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.
Goldeneye Rogue Agent is a very different game to 1997’s Goldeneye, tho.
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.
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!”
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.
The one true joystick:
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.
God, it’s so…pure.
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.
Boss fight cx40
That’s a fuken UNIT. Cool!
Thanks! It definitely elevates a game of Yar’s Revenge.
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?
Yep. Tomb Raider and Resident Evil are the only 3D games I like.
Metroid Prime my beloved…
JK 2. Mouse wheel up and down for push and pull, click for choke. Others can be keys.
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.
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 (and , buy my gamepad input isn’t exactly worth protecting except from embarrassment when I’m failing comically.
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 & they have no 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?
EDIT: Just realized, even younger, I played and beat Star Fox SNES, which only had 1 axis, where aiming and moving were bound together. Maybe it was the baby step of playing a simpler 3D shooter game.
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).
Look, I NEVER played that way with the mouse move. Ya, its fukin bizarre.
But it allowed you to sweep forward and back in sudden waves, super agile. If you were good at it, it gave you a significant edge.
And the games that had that sort of locomotion were originally written to run on x386 processors, so you were fast in a slow world.
I’ve seen this happen with 20 and 30 year olds.
Its an entire learned skill that a large segment of the population never learned.
… unfortunately, much like reading and writing, these days.
But yeah, the idea that… you can move your position in 3d, with wasd or a dpad or a stick… and also orient your view angle with a mouse or stick … at the same time?
This is utterly baffling and disorienting to a lot of people who’ve never played a first person perspective game before.
Its … part of why AAA games are more often than not third person, in the last decade.
Its easier to pickup for a noobie, because you have a constant point of reference, you can always see the avatar of the player, camera movements are less sensitive and less drastic because you have a wider FOV.
But… people live their whole lives in first person view?
I’ve seen many boomers either stare at their feet or the ceiling & they have no clue how to solve their situation because they are disoriented. Same with young kids learning.
Any last words, Jim?
* turns around *
Huh?
Yeah, it’s just wild to me, that we went full-force ahead with the whole 3D thing, when you lock out so many potential players with it.
With 2D games, you can chuck someone a controller and even if they’re just haphazardly pressing buttons, they can still participate in the game. With 3D, no chance.And even those who do have practice still struggle with it. Think of a difficult 3D game and I bet it’s a valid joke that the true end boss is the camera.
May I present Vampire Survivors.
Fantastic game. Entirely oldskool 2d.
You can navigate and play one-handed, no mouse.
And best of all, this is the exact game you just described, where a n00b can haphazardly press buttons and get somewhere.
Yeah, indies are thankfully still covering 2D games, and there has been somewhat of a rebound in general, where e.g. Nintendo will also publish 2.5D versions of some of their games.
It just always felt weird that AAA studios treated 3D as mandatory, in the name of profit in particular, despite it locking out customers.
Well, kind of the obvious thing happened: Mobile games. Often fiercely 2D. Often controllable with one finger. And of course, obscenely profitable.
It’s even a thing in our generation - my now ex was pretty stumped playing skyrim. 2d games were no issue.
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.
Everyone had Doom, because it was shareware. You could play the first 7 levels or some shit for free. Given that most people died well before that, it was a pretty good deal. Doom was on every computer.
Much respect to your old man passing the torch. Game on, friend.
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.
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
Over time I completely lost the ability to play a shooter with the controller. I just can’t hit anything after close to a decade of playing with just mouse and keyboard. 15 years ago it was the other way round for me.
Yeah. I spent an ungodly amount of time on halo 3 and ODST on the 360 back in the day. Then I eventually got a PC and in just a couple years trying to play a shooter with a controller gave the game feel equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
I played the original HALO when it came out and did awfully at it.
I recently bought the PC Master Chief collection and was surprised it was so easy since I’d had so much trouble with the original.
Then I realized the difference was controller vs. m+k. Controllers are good for some styles of games, but IMHO, shooters ain’t one of them.
I’ve never been able to aim and shoot (and hit anything) with a controller, glad to see I’m not the only one.
Controllers are best for platformers imo. I actually hook up a controller to my PC for most platform games.
Oh man, when I played The Last of Us on my flatmates Playstation because it wasn’t on PC at the time, I died like four times to the first few tutorial zombies. It really took a while for me to pick it up enough for even that kind of simple PvE action.
That’s the exact game I had trouble with as well and I believe it even had an aim assist mechanism. I managed to get by on story mode but the shooting parts were just frustrating. (Still totally worth it though)
I do like the motion controls a lot of early PS5 games had. It’s a shame that devs seem to have forgotten how to implement it in just a few short years. For God of War Ragnarok and Days Gone it was a game changer. It just gives you that last few inches of accuracy that the stick doesn’t have.
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
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. Using the d-pad for movement isn’t too dissimilar from WASD movement IMO, and the joystick for aiming is standard. I thought it worked quite well.
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!
Wow! That’s awesome. Hello fellow old man
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.
I’ve only just started using a controller (on PC). I’m still confused by the two joysticks half the time.
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
Inverted Y works for me in first-person games because I equate the tilt of the stick to tilting my head. If I want to look up, I have to lean my head back.
In 3rd-person platformers, it’s because I’m imagining moving the camera. It’s also why I have to invert the x-axis on third-person platformers.
3rd-person shooters I just treat as an fps because that’s how my brain works.
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.
I’ve been trying to play it on switch and it’s basically impossible with 2 sticks. Also it’s really jarring after a few hundred hours in breath of the wild.
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!
The DC had so many great specialized controllers!
Maracas, a fishing rod, mouse and keyboard…and even the regular controllers had screens!
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).
Stick a trackball in place of the right stick, and we have my dream FPS controller.
