I grew up on D-pad and mouse so any of my controll skills fly out the window when given a c-stick.
Love gyro aim though lol. More akin to a mouse.
For along time I preferred the Goldeneye control scheme and I learned it so well that I still revert back sometimes (left stick to forward/back and rotate and right stick [c buttons] to pitch snd strafe). Most games don’t offer this at all anymore, but it was seriously good for peeking around corners. Modern left-strafe/right-look inverts it.
I still need flightstick pitch for looking (inverted-Y camera)
I too only play with inverted viewing. My friends hate it lol
Yes, the y-axis must be inverted. Otherwise I spend the whole game staring at my feet or the sky.
Oddly, growing up my younger brother was the opposite. It was annoying to take turns playing games with him, because we have to adjust the settings between handoffs.
Quake on dreamcast, 1 analog stick. Very disorienting now
I remember binding forward, backward, strafe left and strafe right to the C-buttons in Goldeneye, so I could free up the joystick for quicker aim and Odd Job hate. Everyone thought I was crazy. Who’s laughing now!
1.2 solitaire controls. The other fools using C to aim ate my dust.
I do that, but use the d-pad for the righty stick.
Remember in 1998 how I tried half life on PC using a mouse after ever using keyboard on Wolfenstein and Doom.
Tank controls + horrible camera + terrible draw distance + massive polygons = the classics
Gaming literacy is a real thing. Most people who didn’t grow up with 3D games don’t intuitively understand it. I’ve seen many boomers either stare at their feet or the ceiling & having little clue how to solve their situation because they are disoriented. Same with young kids learning.
I’ve always wondered what’s specifically going on their minds when that happens. I remember getting into shooters and pretty much immediately understanding the two separate axes in Duke Nukem 3D at like age 7-8 (yeah I played violent games when I was young my parents only restricted movies). Maybe that’s why? My brain was just better able to learn at that age? Or is it that I am autistic? Is neurology a factor?
You can try emulating how they feel by finding a game that lets you bind side to side movement on the mouse, and rotation to A and D. Some old shooters were set up that way I think.
My dad always played Doom and Heretic by MOVING with the mouse and aiming with the arrows on the keyboard. It was so weird watching him play. And despite him playing Wolfenstein and Doom and Heretic and Rise of the Triad, he quit once we got Quake. I still played Quake using nothing but the keyboard, like I did the other games mentioned. I didn’t start using the modern wasd and mouse setup until Tribes 2, since it was fairly close to the defaults (IIRC, it used asdf instead of wasd but I rebound them so it was more like the arrow keys; just one set of keys to the right of wasd. I used R to go forward).
The transition period from the 90s to mid 2000s for control schemes was so fragmented. I remember a dozen games with wildly different control schemes. Wasn’t until the late 2000s when things started getting more standardized to what we know today.
Imagine if people kept having to port their games to Dreamcast with its single-stick controllers. We dodged a bullet when that console failed.
but we could be playing samba with maracas!
Mouse and Keyboard superiority!!!
Mouse and keyboard has never felt right for most games for me.
Seeing people play something like Assassin’s Creed on mouse and keyboard is just wild.
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. FIn any case from what I’ve seen those guys either play with a gamepad or an arcade stick.
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.
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.
JK 2. Mouse wheel up and down for push and pull, click for choke. Others can be keys.
Next you’ll be telling me you missed tank controls in games. Why strafe when you can slowly rotate to turn?
Yep. Tomb Raider and Resident Evil are the only 3D games I like.
Ya. The controller people on their little boxes do not understand.
Like, I could plug a controller into my PC … but WHY?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.
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?
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. (Mine TVs don’t get to talk to the internet.)
Yeah, it would also be the biggest part of my room.
:] Laptop it is, then!
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.
My grandmother owned a PS1 which was the first console I ever played on as a kid.
But it was also the last console she ever owned and she said it was because of the move to thumbsticks made her gave up on gaming. Kinda sad…
I remember a LOT of people giving up gaming entirely during the transition to 3D because of this. That was when a lot of the people who experienced the arcade era stopped keeping up.
