega Dreamcast just continued the trend to the point that Sega fans moving to the Xbox would've been perfectly at home.
• Have fun retraining your driving habits when going from FWD to RWD cars, and especially from front-engine to mid/rear-engine layouts! Managing understeer and oversteer is very different between them, and braking points come much earlier on rear-engined cars because braking mid-turn like a front-engine one is a terrible idea for maintaining traction.
• Play some kind of arcadey racer with drifting and whatnot, and then try to play a very realistic sim racer like Forza Motorsport or Gran Turismo.
• F-Zero, the SNES title and uses B to accelerate and A to boost. While X and GX default to A for acceleration and B for boost. Maximum Velocity, GP Legend and Climax uses B to brake instead and holding both L and R is what activates the boost (due to the GBA's limited buttons).
• Gran Turismo: the fact that reversing in the GT series requires you to hold square to brake until you stop, then hold triangle to actually reverse, in contrast to just about every other driving game, which uses the more arcadey scheme of just holding square.
• Initial D Arcade Stage. Versions 1 through 3 in both the international and Japanese version, as well as Japanese/Asian cabinets for Initial D Arcade Stage 4 and above, have the shifter on the left. The US version of IDAS4: The shifter is on the right.
• Mario Kart:
  • Although not messing with the interface, Mario Kart takes full advantage of this by including "Mirror Mode" starting in Mario Kart 64. It's the hardest difficulty level, and the only difference between it and the next one down is that all the tracks are flipped horizontally, forcing the player to relearn the courses and make left turns where they previously took rights, and vice-versa.
  • Try this: Play Mario Kart Wii with a GameCube controller. Once you're used to it, play Mario Kart: Double Dash!! with a GameCube controller, or vice versa. "Hey, I wanted to look behind! I'm sure I pulled a stunt off that ramp... What happened to the mini-turbo?" are but a few of the questions you'll ask yourself.
  • Somewhat lesser known is that if you press down on the D-Pad on Mario Kart 7, you switch to "tilt" mode where you turn the 3DS to steer. Simple enough, but the Trick command is still mapped to the shoulder Jump button - in Mario Kart Wii you jerked the Wii Remote up to do the same thing. Wheel Users in Wii found their 3DS screens flying off if they do this too much with their more fragile handheld.
  • Did you get used to using the snaking technique in Mario Kart DS? It doesn't work in the later games and for some that were used to snaking all the time, they were left wondering why they slid off the road or weren't going any faster.
  • The Mario Kart games usually have the "A" button used as the accelerator. This doesn't work in Super Mario Kart where "A" is used for items and accelerating is done with the "B" button while the same button is used as the brakes in all later games.
  • Moving between any of the other Mario Kart games and Mario Kart Tour can require adjustment. As the latter doesn't have brakes and activates drifting differently due to requiring touch controls on smartphones, not only are doing certain actions a bit different and require different timing, but certain course elements are radically different. One notable example is N64 Kalamari Desert - in other versions, the train is an obstacle that can hurt drivers, and brave or invincible drivers can cut through the train tunnel as a shortcut. In Tour, the train is a trick opportunity that will give a minor speed boost and points, and the tunnel is unavailable (except for in Kalamari Desert 2, where there are fences at points and the tunnel becomes mandatory for all drivers). This works both ways - some courses are easier in Tour, while other courses become harder depending on what gets adjusted.
• Reversing in Midtown Madness 3 depends on whether you have automatic or manual transmission selected. In automatic, the player simply holds brake (left trigger) until they reverse. In manual, the player has to stop, downshift to reverse, then hold accelerate (right trigger).
• Need for Speed franchise have too frequent Genre Shifts between games to the point your skills obtained from one couldn't be used in another, depending on the game.
  • Try jumping into realistic simulation entries like ProStreet or Shift, after you played arcadey Hot Pursuit or Underground. You have a hard time learning to tackle the corners with your braking techniques.
  • Try migrating over from 2010 Hot Pursuit to Shift 2: Unleashed, particularly with the nitro boost/handbrake being switched from A/B to B/A on an Xbox controller.
• Try and play Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing on the PC, Xbox 360, or PlayStation 3. It's a faithful Mario Kart clone with a completely different button layout ^note right shoulder button to accelerate, left shoulder button to drift, A button to shoot items and no option to change the settings (even when playing with a keyboard on the PC). The Wii version averts this, though: its button layout is identical to Mario Kart Wii's.
• TrackMania United Forever has 7 environments with 7 cars with completely different handling. Most TrackMania servers have a playlist of tracks on all environments in random order. Going from Desert to Stadium or from Snow to Bay will cause you to overshoot the first turn. Going from Coast (100 km/h average speed) to Island (many tracks are pegged at 999 km/h all the way) is worse.
  • Today there exist hex edited tracks that have the cars from one environment in another environment, and even if you get the speed intuitively right, the gravity is different between car types. Cue repeatedly faceplanting the landing ramp of 'easy' jumps with a Snow car in Stadium because it dropped like a brick - before the server switches over to another Stadium track, this time featuring the Coast car and its moon gravity.
  • The track editor in TrackMania has two distinct modes. The one where you place track pieces, which uses the arrow keys or mouse to move around, PgUp and PgDown to change the elevation of your cursor, right click to rotate the piece and the scroll wheel zooms in and out. And the one where you place SFX blocks ("Mediatracker"), which uses the arrow keys to move and strafe in some sort of primitive flight sim approximation (+ and - control movement speed), right click and hold to rotate the camera, and the scroll wheel changes the elevation of your cursor. Yet in both modes you do the exact same thing: select a location in three-dimensional space and place something there. GRRRRRRR.
• If you play Wangan Midnight in Western countries, you usually play on the version of the cabinet that has the shifter on the right, just like in countries such as the United States. In Asian countries, you will most likely come across a different variation of the cabinet where the shifter is on the left, which is how it's done in Japan where the game takes place. Australia has both types of cabinets depending on the arcade and version (post-4 cabinets are exclusively right-hand-drive, 3DX+ may have either).
• The PlayStation installments of the WipEout series seems to change its mind over control layout between games. It's generally accepted that X is accelerate but beyond that the remaining buttons move about a lot. Fusion was the worse, when it took fire from one of the face buttons (its traditional place) to a shoulder button for some reason.
• Pole Position on Jakks-Pacific's Ms. Pac-Man Plug N Play Game is controlled by twisting the joystick left and right. Every other game on the Plug 'n' Play is controlled using the joystick normally, and when Pole Position appears in Namco Museum compilations, steering the car is usually done using the same controls as moving the player left and right in other games.

Roguelikes

• Moving between Roguelikes is always a harrowing experience because all the monsters and classes are different, but this trope makes it even worse. As an example, some of the more crippling differences between ADOM and NetHack, two of the more popular roguelikes:
  • Most Roguelikes assign 'q' to "quaff" (for using a potion). ADOM uses 'D' for "drink" instead, with 'q' being "display quest status."
  • In NetHack, you can use yuhjklbn to move. In ADOM, you have to use the numpad.
  • In ADOM, all equipment management is done on the [i]nventory screen. In NetHack, you have to [W]ear and [T]ake off armor, [P]ut on and [R]emove jewelry, and [w]ield weapons. But in, ADOM, T changes tactics, P, W, and R display different kinds of statistics, and w turns a subsequent move into a long walk.
  • Perhaps the worst: In NetHack, you can [Q]uiver your missiles to make shooting them easier...but in ADOM, Q is Quit.
  • Moving from Dungeon Crawl to other roguelikes will cause you to hit the 'o' key a lot, since that is the autoexplore key in DCSS.

Role-Playing Games

• A fun part of RPG mechanics. Roll your first character as a melee tank, for example, then roll a second that's a ranged healer. Watch chaos ensue for a while when you have to swap between the two.
• A few RPGs between the late 90's, early 2000, decided to be different and totally screw up the button mapping for no real reason. Examples:

  • Not only does this put the Accept button in the wrong place compared to the last game (even though this is the standard from this point forward), it also places the Menu button in a strange place. Pretty much every other Final Fantasy uses the upper button, even the SNES ones, which makes this a confusing change. Luckily you can rebind the keys to be more familiar.

