The reviewer was right, you know. Playing an FPS with a controller is the most horrifying thing in gaming history. (Except if it has gyro).
Back in my day we played Doom without any analog inputs, and strafing required a key combination so the sideway arrow keys would strafe instead of turn.
That said I did enjoy Doom the Dark Ages with my mouse earlier today, haha.
arrow keys, alt to strafe, ctrl to fire, space to interact. we made it work.
Did you do any old Classic Mac gaming? Do you remember Pathways Into Darkness?
I don’t think it had mouselook. It was all keys. Damned difficult game that I finished right as I was becoming a mouser on other more modern games.No, I never had a Mac.
Doom and Lemmings on MS-DOS and Anno 1602 and Age of Empires on Windows 95 or 98 were the first few titles my dad showed me on the old PC I got to use. He showed me how to interrupt the Windows boot so I could launch the DOS games instead.
I’m not sure if Doom was just on there because he played it, because this must have been in 1997 or 1998 or maybe 1999, a few years after it released anyway.
I’ve only just started using a controller (on PC). I’m still confused by the two joysticks half the time.
The one true joystick:
God, it’s so…pure.
You whippersnapper!
I bet my old generic Sears pong set still works.
Prove it. I don’t believe you.
Well, I’m pretty sure it left us in a yard sale when we moved out of state.
By then I was all about my TI 99/4a. Rockin my tape drive. Writing my first games in line-number BASIC.
I broke so many of those. The kids today just do not know. Hated those fuken things.
I made one a few years ago with some arcade parts. It’s a little bulky, but works. And, hopefully, shouldn’t break.
That’s a fuken UNIT. Cool!
Y’all laugh but I spent a lot of years not gaming such that this is very recent. I grew up playing pong and Atari, then grew away. When I had kids, the Wii was perfect. Then my kids became teens and it wasn’t enough. Suddenly everything was Xbox, then pc gaming.
Suddenly if I wanted to interact with them I had to figure out this alien contraption with too many buttons and joysticks. After about five years (playing every 2-4 weeks because who has time), I’m ok technically. But there’s no way I can do fighting or any twitch moves, and I still sometimes blank on which button does what - it’s not engrained enough to just do it and I’ll never play frequently enough for that to become true
And Microsoft’s terminology doesn’t help - wtf do “bumper” and “trigger” mean? I still remember those buttons as “opposite of bottom”and “opposite of top”
Bumper is the smaller top one, because it acts and feels kinda like a car bumper. Trigger is the larger bottom one, because it acts like the trigger of a gun.
I, for one, prefer the quiet dignity of controlling Leon Kennedy like a runaway semi with a gun.
I’m looking forward to using emulators to force older games into something like modern dual analog. Megaman Legends works pretty okay like that so far. Armored Core works pretty amazingly for it as well.
I need to try it with Fur Fighters, which I always felt had a lot of potential as a platforming third person shooter. But it only has one built in dual analog control scheme that works backwards - right stick is movement, and left stick is aiming. Now I can switch it!
Ship of Harkinian is a PC port for Ocarina of Time that includes a bunch of quality of life improvements. You can set it to use right stick for camera controls, makes the whole game a much better experience.
I might try that someday, but I’m probably not going to do another OoT playthrough unless it’s a modded version with a lot of new content or something.
I love these decomp projects though. Really looking forward to the SotN one being finished. A lot of great romhacks and stuff are already coming out of it.
Yup, one of my first experiences with this was during a splitscreen multiplayer match of TimeSplitters 2 with a friend who was already clearly well-practiced and highly competitive. Sink or swim they say.
My best friend still uses “Legacy” (goldeneye) controls and gets mad when games don’t have that option. He has even emailed developers about it. Half of them have no idea what he is talking about because they are not old enough to remember the before time.
We roast him for his special controls but he is better than all of us so I guess, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Did you know that GoldenEye actually has dualstick controls, you just had to use two controllers
That’s horrifying. Someone needs to tell the McElroy brothers. I bet they would have fun with that.
I remember Goldeneye but I played it on GameCube so have no idea how more traditional controllers handled input.
N64 only has 1 joystick so games had to work around that. The joystick makes you walk forward/backwards and look left/right. There are also the C buttons that act as a D-pad for your right hand. Up/down is look and left/right is strafe. There were considered advanced movements that the majority of casual players could ignore.
One of the first console shooters where you could reasonably circle strafe.
