Control Freak

“Been playing HL2 as I fancy going through it again. I’m enjoying it, but still find it weird on the XBOX controller. Things which are piss easy on the mouse can be a real bugger on the controller” – Navan Daughn

Valve need to get their heads screwed on for console conversions

When does a controller become part of the game? Pretty much always! However the degree to which it affects the game experience really varies wildly from case to case. I think Navan now understands some of my complaints with regards to The Orange Box much better, having tried it on a twin stick pad. And having played through Half Life 1 myself on a mouse, I already wish I’d got The Orange Box on the PC rather than for the 360. I’m having the same problem with Left 4 Dead as well. Apart from the small concession of a quick-turn button the game is completely designed for mouse & keyboard control rather than for twin stick on a gamepad, and I felt the game really suffered. Now with the Left 4 Dead 2 demo out, I’ve been able to directly compare it on the 360 vs the PC; and there was no contest at all, the game handled far more easily on a mouse, and due to the design of the game this made it actually much more fun to play in many ways. It leaves me frustrated with both versions because many more of my friends are on 360, and I’d much rather play over XBox Live, in the comfort of my front room, with my preferred twin sticks; yet the game feels so much nicer to control on the PC with a mouse and keyboard. So basically I won’t be 100% satisfied with either version. I realised what I really want is a proper “Left 4 Dead 360″ version that changes the game control mechanics enough so that control on a twin stick pad becomes viable & fun and doesn’t feel like you’re stuggling to replicate a mouse. Halo, Gears and many other titles all do this fine, so it can be done.

Some people may say it’s a simple case of “always play a game on it’s default intended controller”, which held more weight with arcade conversions, but it’s still not exactly clear cut. Should Street Fighter 2 HD Remix be played on an 360 or PS3 pad since those are the systems it was released for? Ok, it’s clearly a update of an original joystick game though – so fine, use a joystick. But what about the differences between different joysticks? Isn’t it a bit of an unfair advantage in the game to be using a high quality controller vs someone that isn’t? For Street Fighter IV, shouldn’t I always be using button bindings and turbo auto fire? These things are built into the game options and the official controller! On the PC it gets even more murky, with WoW Macro keyboards, gaming mice with extra button bindings and on and on. Where do you draw the line between cheating and ‘playing to win’ when it comes to your choice of controller? Should you even be allowed to reconfigure your button layout on Halo on the 360? That sounds ridiculous I know, but it shows how difficult it is to draw the line without some kind of organisation of the metagame rules around the video game itself. For Street Fighter, I play to the standard I’ll be held to at whatever offline tournament I want to enter, but if I wasn’t competing in organised offline events, what then?

Auto-fire is probably the biggest controller issue on competitive 360 games, and it affects everything from Street Fighter to FPS titles. There are some quite simple solutions to either designing the game so it won’t be an issue, or detecting it as cheating online. But sadly games developers don’t appear to care, putting in pistols that ‘fire as fast as you can press the button’ which is foolishly naive in an online competitive game, and making the aforementioned official controllers with auto-fire built in. It’s there so you can test combos out in training mode? Yeh right. And the line just gets blurrier all the time – it is already possible to use a keyboard and mouse on a 360 if you are willing to go to enough trouble with things like this XPFS 4.0 Speed.

Another game I love, Virtual On was recently re-released in an upgraded version on the 360 on XBLA, and I was initally overjoyed. But it requires such a specialised controller to play properly I’ve completely avoided it until one comes available. My friend Ollie Barder covered the history of Virtua Ron (as I affectionately refer to it sometimes) and it’s controller issues on the 360 here. However, luckily, fan pressure has meant that a twin-stick controller for the 360 was eventually announced. It’s still not out at the time of writing, but is imminent, and can be previewed at Hori’s site. Of course the problem is whether I’ll ever be able to get hold of one in the UK, and at what price, and then will the game’s netcode make it worthwhile to even play, let alone shell out for another controller.

I don’t really have any answers here, with the current state of play, other than to raise this point as yet another murky area of gaming that developers of competitive games, and conversions of games, really ought to pay much more attention to. However especially on platforms like the PC, it might be a case that there’s very little they can do to control the issue however. All this, and I haven’t even touched on WiiMotes or Natal yet!