  • All of the Breath of Fire games past 2 use something like: X - Accept, O - Run, Square - Menu, Triangle — Cancel/Special Action. A few of Capcom's other games followed this pattern too.
• A rare example of muscle memory failure within a game: in Achaea, there are multiple worldwide chat channels. Each message typed is directed according to the prefix at the start. This can lead to players getting used to automatically rattling off their favourite channel's prefix — which is fine... until they're trying to say something private, and forget not to do it.
  • This is true for most any MUD, MUSH, or MUCK that has worldwide channels, and it's frequently hilarious.
• Here's an example that applies to game mechanics rather than button layout. When sneaking past a surveillance camera in Alpha Protocol, your only options are to stay out of the camera's line of vision or disable it with an EMP grenade. If you attempt to shoot the camera, which disables security cameras in nearly every other stealth video game ever made, it instantly triggers the security alarm and puts every guard in the map on maximum alert. The game tells you this exactly once, during a (completely optional!) stealth tutorial, and expects you to remember it for the rest of the 10+ hour campaign. Have fun!
• Brandish for the SNES has a default control scheme that gave many unsuspecting players a nasty shock when they found out that pressing left and right on the D-pad rotates the game window 90 degrees instead of moving sideways (which is mapped to the shoulder buttons by default).
• The vast majority of MMORPGs use a fairly standard control scheme, with WASD reserved for normal movement while Q and E are for strafing. For reasons unknown, City of Heroes uses a default scheme wherein Q and E 'turn' rather than strafe, thus leading to infinite frustration if you're accustomed to other MMO schemes. It doesn't help that the game's right-click mouselook locks the camera into place after you release the key.
• Some very deranged individual on the Dark Souls dev team thought it would be a good idea to assign both blocking with your shield and aiming the bow and arrow in first person to the same button, in a game where your character can be adept with both melee and ranged weapons and benefit from such. What this means is that the same button that will protect you from death in close quarter combat becomes the one that will result in your death should you follow your usual combative emergency instincts.
  • The sequel changes the jump controls to clicking the left stick while running, which, while odd and confusing, is much more intuitive than double-clicking the button you're already holding. But come Bloodborne the L3 jump is gone and no option exists to put it back.
  • Speaking of Bloodborne, the game plays almost exactly like Dark Souls aside from a few key differences: Triangle, which used to two-hand a weapon now is the dedicated heal button while two-handing (or rather, switching stances) is L1. Magic no longer exists, and thus up on the D-pad now spends health to give you five more bullets. Shields are also no longer a thing, so blocking and parrying is now replaced by tapping L2 to shoot your gun to try and ripost enemies. The game is also much faster overall, rewarding aggressive playstyles and overwhelming offence, compared to the much more defensive Dark Souls. And finally, backstabbing is now performed by knocking the enemy down first with a Charge Attack then attacking.
  • Elden Ring remaps some of its controls to make room for a dedicated jump button. Expect veteran Souls players to spend the first couple hours of the game jumping every time they try to interact with items in the environment. The same goes for two-handing a weapon, which now requires you to press Y/Triangle + L1 or R1, making players frantically press Y/Triangle in the heat of the battle and wonder why it isn't doing anything.
• Speaking of BioWare, switching between Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect on the Xbox 360 is a pain.
  • Dragon Age: Start = Pause menu (save/load/options/etc); Select Back = Game menu (inventory/equipment/quests/etc)
  • Mass Effect: Start = Menu (save/load/options/etc AND inventory/equip/missions/etc); Back = throw a grenade.
  • In Mass Effect 2, Start pulls up the menu, and Back holsters your weapon. In ME1, you holster your weapon by pressing B. In ME2, B is the melee attack. (Which, in ME1, you automatically do when you press RT while standing directly in front of an enemy. Now, in ME2, RT always fires your equipped weapon, no matter how close you are to an enemy.)
• Dragon Age does this between games. While the controls remain mostly the same, the radial menu that handles most tactics has had its layout strongly altered between games. Strangely, most of the 8 items haven't changed, but only one of them (Talents/spells) is in the same place in both games. Most irritatingly, "Quick Heal's" spot in Origins is "Quick Mana/Stamina" in the sequel, so you may wind up burning your Lyrium potions/Stamina draughts as you die messily.
  • For PC gamers, the Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II Spacebar = Pause. For Dragon Age: Inquisition, Spacebar = Jump. Now imagine players' frustration when their controlled character just kept jumping while dying gruesomely (which usually just sped the process along) instead of pausing to take stock as that button had always done.
  • Nearly every console game uses the D-pad for navigating menus. In Dragon Age: Inquisition menus, the D-pad either does nothing or switches between characters. You uses the left stick for navigation.
• In Dragon Quest V, the X will do many things, including talk to people, open doors, and searching; it's convenient compared to the menu, so you'll probably use it a lot. Dragon Quest VI remaps this to the Y button; you'll accidentally be remembering a lot of conversations instead if you're used to the X button.
• Dwarf Fortress did this to itself. In versions 40D and previous, Space pauses and unpauses. Space exits most menus. F9 exits menus with text entry. In versions 31.X (the numbering scheme was changed after 40d) Space pauses/unpauses, Escape exits all menus. The idea was to simplify the interface and allow menus to stay up while you toggle pause. It was received poorly.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • Go from any installment to any other installment and you'll run into this problem, guaranteed. A few notable examples:
    • In the PC version of Morrowind, "E" is used to jump while the Space bar is used to 'activate' things (pick up loose items, open containers, use doors, talk to NPCss, etc.). Oblivion and Skyrim switch the function of these keys. Going from one to the other in either direction leads to a lot of jumping in front of things you are trying to activate.
    • A particularly frustrating example occurs on the PS3 when going between Oblivion and Skyrim. Oblivion uses the R2 key to move items. Skyrim remaps it to use Shouts instead. Coupled with natural lag on the PS3 at higher levels, and the lag brought on from processing the bytes that make up the items flying around the room, an accidental press in Skyrim can be agonizing.
  • This can also happen when going between the Elder Scrolls games and their Fallout sister series, also produced by Bethesda from Fallout 3 onwards, which use the same or very similar engines. These games feature similar controls to Oblivion and Skyrim, particularly in the overworld. However, open a container and a muscle memory based button press can lead to some drastically different results. (Such as removing thousands of pounds of gear from your storage chest, making you over-encumbered and forcing you to put it all back one item at a time...)
• Eternal Sonata attempts to do this within itself. For most of the game, using the Xbox 360 controls, B is for defense when attacked, A is for attacking, as well as counterattacking in special defense circumstances, and Y is for Special Attacks. Achieve Party Level 6 and opt to use it, however, and these three buttons are subject to what's known as the Moving Command: every time you use a Special Attack, including at each point in a Harmony Chain, the functions are randomly reassigned. (All other buttons, including X for item use, retain their functions.) Why would you put yourself through Party Level 6? Well, that gives you the ability to chain 6 Special Attacks (usually both attacks for the appropriate light level for each character) together, as opposed to only 3. Players are thereby encouraged to check the onscreen control scheme each time they activate one.
  • Gaining the ability to (for Xbox 360) press A to counterattack after training your thumb to press B to block for over two-thirds of the game can be frustrating.
• There are numerous differences between Fable II and its predecessor. Sprint became magic, and one button got at least three more functionalities, depending on context (which are easy to miss...how many times did you accidentally jump over, jump off, or dive into something?)
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead came out within a couple months of one another. Woe to anyone who went straight from one to the other, for in Fallout 3, the right bumper pauses the action and zooms in on the enemy for a quick kill, while in Left 4 Dead, the same button does a quick 180 degree turn.
  • Playing Fallout 4 within the same time frame as Fallout 3 or New Vegas can have you accidentally bashing an NPC with your weapon when you wanted to enter VATS. Also, waiting in 4 can only be done sitting down and using Y/Triangle. Trying to wait standing up like in the previous games will cause you go into third-person.
• This happens a lot in the Final Fantasy games:
  • In Final Fantasy VI, Sabin's Blitz command is used by inputting button combos as in a fighting game, but the input is always the same regardless of which way Sabin's facing. If you're used to actual fighting games you'll likely instinctively flip the combos when Sabin faces the other direction during a back or a pincer attack, which causes the command to fail.
  • Final Fantasy VII had the same problem as Tactics, making the set controls the Japanese version. Unfortunately, though you can change the control scheme, the chocobo menu wasn't coded properly for the changed controls, meaning that you can't navigate it if you switched X and O as a fan of a later Final Fantasy would almost certainly do.
    • This actually leads to a minor Game-Breaking Bug in which in order to proceed, you need to dig up a Lunar Harp in bone village. The issue here is that it is buried on the upper floor and for some reason, the action button to climb the ladder will not work if you switched the controls. Which leads to another case of DYMM!
  • Final Fantasy VIII's default mapping was as follows: X - Accept, O - Menu, Triangle - Cancel/Run. Funny when its predecessor used the Japanese default controls and the successor used the US default controls.
    • Unlike almost every other game with a save function, the game also defaults to the last save slot that you saved to, not to the one you loaded from. This makes it ridiculously easy to save in the wrong slot, especially if you're sharing a memory card with someone else.
  • In Final Fantasy X, Triangle causes you to guard. In Persona 4, Triangle puts your party in Rush Mode (an auto-Attack! Attack! Attack! mode). This is even better if you're playing P4 on Expert difficulty.
• The battle system has little to no changes between Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XIII-2, except for the fact that the Ravager's spells are arranged by power in the former (e.g. Fire, Thunder, Blizzard...), and by element in the latter (e.g. Fire, Fira, Firaga...), leading to awkward situations where you may accidentally make your characters use high-level magic of the wrong element. The only saving grace is that you have to confirm an action queue before it is executed (but it still wastes time).
  • Lightning Returns has a drastically different battle system from the above two XIII games. This means that if you go back from LR to XIII or XIII-2, you will inevitably open up your Paradigm menu when trying to change strategies, due to the shared shoulder button inputs.
  • The Steam version of Final Fantasy XV averts this with prompts if you're playing on a controller. The first part is the game can detect if you're using a DualShock 4 or an Xbox controller and change the button prompt graphics accordingly. Otherwise, it has a clever way it has of showing which button to press when a prompt comes up: It'll show a generic diagram of the face-buttons while highlighting which button to press. Since most controllers have the same face button layout, this makes it unambiguous which button to press.
  • The US release of Final Fantasy Tactics uses O for confirm and X for cancel, while the other PlayStation Final Fantasy games use the reverse (in Japan, they all work like Tactics). This is more or less endemic; most US games default to X to confirm and O to cancel, and most Japanese games do the reverse.
    • The PSP remake of the original game reversed the reversal, making X confirm and O cancel leading to some problems for fans of the original since actions can not be canceled after being selected.
  • Switching between normal and arcade modes on Dissidia Final Fantasy can invoke this within the same game, since the characters available in arcade mode have fixed moves and button placements while normally both of these are available for customization. Protip: Either don't use the same character for each mode or match your moveset to the fixed one ahead of time and practice with it.
    • In Dissidia Final Fantasy, the Chase system allows you to follow an enemy after using certain attacks that knock them in the air. In the Prequel, Dissidia 012 Duodecim, the timing is drastically different, making dodging while being chased incredibly awkward for players of the first game.
• In 99% of PS2 games, the right joystick controls the camera. This is almost true in Final Fantasy XII, where it controls the view. In other words, to pan the view to the right, you push the joystick to the right. Sounds intuitive to you? WRONG! In many third person action games, pushing the joystick to the right moves the camera to the right, thus the field of view is expanded on the left. The same goes for up/down controls.
  • The same complaint goes to Skies of Arcadia, at least the GameCube port.
  • Fortunately, many, many games now allow players to select how they want that axis to function. Which is really standard and which is really inverted, however, is yet to be decided, leading to guessing before starting a game.
• Many fans of the Golden Sun series will find themselves playing through Golden Sun: Dark Dawn holding down B to run, even though your character is now always running. Both Golden Sun games on the GBA has Start open up the save/options menu and Select opening in game menus (magic, items, etc) while most other games have the two functions swapped.
• In Guild Wars 2, you have access to a variety of tools for slowing or stopping your fall if you, say, dive off a cliff (a surprisingly common activity in the game after the Heart of Thorns expansion.) You may become very used to having the glider, which you probably have set to activate by holding the space-bar (especially because it is slightly faster than running with the right Masteries equipped, making it a useful speedrunning tool). Now, step into other MMORPGS, where you don't have this function, or where equivalents are tied to different keys, and watch yourself fall to your death a lot. Or, worse, step into any of the game's pre-Heart of Thorns instanced areas, all of which lock the glider! (And a few of the new ones do on top.)
  • Not helped by the fact that the game also locks the glider and mounts when on most Jumping Puzzles... Except when it forgets to lock both out. Which is fairly often.
• The PC port of Halo: Combat Evolved allowed to map the buttons on a gamepad freely. The one for Halo 2 is restricted to four Bungie-chosen button setups specifically thought for an Xbox controller, and they aren't much different from each other (i.e. Southpaw just changes the triggers).
• Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 came out roughly at the same time. The controls are similar with the very important change that Halo's "pick up weapon / reload" button became "drop grenade" in Call of Duty. This led to multiple instances of one blowing oneself up, or other players.
  • Additionally, attempting to aim down the sights makes you go prone in every non-Call of Duty FPS.
    • Subverted by almost every FPS with iron sights released in the wake of Call of Duty 4. The default controls are almost exactly the same as Call of Duty 4s, with Circle/B as crouch and L1/LT is sights. In addition, many games that did not have Iron Sights in previous installments added them in.
    • The L Trigger, which is used to aim down the sights in Call of Duty, is used to throw a grenade in Halo 3. Ouch.
  • A similar "blow yourself up" bit appears when switching between Halo 3 and Rainbow Six: Vegas 2. A good example of this was shown in Achievement Hunter's Let's Play of the game, when Gavin Free, in his attempt to cover, reflexively hit the B button and was forced to run in a panic. Between his laughs and Jack's, Gavin sputters out "B is... B is not cover; B is grenade!" He attributed the mixup to recently playing Splinter Cell Blacklist. Geoff had earlier mistaken B as run, but had managed to get outside of the grenade's blast radius.
    • Or even between Halo 3 and the rest of the series.
    • Another Call of Duty button that got Geoff mixed up was the reload button; in the Call of Duty games that button's X. In Grand Theft Auto IV X is jump/vault; reload there is B. The mix-up happens partway into the first match of 'Wanted X', where after killing Ray Geoff hit X planning to reload only to suddenly vault over the nearby railing and plummet a ways down. He even shouted "X is not reload!" as soon as he saw his character vault the nearby railing.
  • Crysis 2 and the Call of Duty games both use L1/LT for sights and R1/RT for firing, Crysis 2 uses LB/L2 for armor and RB/R2 for cloak. What are L2/LB and R2/RB for the latter? Throw 'nades. Oh dear. Also, go from the former to any other recent game. Sprint and then crouch. Wonder why you aren't sliding.
  • In addition, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on the PC moved "melee attack" from V to E. When pounced on by a dog in either game, there is a quicktime-like event where the player must hit the melee attack key with a specific timing to prevent death. It's very easy to hit V, miss the window, and get one's throat torn out (not that the dogs ever played fair with the timing anyway).
    • Call of Duty 3 was the first game in the series where you could throw back enemy grenades. The problem in this game was that the button to pick up the grenade was the same one used to reload, while actually throwing it still used the standard grenade button. Call of Duty 4 fixed this, so that picking up and throwing the grenades were merged into using the same button.
    • Try going from Call of Duty 4 back to the first two games. Hit the Shift key when your allies get too far ahead and end up smacking one of them across the face with your rifle, because Shift is now your melee key and sprinting is not a thing outside of the first game's expansion.
    • Even better, try going from Black Ops 4 to literally any other Call of Duty before it. You've just been shot, you instinctively try to heal yourself... and you end up blinding yourself with a flashbang.
    • But wait, there's more! The next three games after Black Ops 4 all have a peice of equipment that functions identially to that game's healing stims, so theoretically this can now happen within a match. You could get used to a class with the stims equipped, then switch to a class with stun grenades, and...
  • And now we have Halo: Reach's default controls, which are quite a bit different from the default controls in any other Halo game. While the default controls place reload/action on X like it was in Halo 1 & 2, which can be easy to adjust to if you still play those two regularly, the biggest change is the placement of melee on RB and grenade toggle on B. Melee had previously always been on B by default, while RB was the default reload/action button in Halo 3. If you've been playing Halo 3 exclusively, you might find yourself meleeing when trying to reload or switching between grenade types when trying to melee. Fortunately, there's the "Recon" control layout, which is very close to Halo 3's default layout, with RB being reload/action and B being melee. However, even it differs from Halo 3's default controls, as grenade type toggle is on X instead of LB, while LB now activates armor abilities (in Halo 3, LB toggled grenades while X deployed equipment). Confused yet?
    • Not to mention if, while playing Reach, you get used to being able to zoom in with a pistol, or use night-vision—because you may find yourself stupidly trying to activate the latter in Halo 3, or wondering "where's the little crosshairs?" for the former. And don't even start with the differences between Reach's and any other Halo's Assault Rifle. What is this box-like thing I'm wielding?! However, in its defense, the H3 pistol is insanely powerful.
    • The muscle memory issues get even worse with Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians, since they adopt more Call of Duty style conventions to the controls (you can now sprint with LS, crouch has been moved over to B, and every gun now has a "Smart-Link" or aim-down-sights mode), Halo 5 adds mid-air thrusters not present in the classic games alongside mid-air ground-pounding and sprinting melee attacks, the D-Pad is used for switching grenade types, and while Halo 5 has a Halo 4 control scheme, nothing quite approximates the Halo 1 or 2 layout.
  • Also, Resistance: Fall of Man. Resistance was already hard. Stop making me go back over a section because you put 'throw grenade' where 'whack enemy across face until dead' used to be!
    • Especially aggravating because the player has seconds to sit and realize just how badly they screwed up before the grenade goes off. In an ironic twist, Resistance's grenades have decent and realistic splash damage as compared to other games' 'bunny fart' grenades. There's no way in hell you're getting away in time even with the three second delay; have fun with that, especially since you want to toss one specific type of grenade (Backlash) near yourself to make the best use of it.
    • Even worse with Killzone 2, where Resistance's grenade button becomes 'use'.
• Jade Empire's controls reset whenever the player runs the game. This is incredibly annoying since any custom scheme has to be remapped every time, and because the game is so old, it will never be patched.
• Kingdom Hearts manages to use three different camera control schemes in all three PS2 games that have been released to date, as well as three different battle schemes (although KH1 and KH2's are relatively similar).
  • The final boss of Kingdom Hearts II has a final attack you must alternate pressing X and Triangle to defend against. Everything else in the game uses Triangle.
  • On top of that, when Kingdom Hearts came out, the only other real Squaresoft action-RPG (not counting the RPG minigame in Ehrgeiz) was Vagrant Story. The movement controls are the same. The camera controls are exactly flipped.
  • Not to mention using "X" to attack and "O" to jump is exactly the opposite of... nearly every other PS2 game with a jump function.
  • Try having Aerial Recovery equipped for most of KH2, then switching to its more offensive clone, Retaliating Slash, assigned to the square button. Completely opposite of Aerial Recovery's circle assignment. Have fun wondering why you aren't attacking or at least recovering from a hit.
  • Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep has controls pretty similar to KH2's yet everything that was done with the Triangle button, opening chests, activating Save Points and talking to NPCs, is now relegated to the X button, with triangle being how you use commands in your command deck, making it really easy to waste a potion.
    • And then Re:coded came along, using a variant of Birth By Sleep's Command Deck system. The Air Dash has changed from hitting "dodge" in the air to hitting "jump" in the air.
    • And after that we have Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] confusing things even MORE. Being on the 3DS, it has the attack and jump buttons in the same positions as Re:coded, but has the air dash on the dodge button like Birth By Sleep does.
    • Try going back to I after playing Dream Drop Distance. You'll find yourself trying to Flowmotion off the walls.
  • The biggest cause for most of the above muscle memory is the result of Kingdom Hearts playing like a menu-based RPG. If you've played... just about any Final Fantasy game aside from Lightning Returns, then thinking "menu" rather than "action" makes everything a hell of a lot easier.
  • In Dream Drop Distance, your "party members" are Good Counterpart Palette Swaps of the local Mooks, making it easy to mistake the former for the latter in the heat of battle and waste one of your moves attacking your own allies. Fortunately, they're Friendly Fireproof and your commands regenerate fairly quickly, but it is still annoying.
• The most irritating thing about the PSP game Legend of Heroes IV: A Tear of Vermillion is saving. The confirm button in-game is the cancel button when saving, and vice versa.
  • This problem crops up a lot in PSP games, as they use a standard save/load API built into the firmware—if the game and XMB disagree over which button is accept and which is cancel, the controls will normally switch here.
• A series that can do this within itself is the Mario & Luigi series. In the first game, the Start button switches leaders from Mario to Luigi, and Select opens the menu. In the second game, you can't switch leaders, and Start merely pauses the game — however, you can separate from the babies, and you switch between them by pressing one of their buttons (A or B for the adults, X or Y for the babies). I guarantee you you will try to switch from babies to adults or vice versa by pressing Start. The second game also has the added confusion of having the hammer in battle mapped to X and Y, rather than A and B like all the other games. Even worse, later on in the third game Bowser gains the ability to jump... by pressing Y.
  • Enemies can do it too. Just get used to dodging attacks from endgame enemies, which usually require inhuman reflexes, and then try to fight ordinary Goombas. You will try to dodge MUCH earlier than you actually need to.
    • Speaking of dodging, many attacks are dodged by jumping. Other attacks are dodged by...not jumping. Even if you work out whether or not you actually need to jump, it'll be hard to beat your reflexes and stay still, especially if the enemy changes back and forth between the two methods.
• The controls in the PC port of Mass Effect were as follows: E activates objects, L-Shift lets you sprint (or "Storm," as it is called in game), and holding Space brings up the power wheel. Mass Effect 2 completely reverses this, making the leap from 1 to 2 quite jarring: Space is now both the activate and sprint key, while holding L-Shift brings up the power wheel. E is then used to command one of your squad members. Fortunately, the keys are re-mappable.
  • In a similar vein, the PC port for Mass Effect had R as the default key for... throwing grenades, the key that EVERY. SINGLE. OTHER. FPS uses for reloading! Granted, Mass Effect 1 doesn't require you to reload, but muscle memory for FPS players will make you hit R every time you have a break in the action, meaning usually you've just wasted a grenade, or are going to have to run for your life.
  • In Mass Effect, the B button would take you out of the galaxy map entirely, however muscle memory from other games indicates that this should have zoomed out a level instead. Mass Effect 2 switched this around, but it was too late for those who had managed to train themselves on the original control scheme. Once suitably unlearned, though, it made Mass Effect's galaxy even worse.
  • The console version of ME1 has an in-game example: during normal mode, the right bumper brings up the "powers" menu, pausing the game. During vehicle sections, the right bumper fires the cannon. Players with a biotic Shepard could easily train themselves to hit the right bumper whenever combat started, only to find that in vehicle sections that instinct made them waste cannon shots firing into the side of a mountain...
  • Mass Effect 3 multiplayer can have this effect when switching between classes (or even characters of the same class). This is due to the fact that each class+race combination has its own active skills, which are mapped to the hotkeys (1 through 3 on PC) in a fixed order and cannot be re-mapped. So, if you are playing Asari Adept and you run out of ammo, you can zap the enemy with a weak but fast Throw attack ("3") before taking cover. If you then switch to Geth Infiltrator, you soon find yourself pointlessly switching Hunter Mode on and off again, while the enemy blasts you away.
• Considering the work gone into importing save games in Mass Effect 2, it's surprising that pause and run are now on opposite keys. In fact, pause is now on a completely different key to every other recent BioWare game. Going from ME2 to ME1/Dragon Age/KOTOR results in pressing the Shift key repeatedly, until you realise you should be pressing Space. Also: going back to ME1? Don't press R... in ME2 it's reload, in ME1... grenade.
  • Also, grenades only exist as powers in ME2. See that cluster of enemies that have grouped up in one convenient blast radius? I hope you like reloading.
  • Similarly, when going back to ME1, players who were fond of melee attacks in ME2 will find themselves holstering their gun in the middle of the fight. A lot. On PC it'll have you wasting med kits instead.
  • Hold X to change guns? When most shooters use Y instead?
  • In the PS3 versions of the Mass Effect series there are several changes. For the first game L1 brings up the weapon menu and R1 brings up the powers while L2 zooms in and R2 shoots. In the second game it's the opposite and presumably a good number of people going between the two accidentally fired off a shot while trying to hack an enemy mech (and cursed at wasting a thermal clip). In the third game it keeps the configuration from the second, but now the Renegade/Paragon interrupts are L1 and R1 while in the second they were L2 and R2.
  • In the Xbox 360 versions of the Mass Effect games, the back button's function (or lack thereof) is different in each game:
    • Mass Effect: Pressing Back throws/detonates a grenade.
    • Mass Effect 2: Pressing Back puts away your weapons^note which was B in the first game... while B in the second game performs a melee attack, which didn't have a dedicated button in the first game — Shepard will automatically melee enemies if you press RT while within punching distance of an enemy.
    • Mass Effect 3: Pressing Back does nothing whatsoever. BioWare removed the ability to manually put away your weapons, probably because the function is admittedly pretty useless.
    • In conclusion: Going from ME1 to ME2 results in a lot of pointless gun-holstering as you attempt to throw nonexistent grenades. Going from ME2 to ME1 results in a lot of wasted grenades (which you have a limited number of) as you attempt to holster your guns^note and a lot of pointless gun-holstering as you attempt to punch enemies. Going from either game to ME3 results in a lot of wasted button presses that don't do anything. Going from ME3 to either of the first two games results in completely overlooking the grenade/holster functions.
• In Metal Walker, throughout the game you've been bouncing your partner off of walls to make bank shots and inflict the most damage. In the last dungeon, however, the walls are electrified and will hurt you. It's easy to forget this.
• Monster Hunter Freedom Unite: Going from this game to any other third person game on the PSP will cause much confusion. The camera is controlled with the D-pad (leading to the infamous "claw grip" with the index finger on the D-pad), the shoulders control running and camera reset, and the joystick controls movement. This a setup unique to this game, and attempting to play Renegade Squadron or Valkyria Chronicles II afterwards is very confusing.
  • Monster Hunter 3 (Tri):
    • Going from the Monster Hunter Freedom games on the PSP to this game on the Wii or backwards can be very frustrating at first. While the actual controls in battle are more or less exactly the same, the confirm (A on Wii, X on PSP) and cancel (B on Wii, Circle on PSP) are shifted around. Also, bringing up the menu (done by pressing the Start button on the PSP) is done on the Wii by hitting the Minus button. The Plus button is another attack button.
    • If you've played a game where you fire a gun/bow/whatever on the Wii, you're pretty well used to using the B button for that. Guess what it does in Monster Hunter Tri? It has you roll forward, which has lead to many very dumb deaths.
  • Monster Hunter: World:
    • The game brings this back in full force for anyone used to playing on a PSP, 3DS or Switch. The biggest problem veteran players will likely face is hitting RB/R1 for weapon attacks per 3DS/Switch convention by default, instead of RT/R2 that World expects with the default controls; in fact, hitting RB/R1 makes you sheathe your weapon, which is the last thing you want to happen when trying to block or bring down the Charge Blade's axe form in the middle of a fight!
    • Then there's using the D-Pad to cycle items in World, only to go back to a 3DS and find that it's panning your camera, or to Generations Ultimate on the Switch and set off your Hunter Arts by mistake. And then there's how you can switch the top and bottom shoulder buttons in both Generations Ultimate and World to match one or the other, but sprinting with a sheathed weapon in World always uses the other shoulder button that sheathes your weapon in the first place, whereas it's the same button that makes you block or use different attacks in the older games.
• The original Mount & Blade default controls used 1 to select everyone, 2 for infantry, 3 for archers", 4 for cavalry and 5 for "Others", i.e. those who aren't selected at that moment. The expansions added depth and changed the tactical interface, and thus, the controls: 1 is to selct Group 1 (normally, infantry), 2 for Group 2 (archers), 3 for Group 3 (cavalry), etc., with 4-9 being customizable groups, which means that when you would have wanted your archers to hold ground while cavalry and infantry charged, your archers and an empty group are charging, your cavalry is holding ground and your infantry is given no new orders. Of course, it is editable, but still.
• Present in the Neptunia series. In Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, the Square button is used for Symbol Attacks^note If you hit an enemy on the map, you get an advantage against enemies while Circle is used for searching items on the map. In Hyperdimension Neptunia V, the Square button is used for searching, X is used for Symbol Attacks, and Circle is used for jumping. This can lead to players who try to symbol attack monsters finding themselves searching for an item on the map.
• Pokémon:
  • HMs in Pokémon Red and Blue require you to actually select the move from the Pokémon menu as opposed to simply pressing A in front of the obstacle to be cleared, as every other game that uses HMs would go on to do; it isn't rare for a fan going back to these games after a long absence to wonder if Gen I was glitchier than they remembered before recalling this.
  • In Pokémon Gold and Silver and earlier, you press left for Pokémon and down for your bag. In Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, they switched it to down for Pokémon and right for your bag.
  • For years, pressing the Start button opened the menu and an inventory item could be assigned to the Select button as a shortcut. Diamond and Pearl onward changed this so Start and Select aren't normally used; by default, X opens the menu and Y is the shortcut button, though you can go back into the settings to re-enable Start to open the menu.
  • In the Nintendo 3DS installments, you can rearrange your party by holding and dragging with the stylus, similar to rearranging Pokémon in the PC. Despite also having the party on the touchscreen, the Nintendo DS games only allow Pokémon selection to be done with button inputs. Cue players going back to Diamond and Pearl or Black and White and wondering why their touchscreen isn’t working.
  • In Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, an NPC can swap the positions of the "Deposit Pokémon" and "Organize Pokémon" functions in the PC so that Deposit is third and Organize is first (or return them to original). Those who disliked extra button presses to reach the "Organize" function may like the convience, only to find themselves inadvertently pressing the "Deposit" function when they don't want it because they've gotten used to said button presses.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon are the first main series Pokémon games to lack a grid-based overworld. Those who were accustomed to using the D-Pad in Generation VI to move along the fixed grid when not using a Dowsing Machine will promptly discover that the D-Pad can no longer be used to move at all; all movement is done with the Circle Pad and the D-Pad is used as a shortcut to activate Ride Pokémon.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon brought two major changes to the Pokémon menu. The first is that you switch Pokémon by dragging them^note which was present in X and Y and mentioned by an NPC or pressing Y, instead of the option being in a list that appears when selecting a Pokémon. The other is that HMs no longer exist, with their functions now being fulfilled by Ride Pokémon. Therefore, it's not too uncommon for veterans to go into the Pokémon menu to use HMs (mainly Fly), only to back out and open the Ride Pokémon tab.
  • Pokémon Sword and Shield: The Wild Area introduces a fully adjustable camera. Players who spend a lot of time there often find themselves attempting to use the camera controls after returning to the main areas that still have the same static camera as the rest of the games in the series.
  • Pokémon Legends: Arceus:
    • In previous games, the menu would be assigned to the Start Button, with later ones assigning it to the X Button. Neither of them bring up the main menu in this game. Instead, D-Pad Up brings up the menu; the Start/+ Button activates one of your mounts (which you switch between with D-Pad Left and Right), while the X button switches between the on-screen menus for throwable items and your Pokémon team. Best case scenario, you will hit the X Button and accidentally switch between these menus, forcing you to tap it again lest you forget and accidentally throw a Poké Ball when you need a Pokémon (or vice versa) a few minutes later. Worst case scenario, you immediately break stealth in front of the Alpha or skittish Pokémon you were sneaking up on because you hit the + Button and pop out of the grass to sit on the back of a mount or soar into the sky.
    • The B button hasn't been used to run for a few generations, but a lot of long-time players still held it when running out of habit without consequence. While it is used to dash when on mounts, unmounted it's assigned to the crouch function, tripping up said long-time players. To add insult to injury, the game does have an unmounted dash function—push in the left stick; and no, the game doesn't let you remap the controls.
    • In Pokémon Sword and Shield, you engage in battle with overworld Pokémon by running into them. In Legends: Arceus, this will just get you injured. The game does tell you that you have to throw a Pokémon of your own at the wild Pokémon to start a battle, but this is easy to forget in the heat of the moment.
    • Not nearly as major, but in the mainline games the move Double Hit was a damage-dealing attack. In Legends, it works a bit like Swords Dance in that it increases your damage dealt (and also has a lowered speed priority). If you recently evolved an Aipom into an Ambipom, this may leave you scratching your head until you read the changed effect.
• In Shin Megami Tensei IV, the X button, the topmost button which is traditionally used as the menu button for many other RPGs, attacks enemies on the map. The Y button, the left-hand button usually used as an action button in most other games, opens the menu. This is backwards in RPG standards for seemingly no good reason and there's no way to change this.
  • Going between Shin Megami Tensei IV and either Persona 3 or 4 is just as bad. In Persona 3 and 4 in dungeons, pressing X, the bottommost button on a PlayStation controller, attacks enemies while exploring dungeons.
  • Similarly in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, the Triangle button is used to bring up the map, as opposed to say Start. Menu is Square.
  • Persona 5 switched to a more dynamic in-battle interface where every action is mapped to a separate button instead of being chosen from a menu. This can make going between it and an earlier game difficult, especially the Triangle button. It's used to open the Persona menu in 5 (i.e where the majority of your skills are), but in 3 and 4, it puts your party in Rush Mode.
  • Some demons will change elemental affinities between games. What is considered a weakness for a demon in one game may be considered a resistance in another.
• In Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, the Item Creation system was completely changed. Instead of consuming special items and waiting a few seconds for the result, in this game you instead pile in several people to make the items. The muscle memory comes in with a vengeance when you realize that certain items can only be created with a certain creator at a certain price range, sometimes single digit differences between what you want and something else.
• And yet another from BioWare (but fairly minor): In Star Wars: The Old Republic, the Imperial and Republic space stations are mirror-image flipped from one another. Switching from a character from one faction to an alt of the other often leads to going the wrong way to get to things like trainers and mission terminals.
• It isn't necessarily affecting anything badly, but a lot of people report themselves habitually attempting timed hits everywhere from Pokémon to Final Fantasy after playing though Super Mario RPG (and Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi series), sometimes for decades.
  • Similarly, those who still play Paper Mario after playing enough Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door are likely to try to do Stylish moves. Thankfully, it doesn't cause any actual problems.
  • The timing for Action Commands is much tighter in Paper Mario 64 than Thousand-Year Door, leading to plenty of floundered jumps and strikes.
  • The timing for some Action Commands in Super Mario RPG changed slightly in the Switch remake. Thankfully, there is a cue that will let you know when to press the button until you're used to it.
• Tales of Innocence looks and handles not unlike Tales of Symphonia in battle, but Innocence takes a page from Abyss's book and allows the player character to free-run by holding R.
• Tales of Symphonia has a couple, one with a contemporary game, one with a later game on a different system:
  • The battle system in Symphonia handles very similarly to Super Smash Bros. Melee in the most basic respects: You angle the control stick and press A for normal attacks, B for special attacks. But in Symphonia, guard is mapped to X by default, while in Melee, X causes you to jump, and guard is mapped to the right shoulder button... which in Symphonia causes you to switch targets. Going from one to the other becomes frustrating very quickly.
  • In Tales of the Abyss, which is on PS2 instead of GameCube, the special button is O, while the guard button is the square. The positioning of these buttons on the controller is more or less exactly reversed from the GameCube controller's B (special) and X (guard) buttons. Fortunately, they can be swapped around by the player.
• Tales of Zestiria uses the Triangle button for guarding. Its prequel, Tales of Berseria, uses all four main buttons for attack strings, leading to guarding being now done by pressing and holding L1. Try playing one, then the other; you will either guard when wanting to attack or attack and get seriously injured by whatever opponent you are facing.
• Some of the controls for player spells between TaskMaker and its sequel, The Tomb of the TaskMaker were changed:
  • "Determine" (lowercase D) and "Examine" (lowercase E) in the original were merged into "Examine".
  • "Attack Multiple" (uppercase A in the original) was removed entirely.
  • "Heal/Cure" (uppercase C in the original) was changed to uppercase H. In the original game, uppercase H was "Haste", a spell not present in the sequel.
  • "Blast" (capital B) became "Strike" (capital S), and can now only be used by magicians.
  • "Grasp" (capital G) became "Steal" (lowercase S), and can now only be used by thieves.
  • All of the hidden spells were renamed, and many helpful ones were removed.
• The first seven games in the Trails Series has every combat command be selected by rotating a command wheel and clicking the accept button once it reached the desired command. Then came The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III, which mapped every combat command to a different button. While in most cases this doesn't matter too much because it's a turn-based combat game, the one command that is actually real-time (because it is used to interrupt the established turn order) is remapped to a different button.
• Play any modern first person games, then go back in time to Ultima Underworld. W is run forward, A is turn left, D is turn right, so far so good. S is walk forward, X is walk backward, E and Q are fly up and down, and J is Jump. Conventions hadn't really solidified yet at the point that this was released, and now it can be really difficult to get the hang of.
• Undertale invokes this; a player who plays the game like any other RPG — specifically, killing the monsters they come across - will lock themselves out of the Golden Ending. The game's Superboss even invokes this in-battle by keeping their attacks randomized in contrast to every other monster, as well as being able to change your SOUL's color (and therefore its mobility) mid-turn just to trip you into another attack.
• Valkyria Chronicles II has enough control differences from Valkyria Chronicles to cause more than a little frustration (and unnecessary character deaths). The aim button, for example, moved from R1 to X, which used to trigger several important map actions. X's hold function is now on Circle, which used to be the all-purpose cancel button.
• Most games use the X button to confirm, the O button to back out of a given screen; Xenosaga flips the two, resulting not only in moments of confusion while playing but also similarly irritating mixups while playing other games. Also, the Save Points and Menu? Reached with the Triangle button. To make matters worse, its predecessor, Xenogears also had this standard X-Confirm O-Back setup (although Square was the menu as Triangle was jump). Going from Xenogears to Xenosaga, in terms of control, can be rough.
  • The fact that this particular problem (the standard functions of X and O are swapped in the East and West) is mentioned four times on this page should tell you something about how annoying it is.
  • Xenogears was orignally proposed to be a Final Fantasy game. If you've played any of the older Final Fantasy games, you'll probably find yourself pressing the triangle button to open up the menu out of habit.

