Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Difference between revisions

{{quote|"What bothers me about this game is just one simple problem: They swapped the buttons! ''B'' is Jump and ''A'' throws shells! How did they fuck up the controls for a ''Mario'' game?! Why change what we grew up with? Why change what's been firmly planted in our brains since childhood?!"|'''[[The Angry Video Game Nerd]]''', on ''[[Super Mario|Mario Clash]]''}}

 

 

But then, if they're merely similar, it also stands to reason that they're somewhat... different. And maybe this difference is what completely throws you off your game.

----

{{examples}}

 

=== Action ===

* ''[[Super Metroid]]'' is especially problematic - the default control scheme uses A to jump and ''X'' to shoot. (X is located in the top corner of the SNES controller.) Thankfully, ''Super Metroid'' is also one of the first games to allow you to remap every button on the controller to your liking and save your preferences for later.

** How about going from a 2D ''Metroid'' (A to jump, B to shoot) to one of the ''[[Metroid Prime]]'' games (A to shoot, B to jump)?

** At least Prime 3 allowed you to reverse the buttons. But because the B button is a trigger on the Wii remote, you'd think it'd be the ''default'' fire button. It isn't.

*** Unfortunately, the switch buttons option is broken - it makes A jump and B shoot, but only in regular mode. In morphball form, A reverts to dropping bombs, which makes a confusing mess. Maybe they'll fix it for ''[[Updated Rerelease|Metroid Prime Trilogy]]''?

** In ''Super Metroid'', L aims downward diagonally, and R aims upwards diagonally. In ''Metroid Fusion'', L aims diagonally (both up and down, controlled by the D-pad) and R selects missiles. Get ready to waste a few missiles by mistake early on.

* Go from ''[[Metroid Prime]]'' to any other [[First-Person Shooter]] on the [[Game Cube]]. Not only for buttons or (most of the times) lack of auto-aim, but also because you have to use both analogs to walk properly.

* ''[[Ninja Gaiden]] [[Compilation Rerelease|Trilogy]]'', a compilation of all three NES games in the series released for the SNES, had 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 are used as alternate buttons to perform the same functions, this results in a counter-intuitive control scheme since most SNES action games used Y for attacks and B for jumping.

*** Forget side special, the original has no up/down throw, no airdodging, and ''no C-stick!!''

* ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages|The Legend of Zelda Oracle Games]]'' do this, because their graphics are so similar to those of the earlier ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening|The Legend of Zelda Links Awakening]]'', but your sword starts out on the opposite button from that of ''Link's Awakening''. The real problem, though, is that the button combination used to save in ''Link's Awakening'' is used to ''reset the game'' in the Oracle games. A player who started playing the Oracles immediately after just finishing a run of ''Link's Awakening'' could end up losing quite a bit of progress...

*** Another major difference between ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess|The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess]]'' and the other GC Zelda games (counting the ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time|The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time]]'' remake) is that instead of having all of the menu components simply under the Start Button, it was spilt into two: the D-Pad was used for switching equipment and the Start Button only went to a basic menu that allowed for viewing collectables/stats, saving and changing outfits/sheilds. In ''Wind Waker'' and ''Ocarina Of Time'' the D-Pad was used for controlling the mini-map.

** Then there's ''[[The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap|The Legend of Zelda the Minish Cap]]'', which used the R button for lift/throw, which had been A in ''[[The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past|The Legend of Zelda a Link To T He Past]]'', and wasted the L button on the game's fusion function.

*** The inverse of ''most'' games, in fact, and definitely more than most Zelda games. It's very hard to go from playing this port and then playing the [[Game Boy]] Zelda games.

** In ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword|The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword]]'' the A-button is not for [[Player Tic|rolling]], but instead for running. Shaking the Nunchuk ''while'' running triggers rolling. Almost the same result, but still... Good thing running is more efficient than rolling, once the player has gotten used to it.

*** Which isn't a completely huge problem, since the Z button does not require much force to press down compared to the other Nintendo controller shoulder buttons. The huge pain comes when they forced it on Ocarina of Time 3D as well, a game that was originally designed with a switch targeting system, and is now on a clunky portable system. Even worse is that often, you have to hold both the L and R shoulder buttons on the 3DS because holding up your shield is a common technique against enemies.

* ''[[Assassin's Creed (video game)|Assassin's Creed I]]'' has the exact same 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 too fixed the problem in the [[Assassin's Creed II|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.

*** On PC, this is even worse as ''GTA IV'' no long allows to customize the controls like you could in <s>GTA III, VC and SA</s> [[Porting Disaster|every PC game of the post-DOS era and many before it]].

** ''[[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.

*** ''[[Just Cause (video game)|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 stylishy doing a handbrake turn you jump out of the car and watch it spiral into a wall.

** Well technically you are sheathing the weapon into an enemy... or a wall.

* Variation in ''[[Bionic Commando]] Rearmed'' after just about any other 2D platform game. You ''will'' instinctively try to jump, despite the complete lack of a jump button.

** ''Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes'' is a remake of the first game built on the engine of the second. However, since ''MGS2'' 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.

** The Windows port of ''[[MGS 2]]'' has a totally different keyboard layout from the port of the original... and the key customization doesn't quite work.

* ''[[Max Payne (series)|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 NO [[Regenerating Health]]. Until you get this into your head, expect to have much trouble due to being over-reliant on that mechanic.

** Even 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) 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.

** ''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.

* In ''[[Prototype (video game)|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.

* ''[[Double Dragon|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 also used a similar system in their older beat-'em-up ''Renegade''.

 

* 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.

* 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.

* ''[[Samurai Shodown]] 2'' on the Wii Virtual Console played 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 was 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 were reversed, causing..issues.

