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.
The one true joystick:
God, it’s so…pure.
I broke so many of those. The kids today just do not know. Hated those fuken things.
You whippersnapper!
I bet my old generic Sears pong set still works.
Prove it. I don’t believe you.
I, for one, prefer the quiet dignity of controlling Leon Kennedy like a runaway semi with a gun.
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”
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.
A few years back I was at a bar and they had golden eye on an N 64. Man the controls were hot garbage.
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)
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.
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 wonder if that was actually just an attempt to sell more copies by describing the clearly better control scheme as scary as a challenge to anyone who thought it sounded ok. Like I don’t think it took me long to understand that the Halo control scheme was a game changer compared to the ones that preceded it (other than mouse and keyboard).
I absolutely hated my first experience with modern dual stick controls. It felt so wrong compared to GoldenEye.
Developers themselves were often in the dark as to what the best control schemes were back then. For example, the default controls in Quake games were not originally wasd plus mouse, that innovation actually came from prominent Quake players which eventually became implemented as default in games after.
People mock the N64 controller, but it was designed to allow developers three different configurations to design their game around and let them decide what was best. It’s really not a bad shape overall.
It shows how smart nintendo’s designers were in that era. They knew the transition to 3D would be paradigm shift. The future of games was unpredictable, so they made flexible controller that would suit many possibilities.
They figured out that analog sticks would be important for 3D games from day 1. Unlike sony, nintendo’s foresight meant they didn’t have to hastily retrofit their controllers partway through the console’s life.
I don’t think I agree. It was a worthwhile design historically, because it was the first controller from a major console maker that said, “hey, 3d gaming is here, and it’s here to stay.” But I never found that controller to be very good. That joystick was so poorly designed every n64 controller we would get would turn to junk within a year. It also wasn’t very long before Sony took the hint and released the Dualshock, which basically defined modern controllers right there.
Especially now, I can’t think of a single game that wouldn’t be better to play on a modern controller.
I honestly hate the dualshock design. It’s more about aesthetics then it is ergonomics. The controller was always too small for me and the thumb placement never felt right. I really liked the original Xbox controller and was pissed they never released a large version of their controllers afterwards. It was the only one that never gave me hand cramps after long sessions.
The N64 controller wasn’t a good controller in hindsight, but it was an experimental controller, because like I already said, Nintendo didn’t know how game devs would want to use an analog stick. The center was ambidextrous, so there were three different holding configurations. I have more issue with the Game Cube controller with it’s analog nub. It wasn’t comfortable to use ever and they should have realized that by then.
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!”
Ape Escape was peak dual stick gameplay.
Left stick to move. Right stick for gadgets.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