First-Person and Third-Person Shooters

• There are common actions in First Person games that often have different keys depending on which company built the game.
  • The "Use" command, which is common in First Person RPG style games tends to be either E or F, but if you were playing Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock 2, or Deus Ex, it'd be right-mouse-click, which will prompt an immediate remap.
  • Another is crouch, which is mapped to Ctrl or C. Some games complicate this by adding a prone, which is usually Z, but can be found all over the keyboard and often replaces what you would expect the Crouch button to be.
  • The chat command in multiplayer games. In Quake-engine based games, it's normally Y (which also applies to Soure games like Counter Strike). In Unreal-engine games, it's T. A semi-colon or the period button is sometimes used for team chat as well as U.
  • Scoreboards. Tab in Quake and F1 in Unreal — Tab in Unreal brings up the quick console, whereas other games which have a quick console puts it together with the regular console on Tilde, with Tilde plus Shift to bring up the full console. In modern games the use of Tilde for anything but the console has all but died out.
  • Throwing grenades is initially a haphazard task in almost any new game you play in these genres, as no game ever uses the same button to throw them. Will it be R3? LT? Or is it down on the D-Pad? Push down the right stick? Whatever the answer may be, expect to do a lot of unintended melee attacks and throwing grenades at the worst possible times until you've mentally sorted it out until you move on to the next game. PC shooters usually don't have this problem though as the initial grenade key is almost always one or more of G, the middle mouse button or one of the numbers.
  • If you are a game developer who uses an 'aim down sight' mechanic, and don't allow the player to decide if they have to click and hold to aim down the sights, or can use a one-push toggle, you're gonna get flak for it no matter which you pick.
    • Similarly, a sprint button with no option to pick between holding down or toggling.
• PC FPS games before mouselook and WASD were standardised had a bewildering array of weird control schemes because basic movement and looking around was done solely by the keyboard.
  • Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom, and Duke Nukem 3D were built around the idea that some players wouldn't have a mouse. The navigation is done on the right side of the keyboard using the arrow keys to move forward/backwards and look left/right. You had a separate key to be pushed to make left/right keys act as strafe left/right. Looking up or down? Page Up/Down usually, if the game can even support that. If a mouse was available, it was often used just to replace the arrow keys.
    • Thankfully many source ports for the aforementioned games offer the option to customize the controls, so they avert this. Most of them even default to WASD for movement, and the mouse for moving the camera. Doom source ports in particular go as far as adding complete mouselook, though aiming works more or less the same with bullets that hit as long as an enemy is in the players view and isn't too far away.
    • Vertical camera movement was eventually added to the iD Tech 1 engine in Heretic, which was later carried over to both Hexen and Strife. Most source ports just enable it across all games for the sake of convenience, though the player is usually given the option to turn it off if they so desire.
• The vast majority of shooters on the Xbox 360 use either X or the right bumper to reload. While this makes switching between Gears of War/Halo and Call of Duty minorly irritating, it doesn't compare with the handful of games (Red Dead Redemption 2, Grand Theft Auto V, Left 4 Dead) that insist on making B the reload button. Worse yet, the games that use B typically lack a control scheme option that puts reload on X or RB.
  • As if to add insult to injury, pressing X or Square in Rockstar games makes you vault out from behind your cover, so trying to reload could cause you to jump out into the open and get shot full of lead.
  • Max Payne 3 uses the same control scheme as other seventh-gen Rockstar games - except that RB/R1, which snaps the player into cover in the other games, triggers shoot-dodge instead, while cover is mapped to X/Square.
• Also, shooters on the Xbox 360/One and PS3 tend to use completely different control schemes. The Xbox uses the trigger buttons for shooting/punching and the shoulder buttons for secondary actions, while on the PS3 it's the other way around for ergonomic reasons related to the controller. Worse off, PS3 games don't always give you the option to switch between using L1 and R1 or L2 and R2, and some games (usually multiplatform ones that came out on both) use L2 and R2 as the main triggers regardless, giving you muscle memory problems on the same console!
  • This has been changed for the PS4 so that all games use the triggers by default, which is terrible if you're used to the PS3, since several games don't give you the option to change it back. Noticeable on sequels to PS3 games, such as inFAMOUS: Second Son.
• In a lot of first-person shooters (all Valve shooters, for example), on the PC, the Q key switches weapons between the current weapon and the last weapon used. In Far Cry 2, the Q button throws a grenade. In Call of Duty games, the Q button either makes you lean to the left (from the original to World at War) or throws a special grenade (Modern Warfare 2 onwards).
  • On the same note, players who play Garry's Mod may find themselves bringing up the spawn menu when they wanted their previous weapon.
    • Pressing Q in Minecraft drops whatever the player is holding. So a player attempting to switch between items in their inventory might instead toss their diamond pick into lava.
    • And let's not get started with the difficulties encountered in certain First Person Shooters on the PC when your preference is for the arrow keys instead of the age-old WASD/ESDF layout. While some allow you to rebind the keys with no issue, some - such as Combat Arms - could only be played by arrow key players after they delved into the game's config file.
  • Tribes 2 defaults to ESDF for movement, not WASD like damn near every other modern FPS, mostly because of all the dedicated binds for important things like throwing grenades, land mines, and beacons that need to be within easy reach. There is a stock WASD configuration, but players will have to set it manually. What makes this really egregious is that the preceding Starsiege: Tribes and the following Tribes: Vengeance and Tribes: Ascend all default to WASD, and Vengeance has a voice command menu and loadout shortcut menu that can't be rebound to ESDF.
  • In addition, Vengeance and Ascend have dedicated skiing keys and merged jump and jet key options, while skiing in Tribes 1 and Tribes 2 consists solely of holding down the jump key. This is partly because the skiing mechanic is an Ascended Glitch, one that was just mentioned in the manual in Tribes 2 before becoming a more distinct mechanic in later games.
  • Playing the Starsiege: Tribes series and then playing its spiritual successor Legions: Overdrive can screw you up indefinitely.
    • First of all, Legions has omnidirectional jetting and jetting on the ground. In Tribes, you can only jet upwards. Combine this with the faster gamplay, different button controls, and downjetting, and you get a totally confusing experience.
• A common problem with console FPSs, particularly with aiming and inverted controls. The "normal" controls are generally tilting the joystick up to aim up and to aim down you tilt the stick down. Simple right? Meanwhile, the "inverted" option treats "forward on the stick as "aim downward" and "back" on the stick to aim upward, much like the flight stick in a plane (indeed, this is usually default for flight simulators). While it comes down to personal preference which set-up is the "better" option, it's INCREDIBLY jarring when the game doesn't give you the chance to choose between the two.
  • Even worse is switching back and forth between two people who play with opposite controls. Prepare to spend the first 30 seconds every time your turn comes up navigating menus to switch everything back to your play style.
  • The same problem appears in PC FPS with mouse control. A player who's used to flight simulators will probably choose the inverted mouse.
  • Then there's those PC games that force inverted mouse controls with no way to un-invert them, such as Magic Carpet and Alpha Storm. Apparently, it never occurred to the developers that the other way around might be more natural to some players.
    • The worst part of all? Not everyone agrees on what "inverted" aim is! Build engine FPSs (Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior (1997), Blood, etc.) consider "push up, aim up, and vice versa" to be inverted!
    • This is specially jarring in games in which, for whatever reason, you can switch from third-person perspective to first-person. Or, more specifically, from moving-mode to aiming-mode. Many gamers prefer the moving camera and the aiming camera to have a different configuration while playing with gamepads, as it feels more natural, but some games force the same one. It's specially bad when a game's idea of "inverted" camera is only inverting one axis while other games consider "inverted" camera to invert both.
  • It's not just limited to the FPS genre; Star Fox on the SNES gives inverted control options (push up on the D-Pad to climb, push down to descend), while Star Fox 64 does not. That's right, someone at Nintendo thought it was a great idea to remove the option to customize controls for a sequel — even for a sort-of flight sim where pushing down to pull up would be expected to be "standard", that's still a dumb move.
• The Orange Box includes Portal and Half-Life 2, where pressing E picks up objects and opens doors, and Team Fortress 2, where it calls for a medic. Though, to be fair, TF2 doesn't have pick-uppable objects or non-automatic doors, and the other two games don't have medics.
  • Due to the Spy class in Team Fortress 2 potentially disguising as teammates, the best habit to "spy-check" is to shoot at supposed teammates (as friendly fire is off on most servers). Try playing most other FPSes, you'll need to delete this habit, lest you instinctually shoot a few rounds at teammates walking toward you, especially if there is friendly fire.
  • Also, in The Orange Box on consoles, Snipers have a Medic addiction — because clicking the right stick calls for Medic rather than scoping in.
  • Try playing Portal, where both mouse buttons fire different portals, E picks up/interacts with objects, and space bar jumps. Then try playing Portal: The Flash Version, in which Q and E fire one color each of the portals, the left mouse button fires alternating portals, F picks up objects, W jumps, and right click opens the useless Flash menu (which to be fair, they couldn't deactivate it no matter what they tried).
  • Or go from HL2 to the first Half-Life (even the rehashed Source version). You're being machine gunned, you want to sprint into shotgun range, you press shift... and start walking very slowly.
    • Black Mesa thankfully averts this. The game defaults to Half-Life 2-styled movement in which you walk but can sprint by holding shift, while also including an option for original Half-Life-style movement where you always run and can use shift to walk. That way, people familiar with both games won't be messed up if they set it.
  • Play a Valve shooter, any Valve shooter, after playing Left 4 Dead. Whoops! You just blew yourself up with a grenade while trying to punch a Combine soldier with your MP7! Putting "bash zombie-skull with weapon" on the right mouse button was enough to cause this effect when moving from Left 4 Dead to any other PC shooter in existence, it seems, with the only noteworthy exceptions being F.E.A.R. before it and Cry of Fear after.
    • Try shoving your opponent in Team Fortress 2 as a sniper. You'll be very surprised.
  • Portal 2's controls include zooming in (on PC/Mac, it's set to the mouse wheel), something that doesn't exist in the first one—if you want to get a close look at something that isn't near a wall you can place a portal on, tough luck.
  • Switch weapons in Half-Life 2 or another Valve shooter, then try to switch weapons in Codename Gordon using the mouse wheel. In the latter, scrolling up chooses the next weapon down, and vice versa.
  • For whatever reason, Valve games cycle weapons by scrolling the mouse wheel, then clicking to equip the weapon instead of just scrolling to it, like most other shooters (take Serious Sam or Bioshock, for instance). Thankfully you can enable a fast weapon switch in the options to stop this.
• Pick a virtual reality FPS of some sort, and you're bound to run into issues with different movement systems that were developed due to the potential for players to become susceptible to motion sickness with conventional movement, and that's if they let you move beyond your room space in the first place!
  • Most games opt for teleportation to a given point. Whether this is done via a separate portal gun/translocator like in Budget Cuts and Smashbox Arena or a simple trackpad/stick click like in most other games such as Raw Data and Sairento VR is another matter entirely.
  • Other games such as Hover Junkers and Trickster VR have you pressing a button to move where your hand is pointing.
  • Another method is to "drag" the world or player around them, as used in Climbey.
  • Still, other games like Onward actually enforce conventional movement, as teleportation would be a Game-Breaker.
  • Then there's games like Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter and The Art Of Fight that allow for more than one of these options, with players being able to freely choose between conventional movement on the trackpad/analog stick and teleportation (SSVR) or drag controls (TAOF). These games even have competitive multiplayer options, which may lead to people who prefer one scheme being disadvantaged compared to those who use the other.
• ARMA veterans may be feeling this too as they move on to ARMA 3. One of the mechanics changes was to make grenade use its own distinct key (basically what most shooters have been doing since Call of Duty 2). While the choice of default key for this makes sense for those new to the series (G), in all of the previous ARMA games this key has been used for accessing one's inventory. Dslyecxi demonstrates the issue here with the noble sacrifice of fellow ShackTac members.
• Battlefield is rife with this.
  • Battlefield 1942, Battlefield: Vietnam, and Battlefield 2 have the parachute on a separate key from jump. Battlefield 2142 onward merge jump and parachute into one bind.
  • Battlefield: Bad Company 2 does not allow you to go prone, unlike all the other games in the series. Also, you pick up kits with the same key used to enter vehicles, whereas BF1942 through BF2142 used a dedicated key for picking up kits.
  • BF1942 and BF: Vietnam use number keys 1 through 6 for switching seats in vehicles. BF2 and BF2142 use F1 through F6, because those seats that allow use of hand weapons use the number keys for weapon switching.
  • The worst offender? The number keys used for weapon switching. BF1942 through BF2 are pretty consistent — melee on 1, pistol on 2, primary weapon on 3, extra odds and ends determined by your class beyond that - but then BF2142 puts the hand grenades on 7 and the medkit on 4 (along with defibrillator on 5), whereas the grenades always used to be on 4! This also messes up the order when scrolling through with the mouse wheel. With Bad Company 2, it's even worse now that hand grenades and the knife are not selectable items, so they moved secondary and primary weapons to 1 and 2, along with class extras like the medkit and defibrillator to 3 and 4! Trying to grab the right weapon by using those keys will now be an exercise in frustration if you don't remember to remap them first!
  • Bad Company 2 and BF1943 use the exact same control scheme except that the melee and switch weapon buttons have been reversed. Going to stab someone and accidentally pulling out a bazooka can end unpleasantly for everyone involved.
    • Bad Company also mapped melee to the Triangle / Y button. Not B / Circle per classic Halo convention, not RS / R3 per modern Call of Duty convention, but a button that no other FPS uses for melee attacks!
    • Bad Company also commits the sin of mapping crouch to RS / R3, not LS / L3 (sprint) or B / Circle (use / enter vehicle).
  • The gadget buttons have been switched between Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3, leading to instances where you pull out your defibrillator when you meant to drop a medkit. 3 also switches around the 1 and 2 keys, so now your primary weapon is on 1 and your secondary is on 2.
  • Console players got royally screwed after Battlefield 4 decided to use a COD-like scheme, partially a result of the Commo-Rose being introduced to consoles. The "Veteran" scheme didn't help much.
  • Going from Battlefield 1 to Battlefield V can lead to some minor confusion:
    • You try to build something with the toolbox, so you hit Up on the D-pad (on consoles), as that's how BF1's gas mask was accessed...but you end up pulling out a bandage and healing yourself. Turns out using the toolbox is Down...then how on Earth do you change the firemode on your SMG or zero in your bolt-action rifle's sights? Turns out that not only do you have to hold down Y/Triangle to do both of those actions, but the ability to zero in the bolt-action rifle's sights has to be unlocked via specialization!
• BioShock: The series in general uses a very different control scheme compared to 90% of other console shooters. The use and jump buttons are swapped, for example, and aiming down sights is done with Z as RMB is taken by plasmids.
  • In BioShock, pressing the Reload button while you have plasmids selected will use an EVE hypo. For those who've played other shooters and learned to reload their weapon after every fight to avoid running out of bullets at a crucial moment, this results in a lot of wasted hypo sprays.
  • BioShock 2:
    • In the first game, when dealing with one of the game's Little Sisters you could choose to either save (for a good ending) or harvest (for a bad ending) her, which was done by hitting one of two buttons. The feature returns in the sequel, but for an inexplicable reason, the buttons are switched...
    • The PC version averts the above issue, as key bindings can be customized (and the defaults use completely different keys than the first game). However, the weapons are (mostly) introduced in a different order than in the first game, resulting in players selecting the hack tool by accident when they wanted the machine gun. Again, this can be remedied through the options menu (providing that the player knows what weapons are obtained in what order in hindsight).
    • Minerva's Den is even worse. Pretty much all the weapons obtained are in a completely different order than in the base game, and since the campaign is less linear, the weapons may not be obtained in the same order in every playthrough.
  • Shift does different things in all three games. In 1, it brings up a menu to select weapons and plasmids. In 2, it makes a melee strike. Fortunately, there's an ability that combines the melee strike and fire, which makes the player sprint in a straight line (and attack any enemy in the way), so it's not too alienating. Infinite finally maps it to a more conventional Sprint by default.
• Bodycount (2011): R1/RB is throw grenade. L1/LB is lay mines. Melee isn't R3 like pretty much every other current FPS, it's O/B like the first two Halo games. RS / R3 is Crouch.
• Battlefield: Bad Company and Dead Island follow the "RS / R3 to crouch" convention, and most damningly, neither game provides the option to remap it to a place where it makes sense, like LS / L3 (if you like the classic Halo convention) or B / Circle (if you're used to the modern Call of Duty convention).
• Borderlands 2 laughs at certain player tics, compulsive reloading in particular.
  • Gaige's Ordered Chaos tree relies on a mechanic called Anarchy, which gains stacks every time you kill an enemy or fully empty your magazine in combat. If you reload prematurely, all the stacks will vanish. This can lead to some... frustration among veteran first person shooter players who are used to reloading their weapons at every opportunity. And if you played Gaige for a long time you are never reloading. EVER.
  • On a similar note, Tediore weapons are reloaded by throwing the weapon, which explodes like a grenade, and then a new one warps to your hands. The problem is that if there's any ammo left in the clip, you use it to boost a bigger explosion, meaning players who forget they're using a Tediore at the moment will chew through their ammo supply pretty quickly.
  • The PS3 version moves the aim and shoot buttons from the analog triggers to the shoulder buttons and uses the triggers to throw grenades and use action skills. Those used to the first game's control layout may find themselves inadvertently using their action skills and blowing themselves up with their own grenades. You are, however, able to change the control scheme to "Classic" Borderlands in the options menu.
• More of a 'Damn you ingrained response' situation, but it turns out going straight from SWAT 4 to Call of Duty 4 is a bad idea, regardless of the identical numbering. Having your default response to a hostile be 'Shout compliance, shoot to scare' rather than 'kill em' doesn't work too well when F is now use and enemies don't surrender.
• Call of Duty 4 does not give civilians a weaponless running animation. Hence, in the mission "Death From Above" where you see everything as a thermal image, there's a pair of civilians the SAS team carjacks who on your first play through you'll probably end up shooting and getting sent back to the last checkpoint, simply because you were expected to realize that a pair of featureless white/black humanoid shapes running as though they have assault rifles without the SAS team's IR strobes are not actually enemies.^note If there's any indication at all in-game, it's that they run away from the SAS rather than towards them.
• Call of Duty: World at War's tank controls. In the earlier games, the tank controlled like, well, a tank (strafe keys turned the tank's body, turret would turn with the body). In World at War, the tank controls were overhauled to work more like the on-foot controls (strafe only turns the tank until the body faces the direction you're holding, at which point it moves forward, and the turret stays oriented where you're aiming regardless of what direction you drive).
• Most PC shooters that feature Secondary Fire for their weapons map primary fire to the left mouse button, and secondary fire to the right. The PC version of Clive Barker's Jericho has it the other way around. Left click shoots the grenade launcher, the shotgun, and throws grenades; right click does the standard actions.