Role Inversion

Ok, it’s high time I published the results from the Inversion Survey. A disappointing response on this blog and on XBL I have to admit, but at least I got a good response from my facebook page

 

Skill Level	Inverted FPS	Inverted 3PS	Inverted 3PA
Remy77077 PAD	2	y	y	y
Remy77077 MOUSE	2	n
Navan Daughn PAD	1	n	n	n
Navan Daughn MOUSE	4	n	n	n
GA	1	n	n	n
Dydus	5	y	y	y
RB	1	y	n	n
SH	1	y	y	n
Grymbok	2	y	y	y
adammk	2	n	n	n
Hachimaki	4	y	y	y
McMond	2	n	n	n
Lom2112	4	y

 

My hypotheses before this survey were the following:

1. What comes most ‘naturally’ to you is what you initially learnt from. Someone who played lots of flight sims, or arcade flying games would be affected by each initial learning sticking with them. Also someone who played lots of “crosshairs” games, such as Operation Wolf, before they played an FPS could be affected by learning that.

2. People who invert visualise their game differently. They visualise themselves as the character more, and changing the view is akin to moving their whole head about. It’s like moving ‘a joystick on your head’. People who don’t invert simply see themselves as the crosshair – more like they are visualising themselves as just the eyes of the character, or even the gun-sight.

3. There would be a performance related correlation that the non-inverters had a ‘faster’ kind of visualisation that would be helpful in making them better players (& more likely to become skilled and experienced at FPS type of games).

4. People would generally stick with one control method throughout all kinds of games – and if they changed it, it could well be to do with a change in how they visualised in that style of game.

 

Now clearly this isn’t nearly enough data, nor even enough questions, to make any kind of analysis other than anecdotal, but a few things stood out.

There wasn’t a clear correlation between highly skilled & experienced FPS players and not-inverting as myself and Navan suspected. This gives me a lot of hope that I should continue to play ‘my own style’ without feeling I am being unduely hampered by my choice of controls.

Secondly, I feel if I was to do this survey again and do it more widely, I think I certainly need to break down the difference between playing on a gamepad and playing on a mouse. When I initiated this I did so on the assumption that most people would play the same on either type of control, however I suspect the majority of answers to this were from a gamepad perspective, and also during the period between when I made this survey and this response to it, I had installed and played Half Life 1 on my PC, so was playing an FPS on a mouse for the first time in years. And bizarrely I discovered that without even realising it for many hours of play, I was playing without invert on. As yet I have no idea what has changed for me, as I am certain I used to play on invert on a mouse as well as on a pad.

Some of the most interesting responses I got were actually commentary as opposed to full survey answers, notably almost all of them correlated exactly with the hypotheses I started with -

• “I always play stick/mouse moves the way my characters head goes ie. I push forward I look down, backwards I look up. Same goes for flight based stuff”
• “For whatever reason, un-inverted controls make no sense to me at all. My best guess is that on some odd level I’m viewing the mouse/joystick as an analogue for my “head” in the game. Push the top of your head forward, and you look down, etc.”
• “..it might be interesting to see if there is a correlation with motion sickness for the inverters”
• “Remy77077’s head/crosshair theory fits here. I’m basically using whatever controls I have at my disposal to move a pointer around the screen, rather than trying to push my characters head around. “
• I have a simple explanation as to why I invert the mouse, I learned how to fly before I ever played any computer games with a mouse

Unfortunately I don’t feel I am going anywhere further with this right now. As I joked on facebook “..when I get my research budget”. This is definitely a really interesting area of games analysis for me, but I feel its a really complex area too, and there doesn’t seem to be any simple answers. A really detailed and wide-reaching survey would have to be done, that’s far beyond my scope and the scope of this little blog to entertain. If only I could quit my day-job eh?

Inversion Survey

This is something that’s been intriguing me and I’ve been working on a blog post on for some time, but I realised it would be far more intesting to try and get some data from my friends and any readers of this blog who’d like to get involved too, before actually discussing it further. So please put your answers in the comments, or message to me in any manner is fine (XBL, myspace, email etc.).

Thank you very much in advance to everyone that participates

1. Rank on a scale of 1-5 how skilled & experienced do you consider your play at First Person Shooter (FPS) games, 5 being the highest. (If you have an XBL account it would be helpful if you told me it as well to compare Achievements)

2. When you play an FPS game, do you play with look inversion (Y-axis inversion) on?

3. When you play a third person action game with shooting elements (such as Gears of War, Ninja Gaiden aim mode, Gun Valkyrie, World of Warcraft etc), do you play with look inversion (Y-axis inversion) on?

4. When you play a third person more movement-based adventure style game (such as Tomb Raider, Uncharted, Ninja Gaiden etc), do you play with look inversion (Y-axis inversion) on?

Any more comments associated with your thoughts on this, especially if you change your look invert settings from game to game I would be really interested in hearing your thoughts on why you prefer that. Ninja Gaiden is especially potentially interesting as of course you can have different look invert settings when in “aim mode” compared to the normal game view.

