RetroGaming

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.

Mouse and Keyboard superiority!!!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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)

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 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!

The one true joystick:

Remember in 1998 how I tried half life on PC using a mouse after ever using keyboard on Wolfenstein and Doom.

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 😅

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.

Tank controls + horrible camera + terrible draw distance + massive polygons = the classics

My best experience with a shooter was Metroid Prime Trilogy on Wii. Joystick to run / strafe and motion controls to aim, freeing up your right thumb and fingers for buttons.

I hate having to switch between aiming with my right thumb and pressing buttons with my right thumb. Like in Metroid Prime Remastered on Switch. Grr.

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.

It's still terrifying to me as a PC player.

Quake on dreamcast, 1 analog stick. Very disorienting now

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”

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.

Oddjob in Goldeneye was off limits in our slumber party gaming sessions. Too short to hit.

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.