• Crysis also has a very unusual case where the original PC version's gamepad controls and the later Xbox 360 / PS3 port do not match up. Much of this stems from the console versions of the game actually being retooled to play a bit more like Crysis 2 and 3 with how the suit modes are toggled — you default to Strength Mode when not using Armor or Cloak, and Speed Mode is only enabled during sprinting. However, you'll still be putting up with differences such as crouch being on B / Circle instead of LS / L3, the aforementioned LS / L3 now being your sprint button because LB / L1 was repurposed for one of the suit modes, the fact that you can now peek around cover by holding down the aim trigger...
• Dead Space 2 has several differences to Dead Space: Reloading is now X/Square instead of LT/L1+A/X, Quick Heal is now B/Circle instead of X/Square, Stasis is now LT/L1+Y/Triangle instead of LT/L1+X/Square and the inventory is now accessed by pressing Back/Select instead of Y/Triangle. This can lead to situations where the player tries to stasis an enemy, only to reload his weapon while said enemy proceeds to chew off his face. The layout can not be changed either.
• Deep Rock Galactic doesn't mix up your controls compared to other games, and instead does something entirely new by having F (or B on an X-box controller) associated to throwing infinitely-recharging flares in a game where the natural lighting is practically nonexistent. Enough time playing and you will find yourself reflexively pressing either button when the game gets a little too dark, often to your detriment.
• In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the B / Circle button is the hand-to-hand takedown button. The problem is that it is also the "Back out of a conversation" button in nearly every other game in existence. So, a common occurrence is for a player to totalk to an NPC they didn't intend to, hit B to back out, and wind up accidentally cold-cocking the poor sap.
• The 3rd Person Shooter Dirge of Cerberus decided to invert the camera control. When you push the right joystick right, the camera pans right and you get a view of the left, this is the exact opposite of the majority of TPS and is one of the main complaints of the game.
• Try playing this Flash version of Doom if you've ever played the original. I promise you, you'll be shooting at doors and trying to open enemies... repeatedly.
  • In the original game, it is possible to make doors that open automatically when a player approaches them rather than having to be opened. There are some mods that do this, but also continue to allow the doors to be opened with the use key. These usually result in long-time players accidentally closing any doors which try to be nice and open themselves.
• Quite a few shooters nowadays have a weapon wheel, but what button brings it up and what stick navigates it is almost always different. Doom (2016) puts it on the right bumper and right stick, Resistance 3 has it Triangle and left stick, and Watch_Dogs has it left bumper and right stick, to name a few.
• FEAR 2: Project Origin reassigns the first game's Switch Weapons button as the Throw Grenade button, the former Grenade button/trigger as Iron Sights, the Use Medkit button for Bullet Time, and the Bullet Time button for selecting weapons.
  • FEAR 3's control is mostly identical to that of the second game, except that the crouch and melee buttons have been switched.
• Not so much in the actual video game of Half-Life, but when watching the Machinima Freeman's Mind, the creator is filming with godmode on, so it can be jarring to a person who has their own system of play when he skips medpacks, batteries and even weapons.
• Fur Fighters: the PS2 version had a control scheme that flew in the face of most if not all other shooters on the platform.
• The default controls in the PC version of Ghost Recon put sprinting on the right mouse button. The Shift key, which is usually how you sprint in any other FPS, brings up the command map; the game doesn't so much have aiming (like what most shooters put on right mouse nowadays) as it does zoom levels, activated either by T (for zooming to discrete intervals) or scrolling the mouse wheel (for smoothly zooming in or out).
• Start up Half-Life (on the PS2) for the first time (ever) after playing any other game in history. If you've just been playing 360 nonstop for the past few days, remembering that the Left-Stick and the D-pad are in completely different places can be tricky, but you'll get used to it. But the fucking jump button? It's L1 (or as the 360 people call it, "LB"). What the heck kind of configuration is that?! Hope you like re-mapping it (thank God you can!) or just flailing about confusedly as you run about, since Gordon apparently lacks the ability to walk.
  • Pressing L1 or LB to jump is also the default in the Xbox 360 version of Battlefield 2: Modern Combat and Mirror's Edge. It actually makes sense for the latter in that pressing LT / L2 also makes you crouch or descend, so it's a logical "move up / move down" arrangement that doesn't take your right thumb off the look-around stick in a game where constant movement is everything.
• The Xbox Live Arcade version of Ikaruga alters some enemy placements and bullet patterns. Not a big deal if you're just casually romping through the game, but when you're trying to go for those S++ ranks...
• Try switching from Killzone 2 to Red Faction: Guerilla on the PS3. Both games have very similar control schemes, down to using L2 to stick to cover-except that the former requires you to hold the trigger down while in the latter you only have to tap it. Players who don't anticipate the change may find themselves running in place when they intend to take cover.
• Magic Carpet uses mouselook to control your facing... however, the up/down angle is backwards from every single other game that uses mouselook. Expect to spend 5 or 6 levels just getting used to this, and spending most of your time looking at the sky or the dirt.
• The Metal Slug titles use the 'Fire' button to confirm all selections on menus. In the PS2 ports, this is the 'Square' button. Nearly every other game on the system uses the X.
• Metroid:
  • Metroid: Samus controls differently in this game compared to later titles, making it all too easy for franchise veterans to make simple yet costly mistakes while playing this entry. For example, she cannot shoot down or diagonally at all; pressing down and B causes her to go into Morph Ball and drop a bomb, rather than crouch and fire; pressing up in midair will prevent Samus from aiming left or right until she touches the floor; and her Screw Attack is canceled out by letting go of the jump button or by touching the ceiling, leaving her vulnerable in narrow spaces.
  • Metroid Prime has tripped up many people who played Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion and assumed the Varia and/or Gravity Suit would stop lava damage. Prime makes lava hazardous to Samus at all time, regardless of her current upgrades.
  • Metroid Prime 3: Corruption:
    • In most Wii games, pausing is set to the + button. In this game, that button activates Hypermode, and the 1 button pauses. Expect to enter Hypermode repeatedly when trying to pause if it's been a while since last playing.
    • Impressively, if you're playing Metroid Prime Trilogy, you can get this within the same game. In the first two Prime games, 1 brings up the map (which was mapped to Z in the Nintendo GameCube originals) and 2 brings up the pause menu, allowing you to look at your current items and alter game settings. Corruption bundles the map into the pause menu, so 2 does nothing. It's minor, but it can take some getting used to if you play the games consecutively.
• Another rare case of this happening inside of the same game happens with Nexuiz in final version 2.5.2: normally the Rocket Launcher works with the primary fire button firing the rocket, holding primary guiding the rocket a la Half-Life and the secondary fire button exploding the rocket mid air. But when playing with the Laser Guided missiles mutator (i.e. Mission 17: Stormkeep of the 2.0 campaign), the Rocket keeps its primary fire, but holding it doesn't work anymore (hitting primary fire again will make the rocket to explode while in midair) and the secondary fire toggles the guiding laser. This leads to situations where players explode their own rockets in their own face, hurting or killing themselves.
• If you play a lot of Overwatch, be careful when you try to use your secondary ability or ultimate in Paladins, as the secondary ability (Q) and ultimate keys (E) are switched between games, so trying to throw a grenade as Viktor makes you call in the airstrike you were saving for clearing the point. F activates movement abilities, not Left Shift, so be wary of this. Like with other examples, you can rebind the keys if need be, be it champion-wide, or for one champion specifically (For example, Androxus can punch people with Right Click, as the game has no melee-specific key, so rebinding it to something else more memorable, is wise).
• If you're playing Overwatch after spending a lot of time with TF2, you might find yourself calling for healing... only to instead use your secondary ability, since both use the E key. Conversely, after getting used to Overwatch, you might try to thank a teammate in TF2 by hitting C, which does bring up one of the voice command menus (but not the one you wanted).
• Although this is more of an ingrained response problem then muscle memory problem. Playing PAYDAY 2 for a long time 'will' result in you trying to not hurt civilians in other games, even when doing so would have no effect, be beneficial or even part of an objective.
  • Also pressing Q will, by default, turn a gadget on if you have one on your weapon, this results in new players trying to switch weapons only to have a laser or flashlight turn on instead.
• PAYDAY 3: Whereas throwing a bag was mapped to G in the previous game, here, throwing bags is mapped to Q. In this game, G instead throws grenades (in the previous game, this was mapped to the 3 key). Cue players of PAYDAY 2 accidentally blowing themselves or civilians up when trying to throw down a bag, likely triggering the alarm or tanking their profits from the cleaner costs.
• PlanetSide 2 gives each class a special ability bound (by default) to F. On Heavy Assaults, for example, they have an overshield ability to make them more resistant to damage, Medics can activate a healing aura, et cetera. Engineers get the short end of the stick; pressing F makes them interrupt whatever they're doing and toss down an ammo box with a lengthy animation, which means if you forget you're an engineer and press F to engage the Heavy's overshield while being attacked, you will instead helpfully throw an ammo box at the enemy's feet so that they can reload their guns after they murderize you.
• Prey (2017) has 2 "security" (normal ballistic) weapons (a shotgun and silenced pistol). Sometimes you might get the urge to aim down sights, since this is a first person game. This can lead you to either doing nothing or, if you have one, trying to use a typhon power, wasting Psi and possibly losing the jump on an enemy.
• Players trying to interact with the environment in Rage (2011) may find themselves inadvertently reloading, since "use" and "reload" are assigned to different buttons. It doesn't help that the "use" button, X/A, is normally used for jumping, which in turn is mapped to Triangle/Y, normally used for switching weapons.
• In Receiver, the way in which One Bullet Clips is averted is by altering the interface to assign keys to each component of the firearm. Someone used to pressing "R" after every fight, therefore, will find themselves accidentally racking the slide and ejecting an unfired bullet every time they do so. Also, if you’re used to using E and Q to glance or something else, you’ll constantly eject a magazine and then find the key to put it back - which differs per gun.
• Xbox 360 shooters use Left Trigger and Right Trigger, the analog shoulder buttons. PS3 shooters default to L1 and R1, the digital shoulder buttons. Red Dead Redemption used the 360 defaults, even on the PS3, and Rockstar later released a patch to allow players to use L1 and R1. Also, X is jump, B is reload, A is run/sprint. You can see why this might be a problem.
• Hopefully, you didn't play through Resident Evil 4 just before 5 came out. Your shoot and reload keys have been swapped!
  • Oh, it's even worse than that. The standard control set (type D!) has you aim with left trigger, shoot with right trigger, and you STRAFE if you hit left or right.
  • For some bizarre reason, recent ports of Resident Evil 4, have changed the controls completely, with no way to turn them back 100% to the perfect original, presumably to match RE5 and 6. To wit, Inventory has been moved from the top button to the select button, map from right bumper to top button, and Ashley controls from right button to right bumper, right button now does absolutely nothing, all along with the aforementioned action and run buttons switch.
• Serious Sam 3: BFE has an achievement for completing the campaign once through without sprinting, aiming down iron sights or manually reloading. Problem is, if you've played pretty much any recent shooter, you might easily slip up.
• NES Shoot Em Ups Sky Shark and 1943. The former uses B for bomb and A for fire, and the latter flips them around.
• Very bad idea: try going from Sniper Elite to any FPS or TPS. Not that you will face big problems... Until you get your hand on a sniper rifle. You'll never hit anyone, because you'll try to aim above their heads! Sniper Elite features realistic sniping, and at long range you have to compensate for gravity, and aim a little above their heads. Very few other shooters simulate bullet drop at long ranges, with the possible exception of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., ARMA and Battlefield.
• Splatoon:
  • In general, the series' default control scheme has gyro-assist to help the player aim their shots and control the camera. If you play long sessions of the game using this method, you will attempt to adjust the camera in other shooters by moving your controller around.
  • While weapons do return between games, they're usually given new loadouts, meaning that veterans can find themselves accidentally throwing the wrong kind of sub-weapon and/or activating their special at a sub-optimal time because they forgot that it's changed.
  • Starting with Splatoon 2, the jump button is moved from X to B, with the X button now opening the map instead. This is due to the Nintendo Switch lacking a constantly present second screen ala Wii U Gamepad to have the map constantly displayed on, and the Switch's controller layout having the right analog stick below rather than above the buttons. Players who logged a lot of time on the first Splatoon ended up opening the map a lot when jumping into the sequel.
• Between two of the Splinter Cell games, they decided to change the "hanging from a pipe" controls. Everywhere else, jump was still jump and crouch was still crouch. When hanging from a pipe, where you once had to press crouch to jump down, or jump to pull your legs up, you now had the choices to crouch against the pipe or jump off... to your inevitable doom, as you shout "Don't jump in the sea! Why would I want you to jump in the sea!? Also, the "draw weapon" button became the "throw grenade" button in Conviction.
• Playing any of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games after playing a modern FPS. The first time you get into a firefight, you're going to be in trouble. Many shooters bind the "throw grenade" button to the G key. Grenades are by default selected (but not thrown) with the 4 key in any STALKER game. What does the G key do? Oh, it makes you drop the weapon you have out. The keys can be remapped, but anyone who doesn't think to check on this is going to be mighty embarrassed the first few times it happens. Also bad is going from the second or third game back to the first if you didn't standardize the controls by hand as you went through the games - the M key opens the map on your PDA (one of the many functions it has) in the first game, but from then on, H opens your PDA, and the map is really the only screen that you'll use with any frequency. The H key opens up a list of nearby stalkers in the original.
  • Another in-series example is the quicksave and quickload keys. In the first game they default to F6 and F7, whereas in later games it was F5 and F9 (presumably to avoid hitting the wrong one by mistake).
  • Another example comes when you try to switch weapons. Many FPS games allow you to switch between your two primary weapons using the 1 or 2 keys. In all three games, 1 pulls out your knife, 2 pulls out your secondary weapon (a pistol, until Call of Pripyat where you were allowed to put another longarm in the second slot) and your primary weapon is mapped to the 3 key. Many games also map either a flashlight or a medkit to the F key. STALKER puts the flashlight all the way over on the L key and bandages and medkits on the bracket keys.
• The remake of Syndicate has enough similarities with fellow EA-published Crysis, including the sprint-into-slide and automatic ledgegrabbing, that you might be confused when it isn't. L2/LB is Breach, not Maximum Armour; R2/RB is DART Overlay rather than Cloak. The real kicker, though, is when you double-tap Y/Triangle to get your 'nades out and wonder why they don't show up. It's hold Y/Triangle here.
• Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain, despite being a third-person shooter, defaults to the first three games' tank controls on the left thumbstick, meaning your first few attempts to strafe will probably end up with you running in a slow circle. Strafing is on L2 and R2.
• System Shock:
  • The original came out shortly before WASD became the standard, and as a result, uses ASDX instead (well, that and arrow keys). It doesn't have remappable controls, either, at least without the Enhanced Edition re-release.
  • System Shock 2 came out closer to the end of the decade, but still wasn't quite comfortable using standard controls. It did use WASD in a form, but it was closer to the classic Doom form of putting turning, rather than strafing, on A and D. Fortunately, this time the controls are remappable right out of the box, including a pre-set "FPS" setting that puts the controls closer to standard for the genre.
• For a devoted player of TimeSplitters 1 and 2, picking up Mercenaries 1 or 2 is especially painful. TimeSplitters uses R2 for main fire, while Mercenaries uses R1 to fire and R2 is change weapon. TimeSplitters is an FPS, and Mercenaries is a TPS, so there's no problem... Until the first Sniping Mission, because using the rifle switches to a first-person camera.
  • Let's not forget TimeSplitters 2 and TimeSplitters Future Perfect for the GameCube, in which Future Perfect decided to swap many of the controls in the map editor, even though they function nearly exactly the same, feature-wise. They really didn't even add any new controls, just moved them around.
    • They also removed the secondary fire button (making you actually have to switch to secondary mode on weapons) and replaced it with grenade throw...
    • It's hell for anyone who picked up TSFP first, and then tried to play TS2. The C-Stick is used to aim, sure, but it won't stop moving back to the center of the screen! The option for a crosshair doesn't normally have a zoom-in feature, and melee just isn't possible (which made those damn zombies a hell of a lot harder to kill while reloading). Sniping is far more difficult in TS2 because of the archaic aiming system.
• Just about everyone who went from Turok: Dinosaur Hunter to GoldenEye on Nintendo 64 switched the controls to 1.2 Solitaire. This lets you move with the Control Pad or C buttons and aim with the Control Stick, similar to the dual stick control scheme that would become standard the following generation.
  • A lot of people do the opposite, remapping modern shooters to play like GoldenEye's default setting, which like older shooters puts walking forward and back and turning on the Control Stick and aim up, aim down, and walking sideways on the Control Pad or C buttons. There seems to be two distinct camps on this, with neither one understanding how the hell the other can possibly play like that.
    • This created a big stir when Perfect Dark came out for Xbox Live Arcade. Some raged that you couldn't map the buttons for turning/strafing.
  • It can be particularly aggravating for anyone proficient in the Turok/Solitaire control scheme to move onto contemporary console FPSs. With the Solitaire scheme, the left thumb directs the player's view while the right thumb moves your character using the C-pad. Nowadays, the left thumb handles movement, and the right thumb directs the view.
    • Unless you're playing a Sega Dreamcast shooter, owing to the pad's single analog stick. Even so, some modern shooters like Halo have the sense to provide a "southpaw"/left-handed scheme where the left stick looks around and the right stick moves.
    • You didn't put your left thumb on the D-Pad and the right on the analog stick with that control scheme? Problem solved if you can't get used to southpaw controls. Sure, it's a bit of a reach to the B and A buttons, but nothing too unmanageable.
  • This may happen in some old time PC gamers who were used to FPS games without mouse look, which used the arrow keys by default. Even with mouse look, some may use the arrow keys to move around.
    • The most recent Doom and Quake games still keep old style controls, like CTRL for firing.
• In Unreal, the Automag reloads automatically after a clip runs out. However, since it gives a click when starting to run out, there can be a reflex to try to reload. The standard button for that (R) opens a chat. Which immobilizes you. In fact, there is no reload button; you'll have to switch weapons. Thankfully, if you're playing the Oldskool mod for Unreal Tournament, you can indeed bind R to reload it.
• Cruelty Squad has some rather unusual key bindings by default. The R button is Interact, X is crouch, Left Shift is zoom, and reloading is done by holding the Right Mouse Button and dragging the cursor down. Fortunately, almost all of these can be rebound through the options menu.
• Splitgate's grenades do no damage and are only there to shut down enemy portals. It's very easy to forget that when you stumble into three clustered enemies in one spot, and only realize nothing happened by the time you're full of bullets.
• Warframe features dozens of different Warframes for players to use, and people who are used to maining one frame can be thrown off wildly by the abilities of a new frame, especially if they're in the same general category. For instance, Rhino is most players' first tank-style Warframe, and activiates a protective armor shell with the '2' key. This armor is so crucial to his playstyle that players often cast it by default at the start of a mission. Players who then go to Inaros for their next tank will find that '2' triggers a targeted life-steal ability and is of no use whatsoever defensively, and have to get out of the habit of casting at the start of missions.