* You spent years learning how to play as Voldo in ''[[Soul Series|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 [[Executive Meddling|no good reason]] all the inputs are changed.

** They did the same thing with Ivy!

** Talim is much [[They Changed It, Now It Sucks|slower]], and her moves have been reassigned.

* 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/stay night|Fate/Unlimited Codes]]'', where the combo system tends to leave one open to counterattack).

** Also try playing any of the ''[[Street Fighter III|SF3]]'' series or the P-Groove in ''[[Capcom vs. Whatever|Capcom vs SNK 2]]''. Then try playing ''[[Street Fighter II|SF2]]'', ''[[Street Fighter IV|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''!

* ''[[Guilty Gear]]'': Pressing all the face buttons at once sets up for an Instant Kill attack.

* In ''[[Capcom vs. Whatever]]'' 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 the [[King of Fighters]] series, the LP+LK command has changed a few times. In 94 and 95, it was 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. Whatever|Capcom Vs SNK]] series. In 99, backwards rolling popped you forward straight afterward, while accidentally press a button during forward roll brings you back into the line of fire. In the [[Cv S]] series, there was no backwards rolling whatsoever, so KOF veterans got messed up by this.

 

 

=== Platformers ===

* ''[[Super Mario Galaxy]]'' players reflexively use their Spin Attack to get an extra jump. ''[[Super Mario Galaxy 2]]'' exploits this in several galaxies where doing this will cause you to plummet to your death.

* 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.

* In ''[[Sonic Adventure 2]]'', shoulder buttons had controlled the camera. In ''[[Shadow the Hedgehog]]'', the C-stick took over this function and the R button allowed the useless function of strafing. Grr... Cosmic Fall.

** Try playing the ''[[Sonic Advance]]'' titles after playing ''[[Sonic Rush Series]]'' or ''Sonic Rush Adventure''...and NOT continue to attempt trick actions.

** ''Yoshi's Island'' is pretty much under this as well, the original (at least the GBA port) used A to jump, B to eat enemies, R to throw eggs, and L to lock the aim. The DS sequel, keeping with 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.

** 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.

* Many people, after having played ''[[Cave Story]]'', will frequently press Z to jump in other games. For example, in ''[[Maple Story]]'', Z is the letter for picking up items.

* An infamous example is the [[Game Cube]] release of ''[[Mega Man (video game)|Mega Man]] Anniversary Collection'', a compilation of ten classic games from the ''Mega Man'' series, all of which had the jump and shoot button positions switched from their original release.

** Similarly, ''X'' has the dash button in the same place as ''ZX'''s OIS System.

* 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.

* Try swapping between ''[[Jak and Daxter]]'' and ''[[Ratchet and 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''.

** Even within the ''[[Ratchet and Clank]]'' games. The later ones had optional, or sometimes default, lock-strafe mode. Then you go back to the first one, and that option no longer exists.

** Ratchet is an interesting case though. 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 second and third game, where it was optional but you wouldn't use it before because it was too disorienting.

** In the classic series, R1 has always been a secondary fire button, but most players used 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.

* ''[[Spyro the Dragon]]''. It used to be that Square was Charge and Circle was Breath ability. They change it almost every game. In ''Legend of Spyro'', R1 is charge, Square is breath and Circle is Melee combat.

** Although no immediate examples come to mind, several of the controls swap between ''Legend'' and ''Underworld''.

*** On PC, the default Jump key changed between right-click, and the Space bar.

** Both games feature staff-based combat. However, the "Attack" button (as well as the "break [[Crate Expectations|crates]]" button) in ''Beyond Good and Evil'' is "A." It's "B" in ''Star Fox Adventures.'' The "dodge" command is similarly swapped. Also, both games use ''entirely'' different styles of combos.

** 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'').

** Many cross-platform platformers are this. A classic example would be the the movie tie-in game ''[[The Lion King (Video Game)|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 [[Hilarity Ensues|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 instead), but most people jump straight into the game, thinking "I can handle change!", only to have this trope served to them.

* 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.

* ''[[Maze of Galious]]'' and ''[[Castlevania|Vampire Killer]]'' on the [[MSX]] used 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 used A to jump.

 

* The ''[[Guitar Hero]]'' series and ''[[Rock Band]]'' have similar "guitars", but totally different timing. In particular, ''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.

** That's just the guitar parts. The drum controllers for ''[[Rock Band]]'' and ''[[Guitar Hero]]'' have different layouts for the pads (''Rock Band'' has 4 pads, ''Guitar Hero'' 3 pads and 2 raised cymbals), so switching between them can be a lot of trouble.

*** 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.

* Another ''[[Guitar Hero]]'' example: After getting decent at riffs of songs like "Cliffs of Dover" on Expert, it becomes impossible to play them on Hard.

* The version of "The Spirit of Radio" in ''Guitar Hero 5'' is in a different key than the album version. Lots of luck singing it right the first time.

** 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 ''[[Dance Dance Revolution]]'' games than it did in earlier versions.

* ''[[Dance Dance Revolution]]'' 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.

* ''[[DJMAX]] 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. Moving from 4 to 6 was annoying because when I swapped from one middle column to the other I kept trying to hit the up button instead of the central one, and if it went one column outward again I'd be hitting the outer button. I drilled it into my head eventually, though.

* 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.

** 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 [[Cover Version|based on]] the Brian Setzer Orchestra version of the song, ''not'' the original Stray Cats version. The two have similar rhythms, [[Captain Obvious|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.

 

* For the ''[[Gran Turismo]]'' series specifically, 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 '''ever''', where you just hold square.

** Keep in mind, that is a sim. Remember the first license test that involves braking? Using a "hold square to reverse" scheme wouldn't be a good idea.