Personally, I’d rank myself a 2 for FPS game skill & experience. I’ve played an awful lot of games but I certainly don’t play as many as a lot of folks do, and I’ve never gotten especially good at any of them. On single player I usually only play through them once. And online multiplayer I don’t tend to “know” any of the maps very well when I play FPS games, or even have an average ranking on games like Halo 3. However I am far from a ‘noob’ and can generally hold my own on any game once I’ve played it a little bit. I play every single style of game with look inversion on - so pressing “up” always looks down for me.

-=Lordnaff=-
Here’s my answer to your survey

1. XBOX FPS rank: 1
PC FPS rank: 4
2. Not inverted
3. Not inverted
4. Not inverted

The reason that I don’t invert the y-axis is because when I have accidentally done it in the past, I got instant RSI, eye-strain, back cramps, irritable bowel syndrome, epilepsy and Aids.

The Little-Prince of Persia

Sorry about the long absence from any sort of blog-tasties on my part. Remy has been keeping the ship afloat admirably.

As a start for me to getting back into the swing of corresponding for Agoners I stumbled across this little gem of a video clip. It’s the brother of Jordan Mechner who originally created the Prince of Persia franchise. Apparently this is what was used as a base for the gorgeous simulated movement of the original Prince from Persia.

“Nanan da, Anta?”

…is a taunt & win quote from Remy in Street Fighter III Third Strike. It means literally: “What are you trying to do/Why are you doing this?”. And the same thought went through my mind very late last night after spending a huge amount of time gaming. One game in particular I’d played stood out that spurred this thought: Ninja Gaiden 2. It’s a game I’d been put off even getting due to the reviews, in particular the Eurogamer review, written as it was so clearly by someone with a near-identical viewpoint to my own on the first Ninja Gaiden game. But I’d been lent the game by a friend.. so.. why not give it a try?

But last night, during the evening I had stopped playing the game in frustration and switched to playing other games instead. This has been a frequent occurance with NG2. Usually I start playing it full of enthusiasm, but I’ve invariably ended up turning it off with a huge feeling of annoyance, and either stopping play or moving onto something different. Last night when stopped, I put the game back in its case and back onto the shelf and thought to myself “I won’t play this again. I’ll give it back to my friend next week”. However, instead, I woke up today after thinking about it wanting to play it again.

I just =had= to steal this image

According to one model, International Hobo’s DGD1 model I came out as a majority “Conqueror” type player. Now whilst I have other types of gamer in me, I recognise that ‘hard fun’, agon, is certainly my #1 driving force, as you can probably guess from the name of this blog . It’s definitely a large part of it. I simply want to beat this game. But is it just the drive of fiero calling me?

Is it perhaps the lure of those XBox Achievements? I don’t believe so. Such carrots tend not to affect me, as I seem to able to simply choose not to let them. For example a game like World of Warcraft that is fiendishly addictive for those who enjoy that “level up” feeling simply does not addict me. I got frustrated playing that too, and there were certainly some potential fiero-inducing challenges, but even so I did just walk away from playing it easily.

There is another possible strong factor that is “outside the game” as such and so isn’t ever really mentioned in most player models, and that’s the investment of time and money. Simple really, but so often overlooked – once you’ve spent a large amount of time, money and effort on something, you often want to believe it is good and ‘fun’ and you actually start to find more ‘fun’ out of it because of your investment. Talk to anyone with an especially blinkered “fanboy” attitude to any piece of software or hardware and its really obvious this is the case. Again, its part of the factor in a game like WoW, also part of the reason I believe many people ‘happily’ play agon-based challenge games even though they aren’t really predisposed to this kind of play and would be much happier playing something else – although I think there’s a lot more at work there I could go into at another post. I don’t think its possible to be un-affected by this really, I’m likely been as “guilty” as this as anyone, but also personally I’ve found this is as actually likely to swing both ways. Many of the games that I find particulary annoying and I generally consider the “worst games ever made” (such as Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, and a number of FPS shooters), I am aware that a huge part of my loathing for them comes from the fact I wasted so much money, but far moreso I wasted my precious free time on playing them, yet gained little or no enjoyment ‘reward’. But in any case, in this particular situation it really does not apply, since I have not spent a really large amount of time or effort (yet) on NG2, and I have only borrowed the game anyway.

So if it’s not just the fiero (or lack thereof), it’s not just the investment factor…  so what’s the difference with Ninja “Where’s Me” Gaiden 2 where I seem to keep wanting to go back to it, to something like WoW which I was able to drop on a whim and never ever felt like playing again? I feel that is down to what I consider the core gameplay in the game – at least for me; I understand different people will even get different ‘core’ experiences from a game. With NG2, I can see that the basics of the game really do appeal to me. A fighting game engine where I pit my skills against a good AI with beautiful fluid controls, feedback and graphics all heightening the excitement and engagement feeling (more on this in a future post) – sign me up now! It is exactly like my kind of thing.

