[The Troops]

You'll have to forgive me if this is an unfashionably late entry on a subject that's been pulverized into memepulp by the Kotakusphere, but hey.

Two months ago, I was fired from my job as the city council's cameraman for (in a state of momentary unconscious reflex) zooming in upon the cleavage of a board member on live television, and now become physically ill any time I attempt to move either a first- or third-person camera in a videogame. Out of morbid fear, in the past sixty days I have only played Virtual Console games and Lost Odyssey.

It was two days ago that I bore witness to something of an inverted superplay video: a five year old trying to play Halo 3, and having one molten hell of a problem just looking and walking and shooting. It was so murderously clumsy and frustrating that you could probably show it to Gitmo inmates and get some real results. I tried to help him, verbally, but I didn't know where to begin. Every fucking gizmo on the controller comes in sets of twos and fours. It's not enough just to say, "Hit ____." Do I mean left __ or right ___? Blue? Green? Yellow? Let me look down. Oh, I died. After about five minutes of this torture, the level's tribal drums never even given an opportunity to break their loop, I decided then and there:

The right analog stick is the worst thing to happen to videogames in the last ten years.

It's true.

Let me map the timeline of first- and third-person shooter controls on consoles over the course of a decade.

1997: Goldeneye is released. It is designed as a combination of Doom plus Virtua Cop. It uses an elegant single-stick design that allows even a grandmother to move and turn shoot with just one hand. As these virginal minutes wear on, you can suggest holding the shoulder button (there's only one!) to aim at specific body parts. There's a big blue button that changes your guns, and a big green one that reloads and opens doors. That's it! There's also some C-strafing and other stuff that's totally optional, but hell, you can actually explain to someone the mechanics of Goldeneye in under eight paragraphs, which is downright fucking miraculous.

1998: The Dreamcast is released, and brings with it the last elegant controller made until 2006. You can freelook in Quake III with the sole analog stick, and move on its diamond of buttons. You can shoot with one trigger and jump with another. It is here that we begin the use of analog stick as a poor man's human interface device. A clumsy, drunken surrogate mouse. But the asymmetry of looking and moving still makes it intuitive, plus, there are so few buttons on the controller that your thumbs and index fingers occupy them all at any given moment.

2000: Treasure releases Sin & Punishment, a game which finally validates that first diagram on the packaging of the N64 controller, the one where the left thumb wields that long-untouched D-pad, and the right one waggles the stick. Movement is appropriately digital, limited to strafing and jumping (forward motion is on autopilot), while the stick controls the cursor, and the trigger shoots bullets. It's hand-in-glove. You never have to move any of your thumbs away from where they belong. Everything's right there.

2001: Halo comes along. The Xbox is the first controller with both two analog sticks and two triggers, and you know what that means. Finally, we're kinda sorta replicating the PC, even though we're not quite doing it. There are a million auxiliary functions that demand you take your thumbs off where they belong, and these have been assigned to the big tasty face buttons that beg for loftier roles. So you can jump, but that means having to stop aiming for a split-second. Same for the melee, or reloading, or switching guns, or turning your flashlight on and off, or switching grenades. It's well-organized chaos, but it's still chaos. Even driving a car reinvents what has been known since Super Mario Kart. Most of the time, your fingers form a strange Square of Tendonitis, and if you take away the controller, it looks like you have muscular dystrophy.

2002: Metroid Prime comes out, and forums go aflame because it actually uses a control scheme that makes sense on the GameCube controller, instead of aping Halo's dual analog. The tiny D-pad and C-stick contain the auxilary functions -- switching visors and weapons (four of each) -- and 99% of the time, your digits are at a natural symmetrical rest upon the stick and its giant buttons. When you have to aim, you do so using the same big, white, natural stick that you use to move. Games like Rez come out, and people decry its elegance because they want to move and look independently, etc.