Sports Games

• Several straight iterations of the PlayStation 2 and 3 versions of football games FIFA Soccer and Winning Eleven have had identical default control schemes...EXCEPT that the "shoot" and "cross" buttons are reversed. Cue a patient 20-pass move to get your player through on goal, and then facepalm when he crosses instead of shooting.
  • FIFA 12 takes this to whole new extremes by completely changing the style in which you have to defend. So players, having used the same simple button set for years, have to learn (what might be) new terminology just to avoid conceding.
• Very confusing for the Gretzky NHL (2005) port on the PSP at least, in which in-game menu navigation uses X for enter and triangle for back, while the system menus (which do pop up in-game when loading or saving stuff) are X and O.
• Madden NFL
  • A fairly annoying occurrence in Madden 05 for the PS2 when the R1 and L1 buttons that were traditionally used for jukes were changed to the right analog stick. At first you were allowed to revert to the old system, in '06 however. They removed being able to change it to pre '05.
  • Also another occurrence from a few years later in Madden '09 would be replacing the kicking meter that used to work by pressing X 3 times in succession, to a brand new one that, yep, used the right analog stick again. Leading players to bring up the help screen whenever they pressed X. While fairly less annoying or damaging than the above example. It still took a while to get used to - only to get reverted to the old meter less than a decade later.
  • On sixth-generation consoles, the button used in Madden 02 to have the quarterback run the ball was changed in 03 to having the quarterback throw the ball out of bounds automatically, often causing an intentional grounding penalty. For anyone who relied heavily on QB runs, like someone who used Donovan McNabb or Michael Vick as their primary QB, this was a major issue. ^note The 03 control scheme existed as far back as the PS2 version of 01, but only as an option which few players knew about.
• Who here has played Yooyuball on Neopets for any of the past five Altador Cups? Of those people, who are scoring a lot less this year than those past years?
• Played the Smackdown Vs Raw series of games for a while? FINALLY gotten used to the "Ultimate Control" grappling system they've had in the last 5 installments? Well here comes WWE '12 which throws all that out the window and introduces an even newer grappling system. Good Luck making that transition!
• For NBA 2K13, the developers changed the right analog shot stick to the control stick. Now you pull a fancy move to get open, have a free lane to the basket, but where as flicking the stick one way or the other would make you try a layup, now it makes you do another dribble move. To initiate a shot you have to hold down the left trigger/bumper. A hard tendency to unlearn. Fortunately the dev team was savvy enough to allow you to default the right stick to the shot stick like before and left trigger/bumper to activate dribble moves.