But of course the tradeoff with NG2 is how this underlying gameplay that I would really enjoy is so obsfuscated by the game. The “levels”, the story, the “non melee”/puzzle-like boss fights, the logistic play of the items and save points.. almost all of this stuff actually serves to hide the part I really like about the game. The first Ninja Gaiden also did this to a great extent which was why I was so surprised I really enjoyed it, possibly because it straddled a line for me, yet never crossed it. But NG2 does seem to cross it at times. Especially, as reviews have said with way it challenges you. Its not so much that it’s hard to beat, its how & why it is hard. It’s hard in a way that feels to be almost random and .. well, you can read all about this in a good review like the EG one linked earlier. What is especially frustrating me is how this spoils the logistical play for me, because I could really enjoy that, but it feels especially annoying to me to ensure a full stock of health items, or to not “waste” a full-heal save point, only to lose all my items, or worse my life only due to what feels like bad luck or an unforeseeable event. I also keep wanting to believe their is a higher level of play possible where you are not affected by these things, but I suspect more and more that is only the case once you have experienced the game multiple times through. But that’s not a challenge that usually interests me with this style of game. Even at all the sections that I became “stuck at” so far in NG2, I knew I could have made them all “easy” simply by spending all of cash on healing items. But if I get to the point where I am just bludgeoning my way through the game with health items, thats when I’ll know I really ought to stop playing it. Then again, the fiero and investment factors may just make me pigheadedly fight to finish it anyway, I’ll have to wait and see how I react.

So. Ninja Gaiden 2, an exceedingly flawed game it appears to me; although part of my judgement is always reserved when I feel I haven’t yet played a game enough as is the case here. I am perhaps guilty of wanting to see the good in it too much – a charge that could be levelled at me in other walks of life incidently, so it is perhaps a personality trait of mine. But I think I know why I will persist with it to a point, even though I don’t for other games, although it is perilously close to the line for me still. I know I’d probably be far better off playing a more ‘pure’ experience of what I enjoy, something like Street Fighter perhaps, which is exactly what I ended up doing last night.

Defection to the Enemy Camp – Console vs PC (again)

Sore Thumbs

I knew this was a bad idea to start a blog with Remy. Due to his persistent and insidious prodding I went out and bought myself a large hi-def screen and an <shame>xbox360</shame>
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In my defense the screen is still technically a computer monitor (a highly recommended Dell UltraSharp 2707WFP 27)

So throwing off the chains of prejudice that I have been swinging around my head, usual aimed at console gaming and consoler gamers (aka: baboons), I booted up the machine (nb. to justify my purchase I’m going to use as much PC terminology as possible when talking about my Xbox). Mucho to my disgust I was already enjoying the experience. A few seconds later it was on, no passwords to put in or bios screens to negotiate. Even connecting it to my home network was a doddle. And I was so looking forward to failing at it so I would have a chance to gripe about it! Damn!

So sticking in my new purchase of Ninja Gaiden 2 it started up within a few seconds and the graphics are gorgeous! So as a PC user my first port of call is the options menu to start optimising the sound, graphics and controls to get it running as crash free and efficiently as possible. And what do I find!? Nothing! NO options, NO graphics sliders, NO control configurations…how do they play the game then?!?

Then suddenly it all made sense. This is why people use consoles. It’s gaming with no faff. It was such a liberating feeling. I dove straight into the game and loved the smooth controls, the lovely graphics and amazing animation (as in the first Ninja Gaiden game I played on the XBOX). It was already obvious that a lot more effort and detail has gone into this than any PC game in recent history. This elation with my new gaming experience came crashing down around my ears a few hours into it. First the graphical tearing, then the frame rate dropping and finally a complete system failure. I wasn’t sure if I should be happy or disappointed; happy that the console gaming experience wasn’t a flawless nirvana or disappointed for the exact same reason. At least resetting the game didn’t take too long.

My next experience was to try out Halolz 3. Again, beautifully cinematic. But the moment the gameplay began I forgave my clunky and expensive PC all its past sins. The FPS experience on a console controller is unbearable after playing at high levels with the mouse/keyboard. It’s slow, sluggish and awkward with no finesse (like a bicycling hippo). The fact that it requires assisted aiming means that it is the wrong way of doing it. With a different control input it would be fine, but with the standard game-pads it doesn’t work. I can now understand why Remy has never had a chance to get on with this genre of game.

So to conclude this extremely abridged comparison between console and PC gaming: they are both great and flawed gaming platforms. Some games work better on the PC and some on the Xbox.

However, this is a pointless argument as the best gaming platform has already come and gone. None are as awesome as:

Bow before my awesomeness!