* Although not messing with the interface, ''[[Mario Kart]]'' takes full advantage of this by including "Mirror Mode". 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 [[Game Cube]] controller. Once you're used to it, play ''[[Mario Kart]] Double Dash'' with a [[Game Cube]] controller, or vice versa. "[[Hilarity Ensues|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 the 3DS version, 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.

* An example within a game: ''[[Track Mania]] 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 kph average speed) to Island (many tracks are pegged at 999 kph all the way) is worse.

** [[It Gets 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 ''[[Track Mania]]'' has two distinct modes. The one where you place track pieces, which uses the arrow keys or mouse to move around, [[Pg Up]] and [[Pg Down]] 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.''

 

 

* 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.

* Going from ''[[Monster Hunter]] Freedom Unite'' to any other third person game on the PSP will cause much confusion. The camera is controled with the D-pad, the shoulders control running and camera reset, and the joystick controls movement. This a setup unique to the one game, and attempting to play ''[[Renegade Squadron]]'' or ''[[Valkyria Chronicles II]]'' afterwards is very confusing.

* In ''[[Star Ocean]] 3'', 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.

** 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.

** ''[[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.

** The same complaint goes to ''[[Skies of Arcadia]]'', at least the [[Game Cube]] 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.

* 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 [[Sarcasm Mode|bet]][[Yet Another Stupid Death|ter]] if you're playing P4 on Expert difficulty.

** There is at least an option to reenable Start as a menu button...but not in ''[[Pokémon Black and White]]''. Although there, the menu is always on the bottom screen, so it's not so much of an issue.

** Worse still, [[Pokémon Conquest]] reverted to using Start for the menu... and X '''ends your turn!''' (fortunately it asks for confirmation first, but still...)

* 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.

** 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 to [Q]uiver your missiles to make shooting them easier...but in ADOM, Q is Quit.

* 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:

** ''[[Final Fantasy VIII]]'''s default mapping was as follows: X - Accept, O - Menu, Triangle - Cancel/Run. Funny when it's predecessor used the Japanese default controls and the successor used the US default controls.

** Nevermind the differences between ''[[Fable II]]'' and the 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?)

* 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.

** 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.

* ''[[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.

** 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.

** 358/2 Days manages to switch the attack and jump button from its console counterparts. Cue frustration and deaths. Then, after mastering Days and feeling proud, try going back to the console games. Go on.

*** And then ''Re: [[Kingdom Hearts coded|coded]]'' came along, using a variant of Birth By Sleep's Command Deck system. The DS use 4 buttons on its right side, arranged in a cross, much like the PSP. However, Birth By Sleep uses X (the bottom button) to perform basic attacks, and Circle (the right button) to jump. coded uses A (the right button) to jump, and B (the bottom button) to attack, inverting this, which can trip up people coming directly from Birth By Sleep. Also, the Air Dash has changed from hitting "dodge" in the air to hitting "jump" in the air.

* 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.

* Heck, ''Dragon Age'' does this between its own 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.

* 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. In the third game, Start switches leaders between Mario and Luigi again, and you switch to and from Bowser the same way that you do the babies in the second game. 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.

* ''[[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 recieved poorly.

* ''[[Eternal Sonata]]'' attempts to do this within itself. For most of the game, using the [[Xbox 360]] controls, B is for [[Action Commands|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.

* 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.

* ''[[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.

 

 

=== First-Person Shooters ===

* 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]], [[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.

* In a lot of [[First-Person Shooter|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 all ''[[Call of Duty]]'' games, the Q button makes you lean to the left (except later ''[[Modern Warfare]]'' games, where it instead throws a special grenade).

** On the same note, players who play ''[[Garry's Mod|Garrys Mod]]'' may find themselves bringing up the spawn menu when they wanted their previous weapon.

** 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 [[All There in the Manual|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 succesor ''Fallen Empire: Legions'' can screw you up indefinitely.

* A common problem with console FPS, in particular in relation to aiming and inverted controls. The "normal" controls are generally tilting the the joystick up to aim up and to aim down you tilt the stick down, simple right? Well turn on the "inverted" option and suddenly up becomes down and down becomes up. While it comes down to personal preference which set-up is the "better" option, it can become 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.

** 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. ([[Demonic Spiders|Not that the dogs ever played fair with the timing anyway.]])

** 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?

*** 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.

**** Even worse with ''[[Killzone]] 2'', where ''Resistance's'' grenade button becomes 'use'.

* ''The Orange Box'' includes ''[[Portal (series)|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.

** Try playing ''[[Portal (series)|Portal]]'', where both mouse buttons fire different portals, and then try playing the Flash game, in which Q and E fire one color each of the portals, the left mouse button fires alternating portals, and right click opens the useless Flash menu (which to be fair, can't be deactivated from within a Flash application).

** Or go from ''HL2'' to the first ''[[Half-Life (video game)|Half-Life 1]]'' (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.

*** Try shoving your opponent in ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'' as a sniper. [[Shmuck Bait|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.

* 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...

* The 3rd Person Shooter ''[[Dirge of Cerberus]]'' decided to invert the camera control. When you push the right joystick right, the camera pans left and you get a view of the right, this is the exact opposite of the majority of TPS and is one of the main complaints of the game.

* NES [[Shoot'Em Up|Shoot Em Ups]] ''Sky Shark'' and ''1943''. The former uses B for bomb and A for fire, and the latter flips them around.

* ''[[Battlefield (series)|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.

*** 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.

* 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.

* 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! ''[[Video Game Cruelty Potential|Why would I want you to]] [[Super Drowning Skills|jump in the sea]]!?''"

* For a devoted player of [[Time Splitters]] 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 sniper mission, because ''using the rifle switches to a first-person camera''.

** Let's not forget ''Timesplitters 2'' and ''Timesplitters: Future Perfect'' for the [[Game Cube]], 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...