Goldeneye Rogue Agent is a very different game to 1997’s Goldeneye, tho.
Thats because he discovered the secret that we all eventually discover when playing with dual sticks:
You don’t actually aim with the right stick, you aim by strafing.
Think about it, when you’ve lined up the perfect shot in the distance but the enemy keeps moving, do you readjust your aim? Or do you duck walk in a little circle whilst prone until the crosshair lines up
No. I plug in my mouse
It’s hard to use a mouse while seated in the couch
Youtube thumbnail: Bearded guy pointing backwards at a mouse, title: “The one hack gamers don’t wan’t you to know!”
A few years back I was at a bar and they had golden eye on an N 64. Man the controls were hot garbage.
But because there wasn’t anything better to compare it to, it didn’t feel that bad.
Metroid Prime transcended its crappy controls. Like one of the worst control schemes but still one of my all time favorites.
You can change it so the joystick aims, and you move with the yellow buttons…I think. Either that or the d-pad.
But even better? You can use TWO N64 controllers at the same time, one in each hand, for dual joystick controls. I didn’t even realize that was an option until I saw it in the Switch Online Emulator
Oh, I do recall hearing that recently I think. I would love to try that. How do the other buttons work? Do you shoot twice as fast with 2 triggers? (/S haha…unless it’s true)
As someone who didn’t have dualshock controllers back when I had the PS1, FPS games always felt awful. Most of the games had like L2/R2 for aiming up/down and L1/R1 for strafing, pretty sure Quake 2 was like that. I recall Medal of Honor had you hold R2 to fine aim with the d-pad
That first Medal of Honor game felt so epic though. The music, the ambiance. I’m playing the damn History Channel over here!
I grew up on n64 and I don’t recall having any issue with jumping to dual joy sticks. Like it was so natural… I probably had a week of adjustment that I just don’t remember.
nahh i remember the struggle going from armored core with the shoulder buttons to the 2nd joystick. it was real, and the struggle wasn’t all the players. the devs really didn’t seem to get it.
nothing to do with the n64 other than i was there in the trenches with ya
For me, the cherry on top of this little piece of embarrassing history is something that only a handful of people remember: The PS1 had an official mouse controller, and this was one of the few games that supported it.
I bought the mouse when it came out, and I got a copy of this game about 10 years ago, and I’ve gotta say it works very well. It was also how I played the single-player campaign of Quake 2 back in the day.
The super Nintendo had a mouse controller. You could use it to swat fly’s in Mario Paint https://youtu.be/L9oJRsw_Abs
I remember my friend bringing over his Xbox and playing Halo for the first time. I was constantly looking down at the ground while he was pistol sniping me across the map. Figured it out eventually.
Haha! You’re just like my buddy!
My superior M&KB did not prepare me to be owned so much in Halo!
Those controller folks are gifted.
Mouse and Keyboard superiority!!!
Mouse and keyboard has never felt right for most games for me.
I came up on pads for everything, and still do it for stuff like the Arkhams, Silksong, and various forms of platformer, but FPS? Once you’ve mouse aimed, the joypad just feels clunky.
KB&M with Arkham games was my jam! Now that I’m better with a controller, I can see why people like it.
Seeing people play something like Assassin’s Creed on mouse and keyboard is just wild.
I rather play Assassin’s Creed and souls games on mouse and keyboard for the rest of my life that FPSs on controller.
Haha that was me!
I grew up on it. I even played 2D platformers (emulated) and fighting games on it.
Only in the past few years have I gotten used to a controller. Mostly because Sekiro was kicking my ass and when I whined about it, the internet made fun of me and I finally bought a USB controller.
I’m still trash though I got mods to make me near invincible.
It’s better for FPS games and worse for action games.
Don’t forget about RTS, MMO and some CRPG.
And fighting games
I don’t know about that, I wouldn’t want to play a fighting game with standard keyboard. An ergonomic keyboard could work though. In any case from what I’ve seen those guys either play with a gamepad or an arcade stick.
Leverless controllers are pretty OP, you can hit both forward and back at the same time making movement inputs way faster for some moves & once you get used to it a mechanical keyboard feels about the same
It’s not worse for action games if you get good.
I tried kb&m for Witcher 3 for about 5 minutes. It was miserable.
I switched between Gamepad and M/KB for inventory management because I haven’t seen an Inventory yet where mouse input isn’t faster.
GenZ?