Strategy

• Almost all of the newer Blizzard Strategy Games have abilities on units now, which are hotkeyed to a letter in their name (usually the first one, but if there's two abilities with the same first letter, one of them will be moved to the second or third letter). Now try to play on any custom maps with custom unit abilities; you are almost guaranteed to tap the wrong thing at the wrong time, because the tooltip picture and the actual hotkey look like another ability, but is not.
• Civilization 4 has an annoying example. In earlier versions of the game, if a unit in a city was active, the "enter" key would open the city screen. This was changed to the little-used "insert" key, which is not very convenient to reach, whether playing with both hands on the keyboard or with one on the mouse.
  • Civilization 5 has one before getting into the game. In Civilization 4, "Play Now" was used to set-up a standard game; you would choose the map type, size, difficulty, etc. In Civilization 5, a single click of "Play Now" starts a new game with the last options picked, into a long loading screen which cannot be cancelled out of.
• In Command & Conquer, the "S" key is "Stop". In the first two Homeworld games, double-tapping the "S" key is "Scuttle".
• In general either left mouse selects/deselects your units and right mouse tells them to move and attack (Warcraft style), or left mouse selects and orders units while right mouse simply deselects (Command & Conquer style). For example: playing Supreme Commander then finding Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun at a thrift store, playing it and losing your Mammoth Mk. II because you were trying to tell it to move out of danger and instead kept deselecting it.
  • The first two Age of Empires could be played with one mouse button (C&C Style), or two (Warcraft/StarCraft style). Age of Mythology had only the two-button option.
  • Compare trying to make units do something in StarCraft/Warcraft and Age of Empires to accidentally deselecting them in C&C Red Alert 2 — the left mouse button and right mouse button got switched.
    • The game demo of the PC version of Youngblood has the same problem.
• Going from Disgaea DS to any other version (except Disgaea PC, see below). Most of the options are right there on the field, seeing as you're meant to use the stylus on them, and there's absolutely nothing but the field on other versions. The joystick makes controlling on the field extremely difficult, though you are still free to use the D-pad if you wish. Not to mention, there's the fact that the PlayStation uses the circle-square-cross-triangle button scheme, while the Nintendo DS uses the standard A-B-X-Y scheme. Many players ended up pressing the wrong button to do an action (often undo command) or not knowing that some features are present in the game.
  • This trope is zig-zagged in Disgaea PC: people coming in from any of the PS ports will be a bit confused on how things work (luckily controller support is available), while the stylus controls of the Nintendo DS translate well into mouse controls (which is why a lot of mouse-only PC games were ported to the DS).
  • In Famicom Wars/Advance Wars, you hit the primary key on an empty square to get the end-turn menu, because the series started on button-limited consoles (NES). Disgaea, on the other hand, started on the PlayStation, so it has a dedicated menu button. Going from playing Advance Wars: Dual Strike on the DS to playing Disgaea on the PSP is nice and confusing. Thankfully, they're both turn-based games, so you don't get killed because you're hitting the wrong button.
  • The Disgaea remakes fix this; you can open the menu whichever way you prefer.
• Similarly, going between Disgaea and Final Fantasy Tactics, which are both isometric-perspective-based, is difficult, because the default d-pad layout is set up differently. In one, pressing "up" moves you up and to the left, in the other, pressing "up" is up and to the right. Forunately, you can change this on an options menu in both.
• Fire Emblem: Thracia 776: In this game, the priority of some commands on the action menu is mixed up. The "Wait" option is normally on the bottom in other Fire Emblem games, but it's placed above pretty much everything but "Attack" while "Staff" has taken its place. The absolute highest priority command in the game is "Escape" instead of "Attack", meaning that if you're on a map with a castle to guard that is also the escape square, every single turn you have a chance of making the sole unit standing between the enemies and your defeat vanish from the map for the rest of the battle.
• In Fire Emblem Gaiden and its remake, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, bows aren't quite as effective against fliers as they are in most other Fire Emblem titles. The generic bows that units get when they have nothing else equipped doesn't get bonus damage at all. Most "actual" bows do come with the Anti-Fliers skill attached, but the bonus damage is smaller than it usually is. Therefore, players might send in their Archers and expect them to do more damage against fliers than they'll actually get, or have their own Pegasus Knights avoid archers more than they really need to.
• The changes between Homeworld and Homeworld 2 can be very irritating. Homeworld uses the left mouse button for selection and actions. Homeworld 2 uses left for selection and right for commands. It's also frustrating to forget that you can't pan in Homeworld, where you could in Homeworld 2.
  • Not to mention starting to play Homeworld 1 after being used to 2. In the second game, the "S" key orders your currently selected ships to stop, while Shift+Ctrl+X orders them to scuttle (instantly destroying the selected ships). In the first game, the S key..... issues a scuttle order. Cue my entire combat fleet self-destructing during mission 1. Not good.
• At least in Shogun 2 Total War, some of the RTS commands aren't what you'd normally expect. For instance, the command to tell your units to stop what they're doing? Backspace, whereas other games usually use S to tell a unit to stop what they're doing.
• Star Ruler's mouse-based camera controls are... different. Thankfully, there's an option to convert them to a more conventional RTS setup.
• Sword of the Stars II's interface is so different from the first that veterans may be even more confused than those new to the series.
• The Total War series never settled on one set of controls for all of its games. Most aggravating are the camera controls, which for some God-forsaken reason in Napoleon went from the standard commands in Medieval II and Empire to Rome's (the earliest 3D game.)
• Most RTS games have a technique that lets you save a selected group of units with Ctrl-1 (etc.) and then just hit 1 to call them up again. Total Annihilation had this, except that you have to hit Alt-1 to call them up again, which is an awkward and scarcely used combination. So many people complained about pressing numbers out of habit and getting nothing that Cavedog changed it in the last patch before the company went bust.
  • TA uses Left Mouse Button= Move, attack, reclaim, what have you. Right Mouse Button= Deselect current unit or group. Spring, the 3D remake, reverses this.
    • Similarly, Command & Conquer games traditionally used the first scheme and Blizzard's (Warcraft and StarCraft) used the second... until Tiberium Wars, when EA inexplicably switched to something reminiscent of the Blizzard scheme... with some small differences like the "attack in this zone" command. Thankfully, starting in Kane's Wrath and Red Alert 3, there is an option for classic C&C controls. Glorious!
• Warcraft: Orcs and Humans is downright obtuse with its control scheme to those used to selecting a unit, and then clicking again on the target (on the map to move, on an enemy to attack, on minestrees to collect resources): it's necessary to select the action (Walk\Attack\Harvest) through either a button on the screen or a keyboard hotkey and then click on the target.
• As another Strategy example, after playing XCOM, much difficulty will be had in other games of similar design, like the UFO After Blank series, Rebel Star Alliance and UFO: Alien Invasion due to the similar weapons names, differences in stats and AI, and the subtly different controls and mechanics involved. Expect much cursing as a soldier who'd normally survive in X-Com somehow gets picked off in UFO.
  • This gets amplified if an old-era X-Com veteran picks up the 2012 XCOM: Enemy Unknown — they now have to break a lot of old habits just to get to grips with the revised Strategic and Tactical gameplay.

Wide-Open Sandbox

• Another "driving on the left/right side of the road" example: Go from driving on the right in Grand Theft Auto to a game with left hand traffic such as The Getaway or Sleeping Dogs (2012). Some players have trouble adjusting to the left side of the road and find themselves constantly trying to avoid head on collisions or having to wait for their character to scramble over to the driver's seat because they entered a right-hand drive vehicle from the left. This even happens to players who live in countries that drive on the left in real life since they've gotten so used to driving in GTA.
  • Something similar in Mad Max (2015). As the game is set in Australia, all the cards are right-hand drive. If you're used to getting in the left side of cars in from games set in America, there is a Leaning on the Fourth Wall moment where your companion Chumbucket will ask if you have forgotten where the drivers seat is.
• Pressing Start in The Godfather II doesn't pause the game, Select/Back does. Start brings up the Don's View map.
• The control layouts for Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto V are mostly similar with some exceptions, with taxi cab mechanics being the most notable. In GTA IV, tapping the "enter vehicle" button carjacks the driver while holding it allows the player to enter as a passenger; in GTA V, the opposite is true.
  • Also from IV to V, helicopter (and other aircraft in V) controls, at least in the PC versions. In IV, A and D control rolling while 4 and 6 on the numpad control yawing (a holdover from the 3D era games, where the 'look left/right' keys, 1 and 2 by default, were yawing). In V, it's the opposite, A/D yaw and 4/6 roll, which actually makes sense since it bundles together controls with related roles and importance in flight, roll with pitch (8 and 5) to the left and yaw with thrust (W and S) to the right, like in an RC controller, but it's still frustrating and it takes a while to stop accidentally rolling/yawning while flying a chopper in V.
• On the other hand, the control scheme for the Xbox 360 version of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas can be irritating for players coming from Grand Theft Auto IV or Grand Theft Auto V. Press LT and you'll wonder why CJ is spraying bullets all over the place. Conversely, press RT and you'll wonder why CJ isn't shooting. Surprise, surprise, the shooting controls are switched. RT aims and LT shoots. Furthermore, don't expect CJ to put his back to that wall you're using to protect yourself from enemy gunfire. You don't have that ability like in GTA IV or GTA V.
• Grand Theft Auto IV presents a doubly frustrating example: on foot, if you've grown acclimated to typical FPS/TPS controls a la Call of Duty, your instincts will get you killed. (Jump! Nope, that's spring. Reload! Oh, hang on, that's jump. Fire, goddamn it, fire! Oops, that's take cover.) Then, to compound the aggravation, the driving controls place the handbrake in a very counterintuitive spot for anyone who's grown used to Burnout-or-Need for Speed-style controls; get ready to fail a lot of car chase missions and police escapes. And there are a whopping two controller layout options, both equally unimpressive. What the hell happened to letting players assign button layouts?

  • On PC, this is even worse as GTA IV no longer allows you to customize the controls like you could in every PC game of the post-DOS era and many before it.
  • And when GTA came out for the Xbox, first in the double pack with III and Vice City, and then San Andreas separately, they had completely different controls. When driving, what was attack in San Andreas was now handbrake in III/Vice City... so imagine coming up on a motorbike at top speed, about to fire your Uzi and instead hitting the handbrake and spinning out of control.

  • Grand Theft Auto IV on PS3 also causes major problems for players weaned on GTA III-era games (especially San Andreas) on the PS2. Primarily, the driving controls are completely different and use the PS3 controller's triggers for acceleration and braking (as opposed to the buttons in the earlier games). Which pretty much guarantees you'll run someone over and get the police after you the first time you attempt to do a chase. Or you'll find yourself shooting out the window when you don't want to. Or bailing from the vehicle...
  • Saints Row 2 has closer controls to the PS2 GTA games, except moving around the controls for attacking, weapon switching, running, looking behind, handbrake, and entering missions is the same button as entering/leaving vehicles. It's not so bad, but it does make for confusion, and frustration for the final placement.
• Going to just about any other sandbox from Just Cause. Watching your character break every bone in his body from a long fall after effectively being immune to gravity, or getting attacked by a helicopter and realizing you can't take it out by grappling up to it and hijacking it for yourself, can be a little jarring.

  • Just Cause 2 is an equal offender. The driving controls are pretty much identical to Grand Theft Auto IV, with one difference. The button or key for the handbrake in GTA IV is the same as the command to deploy the player's parachute in Just Cause 2, which can be problematic when you are driving someone somewhere and instead of stylishly doing a handbrake turn you jump out of the car and watch it spiral into a wall.
  • Speaking of handbrakes, in most modern Sandbox games, the button to get into a car is almost always the top button (Y or Triangle), and the triggers control acceleration and braking, but the button to pull the handbrake is always different. Is it the bottom button? The Left one? Or maybe the one on the right? It's always different.
  • Helicopter controls among the three games, especially the PC versions, will also vary enough that you will have trouble flying one of these things in another game for a while.

  • Grand Theft Auto V on PC moved the horn button to E, presumably so it's easier to hit. Unfortunately, in many other driving games the E button is get in/get out of a car. Which means if you hit it wanting to honk you instead dive out of your vehicle.
• Minecraft:
  • Do not try to play Minecraft after playing the similar yet 2D Terraria. In Terraria, you use the left mouse button to place items. In Minecraft, this is used to attack things. You will also get into the habit of pressing Esc to open your inventory. A lot.
  • Also, do not try to play Minecraft after playing any game where multiple attacks on a single object require multiple presses of the attack button. At least, not if you want to actually collect wood.
  • Many multiplayer servers have commands you can use to teleport, which are often used to warp away from trouble. Have fun going back to an unmodded single player world and trying to type /home when you're being mobbed by Creepers.
  • On Xbox, you generally exit from all kinds views by pressing B. This will cause you to throw away your map when you are thinking to put it away. This is especially bad if standing in front of a pool of lava.
  • In various computer consoles and debuggers, 'clear' removes all previous output and logs, so your screen isn't filled up with text. In Minecraft however, 'clear' is delete inventory with no confirmation.
• In [PROTOTYPE], if you wanted to do a Stealth Consume on someone, you needed to hold the right shoulder button and press B (on the 360 controller). In [PROTOTYPE 2], they now just have you do the same motion that you would for an in-battle consume, and pressing the right shoulder button results in dropping your disguise and using your shield. If you're used to the first game's stealth consume mechanic too much, be prepared to accidentally cause a few alerts as you demonstrate powers in front of military personnel in the sequel. Also, P2 uses Back/Select for the menu and Start for the map whereas many other games do the opposite.
  • Another frustration-inducing change is the swap between glide and air-dash. Even for PC users, rebinding keys do not help. P1 used a Sprint/Air-dash and Jump/Glide setup, where as P2 uses a Sprint/Glide and Jump/Air-dash setup. P1 veterans are going to find their enjoyment levels nose-diving as they attempt for a gold medal in events such as Incineration and Recovery.
• Saints Row 2's Xbox 360 gamepad default is to have sprint on RB. Try using that same button to sprint in Saints Row: The Third and you'll throw a grenade, because sprint is on LB. Then you go back to Saints Row 2, wonder why you're not sprinting at all when mashing LB, and then realize it's the "grab human shield/throw" button. Same goes for Crysis and Crysis Warhead, for anyone that would play them on PC with the gamepad.
  • On top of this, Saints Row 2 has melee on LT, zoom on RS, reload on A, and jump on X. Saints Row: The Third is much more Call of Duty-like with melee on RS, zoom on LT, jump on A, and reload on X. Taking human shields is now mapped to Y, since they needed to free a bumper for a dedicated grenade throw bind.
  • Car/bike controls have also changed. Saints Row 2 follows the older Grand Theft Auto convention of using A to accelerate and X to brake, leaving the triggers free for shooting. Saints Row: The Third instead opts for the Grand Theft Auto IV approach of using RT to accelerate and LT to brake, moving the shoot button to LB.
    • The worst part? As much of a Porting Disaster as it was on PC, Saints Row 2 at least lets you customize the gamepad controls to help mitigate this effect. The Third forces you to use the defaults, like a lot of PC ports with Xbox 360 gamepad support these days.
• In StarMade, you use left click to place blocks and right click to remove them, which is the exact opposite of...well, frankly, every other block-based sandbox game. Thankfully a patch added in the option to swap the buttons around.
• Terraria:
  • Some players might have changed the default controls to move the up function elsewhere, freeing W for jumping, since up is normally only used in a few special situations. Cue the 1.2 update adding rope, a very common and useful item that relies on the up function to climb...
  • In Minecraft, opening a chest and then shift-clicking an item or stack in your inventory will place that item/stack in the chest. The same action is used in Terraria to permanently delete or sell items. Thankfully 1.3.0.1 fixes this by allowing you to favorite items in your inventory to prevent them from being sold or deleted like this. A later patch fixes this even further, now shift-clicking will move items to and from chests when opened. An option once hidden within the game files is now in the game proper in 1.3.1 and allows you to disable this action.
  • If you play Terraria after playing games where you push T for in-game chat, you'll find yourself throwing your items on the ground every time you want to talk to someone.
  • Clicking an item and moving it out of your inventory by left-clicking drops the item on the ground in Minecraft, but uses the item in Terraria. In multiplayer it's an easy mistake to make when you accidentally use a health potion or drop a stick of dynamite when you meant to give it to your friend.
  • An interesting example occurs once you obtain the Portal Gun, left click places an orange portal and right click places a blue portal instead of what is supposed to be vice versa. Anybody who has played through Portal and Portal 2 enough will be frustrated by placing the wrong portal every time.
• It's highly advised, when used to either Grand Theft Auto V or Watch_Dogs to not play the other within a short timespan, unless you want to completely screw up your habits. Switching to Watch_Dogs will often leave you wondering why your perfect reputation plummeted because you were on autopilot from playing GTA, which lets you do whatever the hell you want. Switching to GTA, on the other hand, will make you wonder why you can't hack anybody, why you don't have upgrades, and why your guns have generic names. Not to go into the completely different driving control schemes, doing this will inevitably have a rage effect on you.