2004: Halo 2 comes out, and gloms even more shit onto itself. You can now dual-weild weapons, and fire with their respective triggers, etc. It is about this time that dual-analog becomes the de facto control standard, and R1 becomes the official attack button of a generation. Even third-person platformers now have guns that are fired with R1, and actually trying to jump from platform to platform in these games is more complicated than ever, requiring you to juggle your thumb between the safe, soft face buttons and the arthritic simulation of pushing a pea around a plate that is right-analog camera control.

2005: Resident Evil 4 comes out, uses the big, friendly A button to fire its gun. The craterfaced Tomonobu Itagaki fans anti-A sentiment by talking about what a travesty it is that a police officer can't aim and move at the same time.

August 2007: Metroid Prime 3 comes out and solves a decade's worth of shooter control cruft, but nobody notices, because Halo 3 is less than a month away from release.

September 2007: Halo 3 is released, and now has not one but two bumper buttons (RB and LB) that are used to pick up guns, and two separate reload buttons. Tomonobu Itagaki's Ninja Gaiden II is shown for the first time, and RB is officially used as the confirm button in menu dialog boxes and to interact with objects such as save statues. At this precise moment occurs to me how fucking stupid it is that we need two letters to describe a single button.

October 2007: The Orange Box is released for PC and Xbox 360, and in every screenshot and video of the game, HUDs are littered with Xbox 360 buttons. The box includes Half-Life 2: Episode Two, whose mechanics on the PC allows you to sprint and jump and crouch and slide into nooks, all without moving your fingers from where they usually reside; it also features an authentic and gleeful driving segment, in which the 1:1 hand-to-neck instantaneity of the mouse simulates all the nuance of driving (looking over at the passenger for a glance; turning your head to reverse). It feels so right, but most people play it on the Xbox, where they do nothing but complain about how stilted it feels. Portal is also included in the box, which would be recommendable to every person on earth, but its accessibility is ruined by the fact that the Xbox version requires first-timers to learn the equivalent of the Steel Battalion controller before they can perform with any dexterity.

2008: Grand Theft Auto IV and Metal Gear Solid 4 come out, and continue to implement the foolish digit dance on the surface of your DualShock. MGS4 now has over the shoulder aiming and a first-person mode, to satisfy every possible Game Claw stance, and it also finally adopts The Most Retarded User Interface Quirk of the Millennium, which is that the No Button means Yes and the Yes Button means No (the standard on all PlayStation software).

So there you have it. This is what it's come to.

I'm drawing a line in the sand here. You can't like the elegance of the Wii and continue to accept this bullshit. At its most complicated (Nunchuck+Remote), the Wii is only as complex as the N64 controller, which, say what you will about it, but it's like fucking Pac-Man compared to the hundred-pronged BDSM devices we have now.

I physically cannot play games with these controllers anymore, pushing a little inverted crosshair back and forth over a terrorist's head with an itsy-bitsy plastic lollipop. What the fuck kind of representation of aiming is this supposed to be, anyway? This is how you control a Mars rover. This is not how you fire a gun.

[zombieman000]

[DJ]

I like the Wii controls but also have never had any problems whatsoever with a dual shock setup? I was actually pretty happy when Halo 1 came out and used it instead of the single-stick thing that never felt right to me (admittedly I was raised on a mouse for FPS games so not being able to look in one direction while firing in the other feels really gimped). I was like "Oh it does what the mouse is supposed to do. Neat!" and that was it.

Am I weird?

I do agree that the O/X thing is kinda bizarre, though.
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[Mr. Toups]

That's how it is in the MGO beta, anyway.
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[Cycle]

[The Troops]

[CubaLibre]

Right-analog hate: oorah.

We bitched about dual-analog vs. keyboard/mouse once. I think it was in The Darkness thread?
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[DJ]

Well (I'm not trying to sound rude) you're kinda in the vast minority on this. I can't imagine that setup being changed anytime soon. There's also the fact that the games are designed with this layout in mind (assuming it's not a PC port) so while it's not giving you free human movement, it is sufficient to play the game. You generally never need to do anything more complex than what's required, but it's complex enough to add some challenge to it.