I was pretty against 3D games until I played Mario 64 and realized their controls didn’t have to suck. Still feels good to play to this day, an impressive feat for a 3D game from 1996!
I gave up on console gaming for the same reason (the last console I owned was a Super Nintendo) but that’s because mouse+keyboard is just so superior that using dual-joystick controllers feels like punishment rather than entertainment.
I’m just now exploring PC gaming and i have NO idea how you all use the keyboard and mouse for FPS games. Controller is all i know and so much easier.
In my times…! 😁
Karate Champ and Crazy Climber had 2 sticks.
At least there was a transition period. I remember configuring TimeSplitters 2 and the original Halo to let me use the good old tank controls I was used to from GoldenEye.
Trying to play GoldenEye today with the old controls is hard as hell.
On the contrary, I played GoldenEye for the first time last year and I was amazed at how well it controlled with that ridiculous controller!
I implore everybody to play the classic GoldenEye with dual controller setup in the menu so you can do twin stick shooting controls. If you use an emulator, you can bind two controllers to one controller and play GoldenEye in a way you’ve never played it before.
The combination of the animations and precision aiming with the twin stick shooting turns you into a demon. It’s so cinematic to quickly strafe a corner and then unload your gun just like into a horde of enemies and see them all fucking jump in different directions as they die as you spray your gun left and right standing still like you’re fucking Scarface it’s perfect.
You can even play it with modern controls on NSO if you set up the controls both in the game and the Switch itself right.
Do you play modern FPSs?
I do! I play shooters from every era.
What about the original Duke Nukem from 1991?
You mean this? It’s a Swedish release, can’t find the year, but it has over 1 Mb of graphics and animations!
The og is a side scroller
That’s the one I’m talking about. I’m trying to get it for free online, but I can’t find it.
I’ve played the OG Duke a little bit on modern PC, but otherwise I don’t have much experience with it.
Although I do miss interesting control schemes, everything is almost homogenous now and quite boring.
Too Human was an interesting case point. Though not a terribly successful game, they did try and make a control scheme to benefit their gamers.
The game is an ARPG which wasn’t common on consoles at the time, and more often played on PC with mouse and keyboard. The developers knew that players would spend hours on the game and needed a low impact way of playing that type of game with a controller.
They created a control scheme that relied almost entirely on just the two joysticks, moving and attacking and some special moves could all be handled with small movements, this made long gaming sessions comfortable, and far better than button mashing and getting RSI in your thumb joints 😅
Although I do miss interesting control schemes, everything is almost homogenous now and quite boring.
I don’t at all. And I cherish the fact that I can rebind old inputs at will with Steam Input + emulators.
I rebinded the controls of Armored Core 1 so it played with modern shooter controls. Made it so much better and intuitive and now I wonder if the only reason I sucked at the game back in the day was because of its archaic control scheme.
that’s just the nostalgia talking, play EYE and you’ll go “oh, yeah…that’s why we went towards standard control scheme”
I was (and still am really) shit with analogue sticks. I got fairly good at playing Quake II on PlayStation with the lookup/lockdown mapped to L1 and R1. Same as the original Quake on PC, never really used +mouselook coming from Doom, just mapped them to buttons near the firing keys.
The dual-stick setup is much more intuitive though in fairness.
You might be interested in the way brothers: a tale of two sons uses their controls. Each stick controls one of the two characters. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but it certainly is different.
I still never liked that. It’s the best of a bad situation, but aiming with a mouse is so superior, many games won’t cross-platform with a PC out of fairness, lol.
It bugs me when you see youtubers talking about “how busted the auto-aim is on controller like bro look at this seriously how is this not an aim bot omg like this is seriously like playing with hacks isnhow braindead easy it is to aim on controller” and I want to reach through the screen and slap them because theyre basically complaining about wheelchair ramps making it too easy to climb the stairs.