Nope, millennial. Mouse and keyboard is fine for strategy games but I prefer a controller for almost everything else.
You should try VR
I tried it once and I hated it.
A mouse? For shooters?!?
I definitely still played Quake with keyboard only and having it automatically look up or down on ramps.
I think during playing Jedi Knight I started using the mouse and having the revolutionary idea of using the numpad for movement and the surrounding keys for important Force powers. Because that was so much better than using the arrow keys.
No idea when I switched to WASD.
Next you’ll be telling me you missed tank controls in games. Why strafe when you can slowly rotate to turn?
Metroid Prime my beloved…
Yep. Tomb Raider and Resident Evil are the only 3D games I like.
A lot of games have aim assist with controllers. I’m currently playing Read Dead Redemption 2 and when you aim with a controller, it auto locks to their body.
I noticed that with a bunch of games when I’m playing on the Steam Deck.
I always turn that off. Being used to a mouse I always turned my right stick sensitivity WAAYY up so I could aim quickly, but the aim assist would always throw off my muscle memory for how far/long to pull the stick. Then I tried gyro/touchpad aiming for shooters and couldn’t get the hang of it, I like playing with the deck resting on something, I can’t just hold it in the air the whole time I’m playing. Now I just play shooters on PC and everything else on steam deck.
JK 2. Mouse wheel up and down for push and pull, click for choke. Others can be keys.
Ya. The controller people on their little boxes do not understand.
Like, I could plug a controller into my PC … but WHY?I’m gonna just ruin everyone’s day by sharing that I play racing simulators with a controller. On PC.
Im gonna add to the ruination by saying I play shooters on PC with a controller
Really? Like, I know its physically possible. Do you survive long?
But … a little ruination is always good. Game on, friend.I use gyro + flickstick, which is a lot better than the regular stick aim :3 (after getting used to gyro stick aim just feels slow and mushy x3. I can’t use it anymore)
But I do fine at surviving :3. I mean, in competitive games I at least survive as long as my team usually does, and my K/D/A or win/lose scores are usually in the positive and stuff. Im not like a pro competitive player by any point tho, so it’s also not like im fighting the best of the best hehe ^^ and obviously singleplayer/co-op games are fine :3
Sure. Racing and flight simulators are a joke on those little boxes. Ya need a PC. Do you use extra monitors?
Hah, I play on a laptop with just its screen.
‘Gran Turismo’ is in fact quite good, and supports wheels. Their fantasy tracks are really nice, starting from the first game — I had to have them as mods in ‘Assetto Corsa’. ‘Wreckfest’ also works fine on consoles.
Man those smart TVs are so cheap now. The video screen is what you interact with most, its the biggest part of the experience. Get yourself a huge TV, an HDMI cable, and call it your gaming monitor. (My TVs don’t get to talk to the internet.)
Yeah, it would also be the biggest part of my room.
:] Laptop it is, then!
One day when you’re an adult, you’ll look back at the childish patronising insults you threw at millions of women, men and children, none of whom you know or have any right to judge, in order to feel a sense of smug superiority for a few moments on the Internet.
If adulthood hasn’t happened yet, it’s not likely. I broke enough Atari controllers to have paid my dues. Fixed em with superglue and tape. But, you know. I was twelve. Then I got older and purchased big boy toys.
You ought to consider shorter sentences. And drop some of the formalisms. That works better for today’s audiences.
This is not tiktok. People can handle longer sentences.
One would hope. Unfortunately, its not true.
But don’t get involved in two old people bitching at each other. No profit there, friend.
because i can lean back and put my legs up on my desk this way. Using the mouse in this position is super awkward (keyboard cable would be long enough, but no surface for the mousepad is an issue). But i wouldn’t bother with a cable for plugging in the controller, 2.4GHz and Bluetooth are a thing nowadays.
Sweet. I’m old and security conscious. I like wires. I have a long-cabled USB hub to extend my peripherals to my nest of pillows or an easy chair.
I got this stupid ‘lap desk’ for my bedroom. Looks dumb, but it holds a drink, a phone slot, keyboard and mouse space. There’s a couple legs I rarely extend. Works perfectly.You’ve brought me some ideas how to reorganize my space in the future - I do have some 5m usb cables lying around and a cheap USB hub. I’m moving in the next few months, and I’ll keep that in mind, thanks
I love my cables too and am security-minded, buy my gamepad input isn’t exactly worth protecting except from embarrassment when I’m failing comically.