Like, I hate auto aiming. It feels like cheating, especially when I can manually aim just fine. I do like what Halo did, where the game will slow your reticle down when it moves over an enemy but doesn't automatically latch onto it for you. You still have to aim, it just makes it easier to do so and you rarely wind up overshooting your target.

A lot of this is just personal stuff, though. Like, I have never even come close to getting motion sick while playing a game in the first person, but I know quite a few people whom this happens to quite a bit. I also despise inverted controls, whereas one of my good gaming buddies cannot for the life of him play without having the controls inverted. The way he explained it to me is, you tilt your head back to look up, and forward to look down, so this is how he expects his controls to work. Me, I look at it as "I press up if I want to look up, and down if I want to look down." I can barely play Star Fox 64 because pressing up makes your ship go down and vice versa and there's no god damn mother fucking cunt-gargling shiteating way to change that which drives me fucking nuts because I really like that game.
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[Cycle]

I played GoldenEye with that input method where you freelook with the analog stick and control movement with the C buttons, it worked pretty great.
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Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

[The New Ska]

I play Halo at kind of a high level and I agree with you. At a certain level, everyone in Halo stops trying to aim and keeps the cursor at neck height, twitching and strafing left and right. It's too much of a pain to do it any other way.

Sometimes I wish I could just stop aiming altogether and play it like an RTS.

[CubaLibre]

DJ the point is the right analog stick is not a mouse. Keyboard and mouse is awesome. Slick stick movement and bumbling stick stumbling is not awesome. I know some people are leet gamers and can gather headshots like delightful peonies with their ramped-up rightstick sensitivities, but um, those people are freaks. For camera/look control, the right stick blows.
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[The New Ska]

[Sushi K]

I can't play Halo except with the legacy (turn/move and strafe/vertical) for some strange reason. I think it is for a similar reason why DeusJester can't play star fox, or is it because of the button thing, I don't own it so I don't know.

Metal Arms for some reason though really spoke to me. (All those years with mechwarrior?) The arcadey run and gun action makes the dual setup almost necessary; whereas halo (and other more thoughtful shooters) work better with an input scheme allowing for more buttons.
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[DJ]

[Mr. Toups]

[CubaLibre]

The point is anyone can do it, it just takes a stupidly long time to learn how; and then, even when you do, it still doesn't even really make any sense.

[The Troops]

For all these years, I never really complained, either. I beat Halo 1 and 2 on Legendary.

But now here we are in 2008, and we've had OPTIONS for at most four years (EyeToy) and at least two (Wii).

(Actually, we've had mouselook for twelve years, which. Yeah.)

I just can't do it anymore. It's annoying, it's frustrating, knowing that it doesn't have to be like this. It's like having an HDTV and going back to a 13" black-and-white set.

[Sushi K]

[Cycle]

I'm not entirely convinced that a casual gamer would pick up the controls of Metroid Prime 3 easier than those of Halo.

The PC version of Halo is horrible. The Xbox version is pretty tight, though!

Also I don't see where the EyeToy fits in here at all.
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Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

[CubaLibre]

Troops write more on Action Button :(

Hell, put this on Action Button
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[The Troops]

[The Troops]

[Cycle]

I don't know, the EyeToy is really pretty unrealiable and flimsy. The hardware would need more work than the game, I imagine.

I don't think I'm bothered by all the stuff you complain about in the original Halo because you would have to actually stop aiming for a splitsecond to change your grenades, reload, etc. And if you meleed by actually meleeing, you would most certainly have to stop aiming there!

I mean, I've always been a keyboard and mouse person, but I'm really not sure what all the complaints here are.
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Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

[idle]

[extrabastardformula]

[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

[worm4life]

Godhand

[Sushi K]

nipplemouse

JediPad
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[Krabjuice Gaiden]

I grew up playing Jet Fighter III, Descent, Heavy Gear, Unreal Tournament and Half Life. Inverted controls and uninverted controls have never been a difficulty for me. Ten minutes of play and I switch seamlessly. I usually have trouble figuring out what kind of scheme I'm using.

