Vintage gaming community.
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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.
Seeing people play something like Assassin's Creed on mouse and keyboard is just wild.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 😅
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)
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 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!
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 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.
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 remember hating Metroid Prime's controller scheme on the Gamecube. The controls felt so stiff. But I was so in love with the universe and gameplay that I just accepted it, kind of like every Rockstar game.
Now I wish I played it on the Wii.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Oddjob in Goldeneye was off limits in our slumber party gaming sessions. Too short to hit.
In my times...! 😁
Karate Champ and Crazy Climber had 2 sticks.