* [[Fallout]] 3 especially, for it runs on the same engine as Oblivion (and the rest of the controls are the same, except for the buttons for taking out your weapon and going into third person mode are also reversed by default).

* Hopefully you didn't play through ''[[Resident Evil 4]]'' just before ''[[Resident Evil 5|5]]'' came out. Your shoot and reload keys have been swapped.

* ''[[Dead Space 2]]'' has several differences to ''[[Dead Space (video game)|Dead Space]]'': Reloading is now X instead of Lt+A, Quick Heal is now B instead of X, Stasis is now Lt+Y instead of Lt+X and the inventory is now accessed by pressing Back instead of Y. 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.

* ''Bodycount'': 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. R3 is Crouch.

* In ''[[Deus Ex: Human Revolution|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.

* ''[[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).

* ''[[Serious Sam]] 3: BFE'' has an achievement for completing the campaign once through without sprinting, aiming down iron sights or [[One Bullet Clips|manually reloading.]] Problem is, if you've played pretty much any recent shooter, you might easily slip up.

* Players trying to interact with the environment in ''[[Rage (video game)|Rage]]'' 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.

* The remake of ''[[Syndicate]]'' has enough similarities with fellow EA-published ''[[Crysis (series)|Crysis]]'', including the sprint-into-slide and automatic ledgegrabbing, that you might be confused when it isn't. L1/LB is Breach, not Maximum Armour; R1/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.

 

=== Sports Games ===

** ''[[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.

** 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.

* 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?

 

=== Strategy ===

* 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'' (the newest one) went from the standard commands in ''Medieval II'' and ''Empire'' to ''Rome'''s (the earliest 3D game.)

* 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 Strategy|turn-based games]], so you don't get killed because you're hitting the wrong button.

* As another Strategy example, after playing [[X-COM]], much difficulty will be had in other games of similar design, like ''Rebel Star'' 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''.

* 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.

* 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. [[Captain Obvious|Not good.]]

* ''[[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 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.

** 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!

* First of all, we all know the pause button is the Start button, right? Well, some games have pause on the '''Select''' button, like ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Turtles in Time|Turtles in Time]]'' on the SNES and any [[Neo Geo]] game in home mode.

* 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.

**** The default controls though, were insanely hard to adjust to, requiring uncomfortable thumb-twisting and finger maneuvering.

*** The ''[[Donkey Kong Country]]'' series is basically impossible to play without a Classic Controller; the configuration on a [[Game Cube]] controller goes beyond muscle memory and into sheer insanity. Y rolls and runs, B jumps, and the giant button in between them switches characters and gets off animal buddies.

** A particularly good example is ''[[Free Space]] 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.

* 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 [[PS 1]] 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 (series)|Tales]] game released in America on a Sony console.

** Many fighting games with six attack buttons were obviously designed with the original (giant) [[wikipedia:File:XboxOriginalController.jpg|Duke]] controllers in mind. Quite a nuisance on other controllers, where you have to reach all over the place for those extra two attack keys.

* 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.

* 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 Rerelease]] 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.

* The Looking Glass Studios sneak-em-up games ''[[Thief]]: The Dark Project'' and its sequel ''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.

* ''Any'' PC game that assigned particular meanings to CTRL and ALT (such as many FPS including ''[[Wolfenstein 3D]]'' 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).

** ''Tetris: The Grand Master 4'' is slated to replace the third rotation button, used by some players to achieve a quick 180-degree rotation, with an instant autoshift button. [[This Is Gonna Suck]].

* Shooting games, notably [[First-Person Shooter|First Person Shooters]], tend to mush up button assignments for commonly used actions.

** Similarly, grenades and secondary firing.

** As a video game specific example, the ''[[Uncharted]]'' series uses the R2 button to reload. Most [[First-Person Shooter|First Person Shooters]] use Square.

* 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.

* The [[Nintendo Wii]]'s Classic Controller. Unlike the [[Game Cube]] 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 [[Game Cube]] controller, is that the Z button is in front of the R button on the [[Game Cube]] 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 [[Game Cube]] 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.

* 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...

** Not even a bet. To make matters worse, 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.

* Bullet-Proof Software's version of ''[[Tetris]]'' for the Famicom used the down button to rotate (counterclockwise rotation only, of course). A dubious choice, even considering that this was the first console version of ''Tetris'' ever.

* ''[[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.)

 

 

 

=== Automobiles ===

* Most vehicles with automatic transmissions have a brake pedal that's one-third-again to twice as wide as that provided on manual versions, with the extra width going well into the zone where the clutch pedal would be. Result? If you're used to [[Driving Stick]] but occasionally drive automatics, you ''will'' clip the brake pedal while going down for the clutch that isn't there, at least once.

** While we're in driving sticks, going from [[media:GearStick.png|"First on the upper left" to "Reverse on the upper left"]] can take some time to get used to.

** And one more - most cars have the indicator stalk on the side of the steering wheel opposite the gear lever (theoretically to share out the work of changing gears and indicating, although that's less of a problem with automatics). This isn't normally swapped when a car is changed to right or left-hand drive - with the result that most English and Japanese cars have indicators on the right, and American and European cars have them on the left. Cue starting one's windscreen wipers before changing lanes...

*** Australia has a similar problem, albeit worse when a model is initially designed in Europe and released with that setup, then converted to the English/Japanese layout for a couple of years, especially if its being manufactured in Australia, and then switched back because of a re-design by the original team, or the Australian plant is now producing primarily for export to those countries while reducing overall output of that model to make way for a new one...

* Many automatic transmission trucks and vans with automatic transmissions have the emergency/parking brake as a foot pedal, small and close to the outside of the car. Sometimes, there is a release lever above the pedal, under and to the left of the steering wheel. Sometimes, the "release" is achieved by pressing on the pedal a second time. In the latter case, car engineers still like to stick a lever in the same place as the "parking brake release lever", but instead of releasing the brake, it instead pops the hood.