When it came to consoles, it took me a very long time to let go of the d-pad. Using it to move and snipe in Metal Gear Solid taught me that there was a lot of finite control in that scheme. I guess it's no wonder that I hated ape escape.

Yes, the right-stick is useless. Since the 360 runs on usb, just let me plug in my mouse okay?
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{V}_{^w^}_{V}

[shrugtheironteacup]

If something is flying, then I go inverted.

If not, then I don't.
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select button
the nature of beards in war

[Bo 0]

[CubaLibre]

[parker]

I didn't really realize until now how much my thumbs disagree with these mother fucking stick knobs. I guess I never gave it much thought, it just seemed like some bullshit I had no choice but to put up with. Not now brother, oh hell no, now I feel like Oliver Twist asking for seconds, fuck the man putting me down with his primitive control schemes! Actually, the other day while I was getting murdered in Metal Gear Online I had realized I was almost unconciously imagining myself pluging a keyboard and mouse into the ps3 out of frustration, and using them somehow. Now I know what it all meant.
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When asked how to avoid lust of the flesh, Diogenes began to play God Hand in answer. When rebuked for doing so, he replied, "If only I could soothe my hunger by playing Cooking Mama."

[Teflon]

I want me some IHADSS



stylin'

[spinach]

I use dual analog sticks.

I am good at dual analog sticks.

I fucking hate dual analog sticks.

I remember Dreamcast shooters, where I'd look with the stick and move with the buttons and jump with L and shoot with R, never moving my left thumb from the stick except to change weapons, never moving my right thumb from the face buttons for any reason whatsoever. It was pretty damn cool.

Now my thumbs are all over the place and I'm raising my fingers up to the face so I don't have to stop aiming in order to do other things and while it's easy enough to do it's always struck me as pretty stupid.

And here we complain that the Eyetoy and Wiimote are toys. We take our gaming very seriously because of the time we put into learning our unwieldy controllers and our personally customized control schemes that pull down to look up and press LB to jump. We've forgotten that we are holding plastic husks with buttons on them to control a guy who holds a gun which he points at what he wants to shoot so now it just sounds dumb for us to point ourselves. Do you see how stupid that sounds?

[Cossix]

The EyeToy wasn't really an option for this sort of control until the PS3, I don't think. The PS3 is fucking optimized for image processing now though, so it should be able to do any sort of visual control beautifully. Honestly, with the Sixaxis and the EyeToy, the PS3 SHOULD be capable of the most advanced user interface stuff in gaming right now, just no one's bothering to invest in it.

And I even LIKE dual analog! I thought Goldeneye's controls were terrible, and I never thought a first person/third person shooty action game was handled on consoles very well until they implemented some sort of dual analog control. Ratchet and Clank 2 was my first memory of someone doing that but someone else probably did it first. Maybe part of the problem is that the default sensitivities are always set too low?

Haven't played Metroid Prime 3 yet, but yeah Metroid Prime did handle moving and shooting pretty well with their lock-on strafe system thingy.

[Eudaimon]

I personally don't buy into the idea that abstracted control schemes (i.e. dual sticks) are necessarily worse than the "unabstracted" ones where you are "actually shooting!/punching!/running!/throwing!" It's simulationist bullshit; videogames that try to be the next best thing to reality are not fun for me.

That said, I can see how videogame control schemes that seemingly arbitrarily limit a player's abilities can be frustrating. I suppose there may be a few instinctual habits left in us that, if inhibited, may cause us to feel somewhat powerless, especially in such a "familiar" setting as an FPS. However, I think such "unintuitive" interfaces can be made fun, or at the very least less distasteful, by distinctly incorporating them into the game proper, such as the aforementioned GOD HAND, the inability to look completely up or down in Marathon, or (somewhat closer to the original topic) the pre-4 Armored Core games.

Perhaps this really boils down into an argument of whether machines need to be made to fit human beings, or whether we should strive to better fit ourselves to the machines. I have a feeling that the answer lies somewhere closer to the middle.

[les meat]

[les meat]

[gooktime]

I don't know man, a lot of Wii games control like... how did Faithless put it? "a dual-shock cut in half"