Comment by nemomarx

17 hours ago

I've read some early reviews of a licensed alien shooter where they complain about how confusing the control scheme is - left stick for movement and right for aim.

Before Halo it wasn't really intuitive I guess?

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nemomarx

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ziml77  16 hours ago

That's really strange because that setup was effectively the default for N64 games. Stick under your left thumb for movement and the C buttons under your right thumb for camera control

  • cubefox  16 hours ago

    It's not strange because it's not really true. The default controls both of GoldenEye and Perfect Dark used the stick for moving forward/backward and turning left/right. Turok did use the c buttons for walking and the stick for looking though.

    • ziml77  9 hours ago

      Forgive me sounding like Claude, but you’re absolutely right! I’ve played platformers from that era recently but it’s been a long time since I touched the shooters. I was mixing them up in my recollection. The shooters had a weird mix and for some reason even though Goldeneye had a bunch of control scheme options, none of them let you put all movement on one input and all camera control on the other.

      4 replies →

cubefox  16 hours ago

Yeah, that's another point: the modern first-person controls you describe were once thought to be counterintuitive compared to the old Wolfenstein style controls.

A similar point holds for third-person games: Before Super Mario 64, all third-person games had Wolfenstein style tank controls where left/right rotates the character in place and up/down makes it move forward/backward. E.g. Tomb Raider or Mega Man Legends. The idea to make character movement relative to the camera viewpoint wasn't obvious.

(Though the Tomb Raider developers tried to work around this to a degree by fixing the camera behind the character, which prevented to most counterintuitive control issues Mega Man Legends had, but also meant free camera rotation was impossible.)