* Driving different cars may take some time to get used to. For example, driving a car with a brake pedal where the stopping power isn't as gradual, then driving a car where the stopping power is. Even after driving the first car for an hour or so, you may stop the second car with more push on the brakes than necessary.

 

=== Computers ===

** If you're a fairly fast touch-typist, it's entirely possible to hit the central plastic divider-thing between the two halves of the keyboard hard enough to be physically painful when going for a 'g' or an 'h'.

* Some modern keyboards have three extra keys: "Wake Up, Sleep, and Power." The "Power" key is located ''right above the pause key.''

** IBM (now Lenovo) [[Think Pad]] keyboards have an annoying Back key above the left arrow, and forward key above the right arrow. Imagine: You are playing a game on the Internet and want to hit the left arrow key. You accidentally hit the back key. Damn. Now you have to start all over. Even experienced [[Think Pad]] users get caught out by this one.

** Better yet: what about a tower case that has the reset switch on the upper right-hand side, ''right next to'' the optical drive eject switch?

* Each keyboard has a different shape for the Enter (carriage return) key. The thing is, the [| \] key is placed in a different position depending on the Enter key's shape. The first two examples are shown [http://www.dancingmango.com/blog/2007/02/19/frustrations-with-a-smaller-enter-key/ here.]

** If the Enter key is rectangular, the [| \] key is a shorter rectangle key on top.

** If Enter is in a backwards L shape, [| \] is a square key to the left of Backspace, shrinking it.

** Some IBM compatible keyboards from the late 80's had ''vertical'' ENTER keys.

* Speaking of the [| \] key, some keyboards have an extra [| \] key just to the left of the Z key, which unfortunately takes up half of where the left Shift key should be. As if one [| \] key wasn't enough. \try hitting the left \shift key on those keyboards and not accidentally typing like that.

* And of course there is the original QWERTY design itself. It was designed by Christopher Sholes for the explicit reason of keeping people from typing too fast. Keys next to one another, if pressed together in succession, would jam together. This was solved by placing common letter pairs (such as "SH" or "TH" and separating them on the keyboard. This also had the side effect of slowing typists who were unfamiliar with the keyboard layout, also helping to hide the problem until better mechanisms were introduced.

* Some smart phones rearrange buttons slightly on different iterations. While the QWERTY layout was the same on both the Samsung Blackjack II and the later iteration, the Jack, which ones did which symbols when the Function key is hit changed. Most annoying when you're trying to unlock your phone (which requires hitting S on the Blackjack II, but Z on the Jack).

* Some keyboard layouts group the F keys in sets of three instead of the usual four. This is usually an issue with those that use the F keys constantly and go by feel of the grouping. For example, accidentally pressing the F3 key when meaning F4 (because it's at the end of the first grouping), or F4 when meaning F5 (at the beginning of the second grouping).

* Perhaps the most horrendous problems is going from mechanical typewriter to electronic or, worse, straight to PC. It is entirely possible to hurt you finger by both thinking that keys on the upper lines should be substantially higher than those on the bottom lines combined with the force you would automatically hit the mechanical key with.

* On versions of Windows with different languages for default the keyboard shortcuts are different. It's not uncommon to press Ctrl+A repeatedly trying to select all with no results, only to realize that in Portuguese "All" is "Tudo" and the shortcut is Ctrl+T.

* On Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems, Ctrl-D at a shell prompt will generally cause the shell to log out (generally closing the window if you're using a terminal emulator, or returning to a login prompt on a virtual console or serial line). On Windows, Ctrl-D at a command prompt just prints ^D.

* Also, if you've gotten addicted to mouse gestures in Opera, using other browsers can invoke this trope.

* This troper is right-handed, but runs a mouse left-handed to free the more-dextrous hand for writing and numeric entry. After seven years of this, using a co-worker's computer is maddening! One can't rearrange others' workstations for a ten-minute operation, but it's like trying to throw a baseball left-handed while aiming in a mirror.

 

=== Internet, software, and related ===

** And of course it works the other way around, if you've spent enough time on here.

** Then go the forums: Most forums use [[BB Code]], while the TV Tropes forum uses wiki markup.

* An ancient example: in the 80s, the prominent word processor was WordStar, which defined several standard controls that the present Windows editing controls are based on, such as WASD. Their scheme was based on control+ letter for functions, and interestingly was written before cursor arrows became prominent on keyboards. Then in the late 80s / early 90s, the up-and-coming text editor was WordPerfect. WP took advantage of the rapidly expanding computer market to push their own standard instead of supporting existing ones. The result is that anyone familiar with WS is completely incapable of handling WP, and vice versa. F1 for help? Nope, that's F3. ^Q for quit? No, better try F7. And so on and so forth. The scheme relies on control/alt/shift+ F1-F10 for literally everything. About a decade later, Microsoft pulled the same trick with expanding markets to push the Word standard, but at least that one is comprehensible to a novice.

** ''Band-in-a-Box'', possibly because it originated on the Atari PC before key commands were standardized, is absolutely brutal with these. It's near-universal in audio/MIDI programs for the spacebar to activate the "Play/Pause" transport function, but this one uses "Ctrl-A" and "Esc" for these. It can be very awkward moving between Band-in-a-Box and other programs.

* ''[[Black and White]]'' features gesture recognition, including the ever useful ability to shake your mouse left and right to get rid of whatever special mode or spell you have attached to the cursor/hand of god. A decent number of people have tried to do the same thing to get out of zoom mode while using Microsoft Word.

* GUI: Ctrl-C is copy-to-clipboard. Command line: Ctrl-C is ''terminate process''. Oops!

