The NES Marble Madness port (and probably others) had a choice of control schemes, where the D-Pad is either mapped directly to the screen (Down is down) or mapped at a 45 degree angle (Down is down-right). I never could wrap my head around the latter, but I can see the benefit given the stage layout mostly uses 45 degree paths.
The second scheme works pretty well if you can turn the controller 45º. I never had an NES but I am pretty sure some of the isometric games I played on the c64 and Amiga had this as an option.