Other Games

• On the PlayStation and Xbox systems in North America, Accept is the bottom-most face button (X/A) and cancel is the right-hand face button (O/B). On Japanese systems however these are inverted, causing no small amounts of confusion for those who import systems from Japan (and sometimes games will not automatically switch their control layouts and stick to the Western style!) . Nintendo meanwhile has their layout for all regions, meaning the right-hand button is Accept and the bottom-most button is Cancel.
  • It gets even worse if you switch from an Xbox game to a Nintendo one, as they have the same buttons and colours for their face buttons, but in completely different positions!^note To wit: A and B are switched around, as are X and Y And sometimes you don't even need to be confused about the colors. If you grew up during the SNES days, if you're playing a game with an Xbox controller, a prompt saying to press the "B" button will inevitably result in pressing the "A" button the Xbox controller, because that's where "B" is on the SNES one. They have returned to this layout with the Nintendo DS and the Wii Classic Controller, and have continued to use it since.
  • In 2020, Sony announced that the PlayStation 5 and all future consoles would switch to the international layout in Japan, much to the consternation of many Japanese gamers (or Nintendo gamers contemplating buying a second console).
• In general, switching between two games of the same genre will do this, especially if they share 90% of the same control mapping but have certain specific functions in different places. No one developer will agree on where exactly to put the Grenade and Melee buttons, for example.
• Almost certainly occurs when PlayStation 3 titles get ported to PlayStation 4. To explain, most PS3 games opted to use L1 and R1 for Aim and Shoot rather than L2 and R2, as fingers easily slip off their convex shape. When these titles get ported to PS4 (such as Uncharted), they're almost always swapped down to the now-concave triggers, inducing this trope.
• The two major virtual reality systems for PC gamers on the market - the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift - both have tracked motion controllers with analog triggers and "grip" buttons on the sides. Not every title uses them the same way.
  • Oculus Touch games will use the grip buttons for holding objects, releasing the moment you let go of the trigger, but games developed with the Vive's wand controllers in mind tend to use the triggers instead, leaving you wondering why you can't pick up the object in front of you if you're an Oculus user trying out a SteamVR game meant for the Vive.
  • In turn, Vive users find it irksome to have to constantly hold down the Vive grip buttons when playing Oculus Touch games through the Revive wrapper, since it's not very ergonomic to do so. This may be alleviated if Revive allows for toggle mode on the grip buttons in future versions.
• In The Sims and its sequels, you can speed up game time by pressing 3. If you've been playing quite a lot (and since the game is a black hole into which many weekends disappear), don't be surprised to find yourself reflexively reaching for the 3 key to speed up slow processes on your computer — including the loading screen of the game.
• In most PC games, pressing the "Esc" key will pause and pressing it again will un-pause. In Cave Story, pressing "Esc" once will pause and pressing it again will exit the game.
  • That's nothing. Earlier versions of MAME (the original one, not any of the spinoffs) quit immediately if you hit escape, unless you're in a tab menu. In that case, it goes back one menu. On the main tab menu, it closes the menu. Careful not to hit that key too many times, especially because most arcade games do not have any form of game saving aside from save states and high scores, so you're SOL if you quit without making a save state. For those curious, the P key pauses, but it's not absolutely clear without checking the default binds.
  • Even worse combination: From the pause menu, Cave Story uses F1 to go back to the main game and Esc to quit. Spelunky uses Esc to go back to the main game and uses F1 for the SUICIDE COMMAND.
  • A lot of Japanese PC games do this. So if you ever play a Japanese PC game, never press the Esc key unless you intend to quit! Thankfully, some games will bring up a menu and ask if you actually want to quit the game.
  • Games made with 2D Fighter Maker 2002 has Esc key pausing and unpausing a game in progress, much to the initial confusion of gamers who are used to Esc key=quit game function of other Japanese PC games.
  • In Typing of the Dead, pressing Escape lets you change what word you're typing, which also means changing what zombie you're shooting. In The Typing of the Dead: OVERKILL, Escape now pauses the game, and Tab is how you change words. In this co-op Let's Play of the latter game, both of the players often pause when they want to change words.
  • In the independently developed Ace Of Spades, where Minecraft meets World War I, the "Exit Game" function is the ESC key, which, in most PC games brings up the menu screen. Often times resulting in accidental quitting.
• The pause button is usually the Start button. Well, some games have pause on the Select button, like Turtles in Time on the SNES and any Neo Geo game in home mode (Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga as well).
• The Sega Saturn has a light variation. A and C are always "accept/confirm" buttons, while B is always "back". The problem is that games don't always agree on whether A or C should be the confirm button. Guardian Heroes is one particularly notorious case; A works fine in the menus, as does C, but scrolling through dialogue ONLY reacts to C. And if you use an Action Replay 4M Plus cart, only A accepts, never C. Hitting C on the Start Game screen sends you to the CD player menu instead.
• Most Nintendo platformers copy Mario games in having the A button be the "jump" button and the B button be attack. The occasional game that switches things, such as the Metroid Prime Trilogy and Mario Clash of all things, can be jarring, to say the least.
• Any 3D game with camera control, because both X and Y axes can either be inverted or not - and many games don't allow you to change this setting, while others only allow you to change one axis.
  • This is confounded further as different games differ on what they consider to be 'normal' and 'inverted'.
• Some early games that used isometric views had trouble getting the keyboard (or joystick) control straight. It is somewhat weird to press "up" only to have the character move to the top right direction. Examples include Q-Bert and Cadaver.
  • Q*bert strongly advises players to rotate the joystick so the fire button is at the top, so that the direction you moved the joystick corresponded with the direction the protagonist moves, at least on the Atari 2600 version.
• The controllers for Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft consoles all have an X button. It is in a different position on each controller.
  • To make this simple to understand, all Nintendo controllers that have a four button layout (sans the Nintendo GameCube, but we'll get to that later) read clockwise from top: X A B Y. Meanwhile, the Sega Dreamcast and all Xbox controllers are Y B A X. Sony controllers use symbols instead of letters, but still manage to have an X button, which is on the bottom, as opposed to the left on the Xbox or the top on Nintendo layouts. Brentalfloss even made a video ranting about the brief confusion this can cause if you play on multiple consoles.
  • Taken to the extreme by the GameCube: not only are all of the buttons in different places compared to even other Nintendo controllers, but they are irregularly sized and placed in an irregular arrangement. Y and X are pushed over as jelly bean-shaped top and right buttons, B is a small round button to the bottom left, and A is a large round button in the middle. To make things worse, if you try and play a Super Nintendo game on the Wii Virtual Console with a GameCube controller, the buttons are the same for each letter, not button placement. The SNES X becomes the GCN X, which makes certain games near insanity to play. Take Contra III: The Alien Wars for example, where Y shoots, B jumps, and A uses bombs... yeah, just try jumping and shooting with that big bomb button in the way. Or the Donkey Kong Country series, where Y rolls and runs, B jumps, and the giant button in between them switches characters and gets off animal buddies. The Wii's Virtual Console has no customization options at all, so you better own a Classic Controller or stick to the rare titles (like Super Metroid) that have their own customization options.
  • In Japan, the standard for PlayStation game menus and PS3 and PSP XMB menus is O to select or confirm, and X to go back or cancel. Makes sense, as these symbols have a meaning in Japanese culture: O (maru) means yes and X (batsu) means no. What doesn't make as much sense is that outside Japan, the standard is X for select/confirm and O (or triangle in older games) for back/cancel. Just try to play the Japanese version of any PlayStation game, and then switch to the English version of the exact same game. You'll be screwed.
    • On the PS3, some Japanese games will automatically switch the Accept/Cancel layout if they figure out they're on a international console. This is evident when the tutorials reference the wrong button.
    • Forget games. If you have a North American PS3 and a Japanese PSP (or vice-versa), you will spend a lot of time trying to remember which button does what.
    • Also, in the XMB menu, Triangle opens a menu with extra options. The PS4 put this to a separate Options button, which can lead to confusion when trying to reach for a button that isn't there on older systems.
    • In rare cases, some Japanese games subvert this trope by having NA controls instead of traditional Japanese ones. Initial D Special Stage for PS2 comes to mind.
    • The PS5 controls use X to confirm and O to cancel on consoles worldwide, including Japan, dropping a standard that was in place there for over 25 years.
• Space sims don't all use the "like an airplane In Space" model of Wing Commander, X-Wing, and the like. In more realistic games that have at least make a passing nod to Real Life physics. For those who use both methods, depending on the game, it can be confusing to attempt a maneuver in one Game Engine physics model, while actually using the other model.
  • A particularly good example is FreeSpace 2, specifically the fan-built Source Code Project engine upgrade. One release implemented Newtonian physics as an option, essentially just to prove they could (it's since been used by a couple of mods). Switching this on in the main campaign would result in hilarity, as the AI pilots no longer had any idea how to fly their ships.
  • An even better example is Elite. Frontier: Elite II and Frontier: First Encounters use full-on realistic Newtonian physics for controlling a ship, and it can be a pain to get used to. If you decide to decelerate your ship down to zero, it's going to take a LONG while before it comes to a full stop and vice versa, and if you come near a planet or station while you're still at high enough speeds, you'll get splatted all over the vicinity. Making any sudden turns? Don't expect any arcade-ish mechanics like unrealistically turning on a dime. Your ship WILL turn painfully slowly, especially if you're at break-neck speeds.
    • The original Elite does not use Newtonian physics. However, it still deserves a spot here just because it uses O and P to roll, and S and X to pitch while A fires your lasers. You have no yaw control whatsoever, either, which makes lining up for a docking approach extra challenging along with going against the Wing Commander and Freespace convention of prioritizing yaw over roll.
    • Elite Dangerous does not use true Newtonian physics either - all ships have arbitrary top speeds, and they all turn much faster at roughly 50% throttle. On top of that, while you can yaw this time, it's intentionally nerfed compared to roll speeds to give more of an Old-School Dogfighting feel to the gameplay. Most of all, though? For the first time in the series, you have full six-degrees-of-freedom movement akin to Descent, so you can strafe vertically and laterally in addition to moving forward and back. This is not only critical to use to become a proficient dogfighter, it's required for successful docking.
• Flight sims have their fair share of muscle memory issues too, owing to different Real Life implementations of the controls just as much as different interface conventions between each sim. Real pilots have to undergo conversion training for this very reason.
  • The F-16C, most notably depicted in Falcon 4.0, and the A-10C, featured in one of the DCS World modules, have very similar stick grip designs, with two minor differences - the A-10C doesn't have a paddle switch and has a center click-down on the CMS hat. Most sim enthusiasts with a replica stick grip (usually produced by Thrustmaster or CH Products) will therefore tend to mirror the real life switch mappings in their settings. How different could they possibly be? Let's list all the ways:
    • The Data Management Switch (DMS) below the trim hat switches the Sensor of Interest (SOI) and cycles the Multi-Function Displays (MFD) on the F-16. On the A-10C, those functions are relegated to a "Coolie Switch" hat on the throttle, and the DMS instead cycles weapon profiles, controls zoom and cycles waypoints, depending on SOI and master mode.
    • The Countermeasures Management Switch (CMS) on the F-16 has you press right to enable ECM, down to disable ECM, up to execute one of four different countermeasures dispensing programs depending on a knob setting, and left to execute program 6, with program 5 being a slap switch near the throttle. On the A-10C, left and right cycle programs, pressing up executes the program, pressing down stops any currently-executing programs, and pressing the center toggles ECM.
    • The pushbutton above and to the right of the trigger toggles Nose Wheel Steering (NWS), disconnects the aerial refueling boom, and steps through your available missiles and bombs on the F-16. On the A-10C, that's your Master Mode Control Button (MMCB), which replaces a few pushbuttons and the dogfight override switch on the F-16. NWS toggle is instead done by the pinky button, which also enables the targeting laser for certain munitions, and missile stepping is done via pushing a two-way "china hat" on the throttle. In turn, that pinky button just toggles the current SOI's FOV on the F-16 when pressed, which the A-10C also relocates to the china hat switch.
    • The autopilot switches are also considerably different, with the F-16 bearing an altitude hold / off / attitude hold switch on a control panel while the A-10C has an altitude and heading hold / path (attitude hold) / altitude hold mode switch on the LASTE panel below the throttle, and the actual AP on / off setting is done via one of two buttons, one of which is the left throttle button.
• Switching between Animal Crossing: Wild World and the DS game Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times can cause some serious awkwardness in the An Interior Designer Is You segments. In Animal Crossing, the A button moves and flips furniture, as well as activates certain items. Others (like chairs and beds) can be used simply by walking into them. The B button picks up furniture. In Magician's Quest, though, the A button picks up furniture, while the B button is the one used to move and flip it. To make it more confusing, the Y button is used to activate it (such as opening dressers), and to sit in chairs or lie down on beds.
• A good way to start an argument on an indie game design forum is to put the jump/shoot functions on 'Z' and 'X' "backwards". Which way is considered backwards? Whichever way you're using. Do yourself a favor and just make the controls remappable.
• You can edit the control scheme for the original PS1 version of Tales of Destiny, but its default setting has O as select/attack and X as cancel/special skill- the opposite of every other Tales game released in America on a Sony console.
• This was endemic enough among the DOS side-scrollers that games assigned jump to up, space, Z, X, control, and shift, and shoot to any of those except up.
• This trope can cause Fatal Frame players to panic when switching from the first game to the second (or vice-versa), especially when the ghosts manage to come right up to you as you try to figure out just which button is for raising the camera.
  • Additionally, the developers also screwed players for the sequels, since they removed the "quick-turn" function while in viewfinder mode. The function disappeared completely for some reason and the button for it is used for whatever it's mapped for in subsequent games.
  • Then comes Fatal Frame III, which suddenly mapped the camera to the rarely-used Triangle button, rather than the usual Square (or Y button, for the XBOX versions) button. The game was a PS2-exclusive title, but playing the original versions and switching to this one will merely lead to the player opening up the map instead of using the camera.
• Besides the points above, the Nintendo DS is almost a whole game system that's guilty of this trope. Again, the system has the exact button layout as the SNES. However, most Nintendo-published games for the system have elected to make the A button the main/jump button for each game, even though back in the SNES era, B button was your main/jump button and Y was your second most used action button. Nintendo has a bad habit of not giving you any way to remap the controls, either, since Viewers Are Morons. It's most glaring in the above mentioned Kirby examples, especially in Super Star Ultra, which is an Updated Re-release of an SNES game that use the B/Y controller style and forcing you to use Nintendo's now preferred A/B style. It's also very annoying when you play a Game Boy Advance game on the system, since they have to saddle you with the A/B style since some players might get confused if they had the option to remap the controls to B and Y, so it's partially justified.
  • Not to mention the trouble switching from GBA to the DS Phat layout. On the GBA, you can mash the D-Pad's "Up" button with wild abandon (tends to be when walking/running somewhere in a game). Move your finger a little too high on the DS Phat, and congratulations! You've just shut your DS off! (often times, without saving what you just did). At least this is rectified on the DS Lite model, where the Power button is now conveniently moved to the side as a switch instead.
  • Note, however, that third-party titles tend to avert this, as their developers are either clearly fans of the old SNES B/Y style, have options to remap your controls, or both; such as the DS Castlevanias or the Mega Man ZX games.
    • Unfortunately, the ability to remap your controls in Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow only works during the regular gameplay. When playing in Julius Mode your controls cannot be changed. This is annoying when you've played through the original twice with the controls in a particular way, then you decide to play as Julius.
  • NES Virtual Console games on the 3DS have the same problem as GBA games on the DS: forced A/B scheme and no way to change it.
    • And the NES on Nintendo Switch continues Nintendo's aversion to custom-mapping buttons. Some people still have that B/Y muscle memory from the SNES, Nintendo.
• The Looking Glass Studios sneak-em-up games Thief: The Dark Project and Thief II: The Metal Age allowed the player to save their key bindings under a specific name. It also came with several popular sets already pre-installed. These had names such as "Quake" and "Half-Life", mimicking the controls in those games.
  • The default controls in Thief: Gold aren't so bad, except that in WASD, S walks forward and W runs, X walks backwards.
• Any PC game that assigned particular meanings to CTRL and ALT (such as many FPS including Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom using them for "fire" and "strafe") was subject to this when the "Windows" key first appeared between CTRL and ALT on new keyboards. Depending on what OS you were running, accidentally hitting the Windows key instead of CTRL or ALT would at best do nothing, and at worst switch you out of the game entirely (such as when running a DOS-based game under Windows 95).
  • Running Windows on a dual-boot Mac with a Mac keyboard also causes this. Since the Windows key is mapped to Command, it ends up on the right of the ALT key instead of the left.
  • Also, press Shift 5 times in a row, and be ready to leave your game due to a window warning you of StickyKeys... Fortunately, said window also gives you the option of disabling StickyKeys entirely.
  • Some laptops come with a "Fn" key (used to give secondary commands to function keys), which, depending on your model, may sit where the Ctrl or Alt key is on other keyboards. It can become aggravating if you frequently switch between your laptop and an ordinary computer keyboard. Not only you end up pressing Fn accidentally instead of the intended key, but also (on some models) you need to hold it down to use function keys the normal way—if you forget it, you'll end up activating the secondary function, such as turning on the camera, turning off the speakers, etc.
• Shooting games, notably First Person Shooters, tend to mush up button assignments for commonly used actions.
  • Between PlayStation 3 games and Xbox 360 games, the button to shoot is typically on the same side, but swapped. On PlayStation 3, it's normally the shoulder button that shoots. On the Xbox 360, it's normally the trigger button that shoots. There are some PlayStation 3 games (First Encounter Assault Recon, BioShock, Sleeping Dogs (2012)) that use the trigger to shoot though. More than a few strategy guides for multiplatform games have mixed up the functions for the L1/L2 and and R1/R2 buttons.
    • To add to the confusion, a few games that use the triggers to aim and attack switch to the shoulder buttons in the sequel.
    • This has changed with the PS4-so far all shooters released for the platform use the shoulder buttons for aiming and shooting.
  • Similarly, grenades and secondary firing.
  • As a video game specific example, Third Person Shooters usually uses the R2/RB button to reload, while most First Person Shooters use Square/X.
• Switching from Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers to Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers leads to some confusion. They're both 3rd person adventure games, but the position of the camera adjust and the menu have changed. The camera adjust is the d-pad in FFCC (which serve as taunts and other things) while it's -/+ in BZS. Menu is 1 in FFCC (special in BZS) while it's 2 in BZS (which is the camera function in FFCC). I'm sure most people probably don't have that issue since BZS is a pretty obscure game, and all the reviewers have a thing against it...
• Try switching from an RPG on the Nintendo DS, where the confirm button is on the right and the cancel button is on the bottom, to one on the PSP, where confirm is on the bottom and cancel is on the right. Or, better yet, don't.
• Visual Novels vary in keyboard controls. The most common control scheme has down advance to the next line, up scrolls back to the previous line, and spacebar hides/shows the dialogue window. However, some games (Type Moon] games in particular) use spacebar to advance to the next line, and only use down to scroll down through the lines you've previously read. Whether page up and page down function the same as the up and down arrows or have their own unique function also varies from game to game.
• The Wii's Classic Controller. Unlike the GameCube controller (with the analog stick in the upper left and the D-pad below it and to the right), it has the D-pad in the upper left and the analog stick below it and to the right.
  • One other issue, if you try to switch between the Classic Controller and a GameCube controller, is that the Z button is in front of the R button on the GameCube controller, but the Z button(s) is to the left of the R button on the classic, and at the middle. As an example, even if the other button placement issues are worked around, someone experienced with using the GameCube controller in Super Smash Bros. Brawl will continually block when trying to throw and vice-versa. There is a Classic Controller Plus, however, which is slightly bigger and easier to hold, and moves the Z buttons to be more like the left & right bumper/L1 and R1 on the other consoles' controllers.
  • Also, the way the Classic Controller's handles angle out instead being in a straight line like every other freaking Nintendo controller in existence! It's not much of difference, but it's just of enough of a change to make you have to relearn how to move the control stick for classic games.
• The Pro Controller for the Wii U doesn't fare much better; its thumbsticks are located at the top of the controller while the D-Pad and buttons are lower. Some players can get used to the layout (as it's designed to mimic the layout on the Gamepad), others cannot.
• Nintendo 3DS:
  • Who here wants to bet that, at least once, they'll shut their 3DS down instead of pressing 'start'? Putting the power button where 'start' and 'select' used to be might not have been such a great idea. Worse yet, it takes you to a screen where you have the option of either shutting it off or putting it into Sleep Mode. Since it then instructs you to do what most people do when they want to enter Sleep mode (for example, closing the system) this is not only redundant, but unlike closing the system, you're booted out of the game with no way to get back but to restart it.
  • If you switch directly from a DS Lite to a 3DS, you may find yourself occasionally trying to turn on/off Wi-Fi when attempting to turn on the 3DS, as the power switch on the DS Lite and the Wi-Fi switch on the 3DS are in the same exact place.
  • What's really annoying at times is where the stylus is. From the DS Lite and on, the stylus is on the right side. With the 3DS, the stylus is near the cartridge slot. And just for fun, the 3DS XL is back on the right side. WarioWare Gold managed to make an entire microgame out of remembering where the stylus is on various 3DS systems.
  • The New Nintendo 3DS changes the layout again. Start and Select have moved back to their original positions, and the power button, the stylus holder, and the cartridge holder have all migrated to the bottom of the handheld. The volume switch has also been moved to the top screen. Not as big of a change, but it can certainly throw off people who are used to the original 3DS. They also decided to move the location of the SD Card slot to someplace where it cannot be replaced with a new one without taking the system apart.
• After Atari's buy-out on Humongous Entertainment, they tried to recreate Pajama Sam and Putt-Putt. Not only did they fail, but they changed the key for skipping cut scenes from Escape to Enter (with Escape now functioning as an additional way to access the Main Menu). This left many under the impression you could not skip cut scenes.
• In Touhou, go play Fairy Wars for a while and then go back to the main series. Then die a dozen times before remembering that you can't freeze enemy bullets in the main games.
  • Going from the photography games to the others is the most 'fun'. With the exception of Violet Detector, you don't directly attack enemies in the photo games, which can really screw up your dodging reflexes, and the way it handles focus^note Shift+Z is a superfocus mode. Z is normally used to attack can lead to forgetting to fire.
  • In the photograph games, the correspondence between the buttons in game and in the menu are inconsistent with the rest of the games:
    • Shoot the Bullet has Shot, Slow and Cancel (no bomb button). In game, Cancel pauses, being the only game where this happens. Slow also cancels in menu, the rest of the games cancel with Bomb.
    • Double Spoiler, like Shoot the Bullet, lets you cancel with Slow, as well as with the new Rotate button. Unlike Shoot the Bullet, neither of them pauses the game, just in case you were getting used to that.
  • How about going between Touhou and CAVE games? In the former, you use a separate button for "focus" mode. In the latter, you instead hold down the shot button to do that.
    • Alternatively, Bullet Hell to non-Bullet Hell shmups. No, that wasn't an invisible bullet, your hitbox is actually the size of your sprite rather than a few pixels in the center. The inverse is also true; your skills to evade in non-Bullet Hell games don't work with heavy bullet patterns in Bullet Hell games.
  • To take a picture with the camera in Shoot the Bullet (and Double Spoiler), you press Z. There's a camera in Impossible Spell Card too, but now you take pictures with X. If you go from one to the other, you'll jump right in front of a bunch of bullets to delete as many as possible with a picture, but you'll never get to delete any because you'll use the wrong button and die before you realize your mistake.
  • In most of the main Touhou games, you can shoot by just holding the shoot button. In both of the Phantasmagoria games, however, holding the button makes you charge special attacks. You have to mash the button to keep shooting.
• Bomberman usually isn't too bad with this, but try going from Bomberman 64 or The Second Attack!, where double-tapping A drops a bomb and then Bomb Kicks it from a stationary position, without having to move off of the bomb and back into it, to Saturn Bomberman or Bomberman Generation's Battle Mode, where that does Line Bomb instead! (And speaking of Saturn Bomberman, all control configurations use C as the bomb button, not A.)
• MechWarrior
  • Players switching from MechWarrior 4 to MechWarrior Living Legends will have problems in that they will be ejecting every time they try to flush coolant while Over Heating. In MW4, the Flush Coolant key is set to "F". In MWLL, Eject is set to "F", with coolant set to "C" (which was Crouch/Stand Up in MW4).
  • Going from Living Legends to Online, if the player attempts to set their weapons to Chain Fire or Group Fire with "\", they will Alpha Strike, probably into the back of a teammate with typically vengeful results. The targeting key "T" will instead lock out the controls and open up the chat menu. Finally, the throttle will (by default) behave like a traditional shooter (hold W or S to move forward/backward) instead of the traditional Mechwarrior aircraft/boat throttle, though this behavior can be changed in the options menu.
• Star Fox 64. Going back from the Bluemarine in Aquas back to the Arwing in Zoness, the following stage? If you've been abusing the "barrel roll + shoot + torpedo^*of which you have infinite of, unlike the Arwing's and Landmaster's Smart Bombs" tactic in Aquas, expect to waste a bomb or two by accident when Zoness begins.
  • If you've played the 3DS remake of SF 64 after playing the SNES original with the default controls, then you'll instinctively press Y to boost and X to bomb and find that they've been switched around. While the game features two control schemes, neither of them are identical to the SNES default and it'll be hard to get used to it, which begs the question of why they didn't just include that control scheme in the first place.
• Euro Truck Simulator features the Real Life example of crossing national borders (most notably the English Channel) and thus having to drive on the "wrong" side of the road. Because of this, American players are advised to start in mainland Europe, while European and British players would do well to start in their home country. In addition, if you are going to be spending a significant amount of time driving in the UK, it would be wise to reconfigure your truck's interior to UK style, with the steering wheel on the right hand.
• In Wii Fit Plus, the Tilt City game on Advanced mode has the player use the Wii remote to control the board on the top and lean back and forth to control the two boards on the bottom. Switching to Expert mode reverses the controls: lean back and forth to control the board on the top, tilt the remote to control the boards on the bottom.
• Story of Seasons:
  • Going back and forth between Animal Crossing and Story of Seasons can be very tricky, especially when it comes to actions that can be performed in both games such as fishing or harvesting fruit trees. Despite having some gameplay similarities, their control schemes are generally completely different. Harvest Moon: Magical Melody and the original Animal Crossing (2001) are probably the best examples. They're both Super-Deformed Gamecube titles in similar styles, when it comes to fishing it can be a drag going between them. In Animal Crossing you have to wait for fish to nibble while in Harvest Moon you can get it right when it bites. This leads to more than a few missed fish in AC.
  • Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life and Harvest Moon: Magical Melody are on the same system but have completely different fishing mechanics.
  • Harvest Moon 64 and Harvest Moon: Back to Nature have the same characters and use the same art style, but the characters likes are different. This can cause issues when switching between games. For example, eggs are the easiest way to befriend Gray in 64, but they don't give as many friendship points in the Mineral Town games.
• Play Silent Hill 2 then immediately go to Silent Hill 3 and accidentally pause the game all the time trying to open the inventory. All the other controls are exactly the same, except those two are switched. Heather also turns at an odd pace compared to James, but that's not as bad. For added fun, go from those two to Silent Hill 4 and equip a weapon when you want to run, or reset the camera trying to use look mode.
• If you play Hitman: Absolution, Hitman (2016) or Hitman 2 and have just started playing Hitman: Blood Money, then you're likely used to dumping bodies out of sight and into a container somewhere, then picking up the disguise from said container. Well, not so in Blood Money, as you have to take the disguise you want before you hide the body, not after as with every game after it. Keep that in mind or you'll be restarting the levels a lot...
  • Absolution and the modern Hitman trilogy use the same engine and share a lot of the same mechanics and controls except for one crucial one for the series - in Hitman, you could clonk people over the head with whatever blunt instrument you happen to find and they'll only be considered unconscious for the purposes of your Silent Assassin run unless the tool is specifically labled "lethal". In Absolution on the other hand, if you happen to clobber someone with a wrench or fire extinguisher or hammer or whatever, they'll drop dead on the spot, costing you points and your hard-earned SA rank.
• Switching between MOBA games can cause some hefty doses of this, as they tend to lull you in with a fair amount of overlap, only to remind you painfully that the similarities can only go so far. The DotA duo and League of Legends have some scathing differences, from minion and tower behavior to how quickly you can change directions. Topping anything from that pair, however, is interchanging the previous games with Smite; now you're juggling ability keys being either based around "qwer" or "1234" with extras scattered about in different places and either having cursor targeting or no cursor whatsoever. That's not even getting into the possibility of inadvertently using the wrong ability after momentarily confusing one hero/champion/god for another, mixing up items or build strategies, or getting lost after you remember the base map of one game does not equate flawlessly to the map in another.
• The two Pokémon Trozei! games have different methods by which you move Pokémon around the board. In the original, you move them in any of the four cardinal directions and try to line up matches, while Battle Trozei! has you swap their positions instead. Getting the two movement systems confused is not only likely, but it's doomed to end in failure if you don't adapt quickly.
• Dota 2 has different hotkey assignments from the first one, which tends to throw veterans making the switch off. Thankfully, there is an option to use the old hotkeys.
• Play any game where you need to hold down a key to run. Now switch to a game where running is the default mode, and the same key is used for walking slowly. Frustration ensues.
• WarioWare uses this to throw the player off. Several levels resemble other levels but play differently, which along with the fact they're only a few seconds long causes you to think fast.
• Justified on the Vampire Killer case above, many MSX games like Nemesis and Metal Gear use the keyboard controllers. This screws up many gamers who never used to own this PC system.
• Cook, Serve, Delicious!: Go earn yourself your nice five-star restaurant with your controller of choice. Got it? Good, good. Now, go plug in a different controller. Any controller. We dare you. The actions might be carefully remapped to make "sense" on the new controller, but you are going to have angry customers on your hands for a while.
• On the NES version of Action 52, the "jump" and "attack" buttons are B and A respectively, which is the inverse for most games on the console. Same goes for the NES adaptation of Alien³.
• The PC port of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony has many control differences compared to the PC ports of the previous two main-series Danganronpa games. The right mouse click fires the truth bullet and left click fires the silencer, while it was the opposite in later games; Enter highlights observable objects rather than Tab, Esc fast-forwards through text and exits areas rather than Ctrl and R respectively, and F3 brings up the controls instead of Esc. Fortunately, all of these except the mouse can be changed by editing the game's config.txt file.
• For PC games, try going from a downloadable game to a game that uses CDs, and see if you've left the disc in the tray after you're done playing.
• In hindsight, the back-of-the-cartridge warning on Nintendo Entertainment System games that hold save data that informs players that they must hold in the Reset button when powering off the system as well as in-game warnings to do so every time the player saves their game were very good ideas. Players used to more modern systems (which do not require that extra step) may reflexively just hit the Power button without resetting, and then seconds later have that crushing realization that their progress just got wiped out.
• Some city builders use WASD to move the camera around, while others use the arrow keys.
• A lot of base-building games use space to pause the game. Factorio uses it to fire your weapon. Let's just hope you're not holding your nuclear-armed rocket launcher when you make that mistake.
• In all of the other games within StreetPass Mii Plaza, pressing the A button during a dialogue box will fill in the rest of the dialogue box immediately. In Mii Trek/StreetPass Explorers, however, pressing the A button during a dialogue box will skip to the next dialogue box. This frequently results in fast readers missing some of the things the characters have to say. For a more general, system-wide example, all of StreetPass Mii Plaza, including Mii Trek/StreetPass Explorers, allows you to hold down the R button to speed the game up. If you play it a lot, you're likely going to accidentally do this for other 3DS games too.
• MMORPGs have their game balance changed quite frequently, so any tactic or skill that gets changed will have players still trying to play the old way out of habit until they get used to the new changes.
• League of Legends, Olaf got a mini rework which fundamentally changed how his W ability is used. While it retained its Attack Speed increase, it is now meant to be used when he has very low health to get the most out of the shield. This is a direct contrast to always using it immediately when engaging a fight.
• Emily Short's Best of Three and Pythos Mask have almost the same dialogue systems, but the method of choosing options is different. In Best of Three, it's with the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4, and in Pytho's Mask, it's A, B, C, or D.
• MiHoYo's flagship games of Honkai Impact 3rd, Genshin Impact, and Honkai: Star Rail can be annoying to flip through with regards to the control scheme.
  • Honkai Impact 3rd in particular has controls all over the place when compared to other action/adventure games. For instance, the right bumper button is used for interaction and the top face button for jump. Then it has inconsistencies within itself, particularly with Part 2, where Ultimate is now right bumper and the left bumper is interaction. Events can sometimes run amok with this as well.
  • If you're coming from Honkai Impact 3rd to Genshin Impact, have fun pressing the jump button when you meant to dodge or pressing the right bumper button when you meant to interact with something.
  • And finally coming from Genshin Impact to Honkai Star Rail, you'll be pressing attack in the normal map when you want to interact with something, and then there's the shortcut ring, which only about three things share the same spot between the games.