** Ctrl-C is terminate process at shell prompts in both Windows and Unix operating systems, and is copy-to-clipboard in GUI applications (at least most of the time in modern Unix applications). It's consistent between the two operating systems, but still well falls under this trope (just try copying from a Windows cmd shell, or worse; a UNIX ssh session running on a Windows desktop).

*** In Finder Enter ''renames'' a file. Instead of opening it, which is ''obviously'' Cmd+ O.

* Windows Command Prompt ([[Older Than They Think|and earlier MS-DOS]]): ''dir'' to see the contents of a directory. Unix shell: ''ls'' to see the contents of a directory. This becomes very frustrating when using the command prompt to navigate files in Unix and then trying the same in Windows. It's made slightly better because some Unix distros humor Windows users by aliasing "dir" to "ls."

* Also, in Microsoft Word (or the Office software group), sometimes people may find that the text to the right of their cursor suddenly gets eaten up by whatever they're typing next. This is because the Overtype mode often comes on without them knowing they accidentally hit the Insert key, which is right next to the Backspace key. Good thing at least one keyboard type doesn't have an Insert key (except for zero when Num Lock is off).

* Anyone that has ever got used to vim surely has filled lots of files opened in other editors with "jjjjjjjjjjjjjkkkkkkkkkkkkkk" trying to scroll down.

** Another sign that you're a vim user is typing either ":wq" or "ZZ" at the end of documents opened in other editors. (Both those keystroke sequences are ways to save-and-quit in vim).

** And for those gVim users out there? Don't get too used to using Ctrl+s to save your files, even though gvim gives you the option. Because one day, you'll be working in regular vim in a PuTTY session and you'll hit Ctrl+s to save all those awesome changes you've just made, and...[[Stock Scream|AUUUUUUGH]]! {{spoiler|Fortunately, Ctrl+q can get you out of that jam.}}

* Speaking of scroll bars: Windows has up and down buttons on each end of the scroll bar. Mac has both button at the bottom end of the bar. It's a good thing that in both cases, the bar itself can be dragged, and users can still click past the bar for a page up/down effect.

** Another example of a scrollbar is provided by Google Wave, where the arrows are located on the upper and the lower end of the bar. Clicking these will achieve a a page up/down effect indeed, instead of skipping lines. Moreover, you can't operate this thing carefully, because there is no line on which it would move, so you can't click past the bar. By dragging it, the scrolling delays until the shadow of the bar (?) catches up with the body of the bar, completely disorienting the user. You will end up dragging it randomly and ending up at the right place in the wave with a great deal of luck - the effect is simply ridiculous.

** There are times in which pressing the down arrow on a scroll bar does nothing, and the reader is expected to press up to scroll down and push the content up, and vice versa.

* From Windows 95 to XP, choosing "Shut Down" or "Turn Off" from the Start menu would take you to a confirmation screen where you can choose to shut down, reboot, or cancel. In Windows Vista, the default button was changed to "Hibernate" (which looked like XP's "Shut Down" button but yellow), forcing you to open an extra menu to shut down without hibernating.

** Windows 7 changed the default to Shut Down, this time with a written label instead of the universal power symbol. And, unlike Vista, the action you set for the button ''does not appear in the menu.'' It also removed the separate lock button.

* [[Homestar Runner]] once had a link to the [[The Merch|Store]] to the front page of its website. The "Watch Intro" button was where "Come On In" was for over 5 years.

* When you open or save a file in some programmes, there is a sidebar with a number of default folder options; however, what exactly those options are and where can differ based on the application and operating system. Compare, say, Microsoft Word 2000's to Adobe Photoshop CS3's.

* With an earlier version of the FanFiction.Net website, clicking a button at the bottom-left of a page allowed you, by default, to post a review. A newer version moved the review button to the bottom-centre of the page, while the default setting for the button at the bottom-left adds the currently-being-read story to favourites. You can see how a veteran used to the older version of the website might trip over it.

** Likewise, switching from a MUD to IRC results in lots of sentences starting with the word "say"

** Chat functions in video games. Enter-message-enter is a common one, but you may also find space-message-enter and one particular game had T-message-T.

* Some browsers let you type a Google search string into the address bar, others have their own bar for this and produce an error if you don't put an url into the address bar. Gnarfbl.

* 3d Software is absolutely awful for this. There are at least a few programs which could be considered industry standard so just learning how to operate in ''only'' one is limiting. Given the time projects take and how many shortcut keys are needed this is ''extremely'' confusing. Plus since you probably use the same shortcut 100 times in an hour, enjoy going to other programs. There's been so many times I tried Alt + Click which is the pan camera control in Maya while using Photoshop only to bring up the eyedropper tool.

* The newest version of Ubuntu (10.04 "Lucid Lynx") had the brilliant idea of moving the minimize, maximize, and close buttons from the right side of the window, where they are on Windows, to the left side of the window, where they are on Mac OS X. This was pretty much only done to show off the new gconf option that enables the user to move those buttons around at will, although you wouldn't know that reading the official statement on the matter, which cites it as a bold and innovative and [a bunch of meaningless buzzwords] idea that will help encourage creativity and [a bunch of other meaningless buzzwords] in users. Needless to say, nearly every user who doesn't also use a Mac has since moved them back to the right.

* Someone using both [[Vocaloid]] and its freeware derivative UTAU can get easily frustrated. The interfaces are similar, but the methods of drawing notes, doing pitch bends, creating vibrato, etc. are very different, causing a likelihood of extreme aggravation (especially when one tries to use the Vocaloid editor and click elsewhere to create a note from your current point to where the mouse is clicking, but instead starting a new note where the click is).

** And for keyboard users, Windows. Vista. In previous versions, you could answer "'''Y'''es" or "'''N'''o" to this question by pressing Y or N. Then someone had the bright idea to change this to "'''S'''ave" and "Do'''n''''t save". It's even worse in French, where the shortcut for "Ne pas en'''r'''egistrer" (yes, they seriously chose the "R" for that) doesn't match the one for "'''N'''on".

*** Except that in Windows Vista & 7 you can still hit the Y key to save, thus subverting this trope.

** A related phenomenon may be the desire to hit the quick-save key any time you're about to do anything, even in real life.

** F4 - Repeat Command in some Office tools. Make your changes to one text box or shape, click on all of them in order and press F4 after each click. Cue that deflating feeling when you try it in pretty much any other program and it doesn't work.

* The menu bar shared by various branches of Google is inexplicably different on Google Groups, with the link back to the regular Web search jumping from the far left to the middle (and ''vanishing completely'' when viewing Groups search results.) The other links are also randomly jumbled.

* Ever made a forum post only to find a garbled mess of the wrong-shaped brackets staring you in the face? Exacerbated by the fact that HTML and [[BB Code]] use a lot of the same tags, but ''those brackets''...

* As of March 2011, when responding to posts on [[Facebook]], hitting the Enter key will complete your post, rather than line break (in which case you have to hit Shift+Enter).

* In Windows 95 to Vista, the "Show Desktop" button, which minimizes all windows, is an optional part of the Quick Launch toolbar, found on the lower-left corner of the screen next to the Start menu. On Windows 7, this button is fixed to the far lower-right, next to the date and time, and it's not even labeled. Once you start using it on one OS, juts try going to the other.

* In Linux, you can copy and paste by selecting the text you want to copy, and middle-clicking where you want to paste. Attempting this on Windows results in nothing happening.

* If you're a shortkey fan, switching from Windows in English to Spanish or other languages or viceversa will severely cripple you the first few days or weeks, as most of them change according to the language. For instance, while CTRL+F is the command to find in the English version, it changes to CTRL+B in Spanish. CTRL+A is "Select All" in english, while in spanish it's the "Open File" command, as "Select All" is CTRL+E. It becomes increasingly unnerving if you use, for instance, Windows in English and Office in Spanish, as you have to switch back and forth between shortkey commands as you work.

* [[wikipedia:FilterKeys|Filter Keys]] is an accessibility option in Microsoft Windows which is activated by holding down the SHIFT key for 8 seconds- this is especially frustrating because many people absent-mindedly keep the shift key held down as they think about their next sentence - because they know the first letter of which will be capitalized.

* The Eclipse development environment has quite a few completely non-standard keyboard shortcuts. Want to search for the next occurrence of something you've already found? Nope, not Ctrl+G, the most common shortcut for that function in text editors. It's not F3, either, which is a common alternative in Windows apps. Nope, the shortcut to do that in Eclipse is Ctrl+K!

 

=== Music ===

*** Differing resistances between pianos is nothing compared going from practicing on a full piano (with very resistant keys) to playing a keyboard (with unweighted keys.) The upside is that you can then play much faster on unweighted keys if you practice with weighted ones.

*** There's also a major difference in functionality between many electronic keyboards and traditional pianos: on traditional pianos, and electronic pianos made to emulate them, when you press a key the whole key goes down. On most electronic keyboards, however, only one end of the key moves down, in a swinging motion. This can easily result in skilled pianists whiffing notes if they start playing up in the black keys.

* Handbells. Going from bass (F3-B3) to the bottom of the treble clef (D5-E5) mid-concert means that hand location for damping has moved about a foot backward, not to mention the care that must be taken to avoid tossing the bells across the room.

* Going from a bass trombone with dependent valves to one with independent valves can be tricky; there are techniques that you can use on one that will not work on the other.

* It can feel very strange playing bass for awhile and then changing to a guitar.

** Or switching between classical, steel-string acoustic, and electric guitar.

 

=== Sports ===

** On a more basic level, every horse is an individual and even similarly trained horses will respond differently to the same set of cues: One does NOT cue a hot thoroughbred the same as a phlegmatic warmblood... not if you want to live, anyway.

* Speed skaters and roller derby players often find that they spend so long going anticlockwise around the track (the direction races and bouts go in) that they stumble over basic footwork when going clockwise. It's very frustrating.

** This is also a tactic in cricket. Since by the rules of the game ''require'' the bowlers (roughly equivalent to a pitcher in baseball) to alternate between overs you can alternate between left and right handed bowlers to keep the batsmen from getting too comfortable.

*** Of course, the batsmen can do this as well if both a left and right-hander are in. By scoring single runs, they switch ends, not only forcing the bowler to adjust, but making the fielders change positions.

** This can also be a problem when switching from foil fencing to epee. The weapons vary in weights and length, but more importantly the target areas are different. New epee fencers will be frustrated by how often they get hit in the knee or arm.

** A similar problem occurs when switching between one of the other blades and sabre (or vice-versa), as the majority of attacks in sabre are delivered with the edge of the blade, instead of the point. Adjusting for the extra step (swing blade down from guard to cut as the arm extends) can take a little while. Added to that, the standard guard in sixte (for example) has a radically different angle of blade when used in sabre to either of the other weapons, so people tend to find they're using the wrong guard stance and leaving themselves open.

 

=== Televisions and related ===

** What is the "'''Top''' menu" button anyway? How is that different from the plain Menu button which is more used? Or, sometimes, the regular menu button is above left of the arrow buttons, and sometimes it's on the above right.

*** The top menu is the main screen, where you have access to the usual options (play movie, select chapter/episode, set-up, and special features). It's confusing, because usually, the "plain" menu button will take you to the main menu if you're watching the movie or episode, but to a sub-menu if you're watching special features. Either way, you get yanked out of whatever you were watching. The newer Blu-ray high-definition format uses this in a much more logical manner, where the top menu button functions more or less identically, but the regular menu button merely brings up the usual options above, but as an overlay while the content continues playing with selections made on the fly. It's much easier to use when changing audio or subtitles, or finding a specific chapter or episode.

**** Unless the Blu-ray disk uses Java and has gotten creative with the buttons...

** This is especially when you switch from watching movies on DVD or Blu-ray on your Playstation 3. The menu and control configuration is different on almost all buttons.

* Not to mention most modern TV's no longer have buttons lined up on the front of the set, but rather a cluster of them on the side of the TV instead. This is supposedly for aesthetic reasons. Apparently the designers forgot the first rule of engineering and design: design for ease of use, not because it looks nice. Which is why you don't let artists design electronics or any home appliance for that matter.

** And the cluster will never be on the side that you try feeling first. Operating any unfamiliar TV always means having to give it a little pat down as you run your hands along the top and sides. Eventually, they're just going to put the buttons on the back of the TV.

** When the batteries on your remote have expired, you'll still point it at the screen and push buttons for a good ten seconds before realizing that swearing at the set (or [[Percussive Maintenance|smashing the remote against the wall]], for that matter) is not going to work, at which point you remember that you need to change the batteries.

 

* Any RC modellers will experience this at least once. On an RC controller, left stick Y-axis is throttle, while X-axis is yaw. Right stick is roll/pitch on X/Y-axis, respectively. Enter the Playstation. ''Left'' stick is pitch/roll, and throttle/yaw are usually relegated to the shoulder triggers. This is especially detrimental when attempting to hover RC helicopters - which is far more difficult than flying at any speed in any direction, for those that have not tried it.

** RC car modellers are slightly better off, in that most racing games have accelerate/brake mapped to the right stick as well as L2/R2. The reversed sticks still don't help.

* Anyone ever flushed the toilet while someone was in the shower due to this trope?

** And even when you've got the motions for whatever weapon you carry down pat, if you ever get surprised or startled while ''not'' carrying it, expect to find yourself reaching for it anyway as part of your "startle/flinch" response.

** ...and the FN Five-seveN (Protip: safety is above the trigger, use your index finger)

** Similarly, getting used to a PC media player like MPC or Zoomplayer will have you reaching for a keyboard to press the 'back 5 seconds' key combination on everything electronic.

*** Or worse, '''real''' conversations.

** Or when visiting someone who does not have a DVR-equipped TV set, confusedly mashing the fast-forward and rewind buttons to no avail.

* On a similar note, watching a VHS tape when you're used to DVD controls. DVD players allow changing the speed of rewind and fast-forward by tapping the button again, and you press Play to return to normal speed. Some VCRs have the same feature, especially if a tape is recorded in long play mode. But other VCRs just take you out of rewind or fast forward when you press the button again; you have to ''hold'' the button to make it go faster.

* Any txt-oholics who change phone brands suffer from this. Manufacturers sure like to use completely different keys for commands like "space". This happens especially with dumbphones but can also happen when Apple or Google rearranges the on-screen keys in an operating system update.

* Trained martial artists have gotten seriously hurt against knife-users because of reflexively trying to block the blade, which is [[Barehanded Blade Block|impossible for normal humans]]. It's slightly better if you were taught to parry at the wrist than outright block, but still no guarantee.

* Spend all of your time drawing on a tablet. Switch to pencil and paper. Wonder why Ctrl+Z does nothing.

** Alternatively: Try and move your pencil over your sketchbook (or worse, your tablet!) in order to move the cursor on your computer. Again, wonder why it does nothing.

* One this Troper discovered from her time cosplaying: Going from Chest Binding to Corsets during costume changes. See, the problem is how you breathe: with binding, the top half of your torso is constricted, so you find that the only way you can breathe is through your stomach (i.e. you puff out your belly to breathe) However, anyone who has worn a corset knows that it mostly constricts the lower half of you torso, and so you breath through your chest. Doing a quick swap between can lead to several moments of absolute panic as you stand around unable to understand why you can't breathe before you realise you're doing it wrong...

* Those who work in retail can attest to this: Ever went to the grocery store you work at to get some milk but you decided to punch in only to realize that you're not supposed to be working that day?

* Going from reading on a tablet like the iPad to any Kindle that doesn't have "Touch" in the name leads to you swiping your finger uselessly across the screen to turn pages, or pressing the sides when going Kindle-to-tablet.

* Attempting to use the car radio's volume control to make human passengers louder.

* Completely losing your balance on non-moving escalators. Moving ones are fine. Stairs are fine. Escalators that ought to be moving but aren't are confusing.

 

 

=== Comicbooks and Manga ===

*** It doesn't help that Japanese and Chinese can be correctly written left to right, going to the next line at the end of a row (like English) OR up to down, starting in the upper-right corner and moving left at the end of a column. Luckily you can usually tell pretty easily since up/down writing tend to be spaced in a rather distinctive way.

*** This is why some manga are published in a flipped format. Of course, if you just finished reading an unflipped series...

** Much worse when the manga artist deliberately flips the language for absolutely no reason at all.

** Arabic writing is backwards to Latinic or "western" writing too.

* Shougo from ''[[Holyland]]'': Despite his time on the street, he was trained in karate first rather than street brawling. When he gets into trouble in a certain fight, he instinctively falls back on his karate base, which only makes things worse.

 

=== Video Games ===

 

=== Web Original ===

* [[MediaWiki]], see those buttons at the top of the page and the links down the side? Sometimes, during a site update, they get rearranged. Then you find yourself adding something to your watchlist when you want to see a trope's edit history.

* [http://www.mangafox.com/ Manga Fox] for some reason switched places of Bookmark and Forum. So most of the times when trying to see if the manga you read has updated, you will accidentally send yourself to the forum.