Tapezilla

Am I the only one that hates using analog sticks for first person shooters? Who decided it was even a good idea to take something successful (PC FPS games) and bring them to consoles without the crucial element of the control method best suited for them? Why, more than a decade after the first console FPS forced its analog stick down our collective throat, has such a glaring issue not been eradicated?

Read on for the answers to these questions and more.

I blame all this on Goldeneye, really. Rare and Nintendo had the opportunity to do the right thing and just plain wouldn’t be bothered. Nintedo whispered in Rare’s gullible little ear “Mouse? You don’t need a mouse, we have this stick-thingy…” and it was all downhill from there. Chalk that up as reason #129 that I hate Goldeneye. That’s right, I said “I hate Goldeneye”, but that’s beside the point.

The Backstory

I preordered Metal Gear Solid 4 like the rest of the civilized world, which had the happy side effect of netting participation in the Metal Gear Online beta. I suffered the embarrassment and torture of signing up for 53 IDs despite Konami’s best attempts to prohibit my doing so, awaited the launch, and promptly had my ass kicked.

Now, I can handle a sound thrashing. Hell, I can even enjoy getting beaten down if I thought I had a fair shake. Therein lies the problem, the playing field wasn’t even. See, dear reader, I didn’t play *any* console FPS games. I just didn’t see the point. I skipped the entire Halo phenomenon (save and handful of drunken hours), the miscellaneous ports, and mediocre originals. What I’m driving at is that because I didn’t waste hours on end re-learning how to move and aim with the substandard control forced on an unsuspecting populace in lieu of the tried and tested one, the kids half my age that grew up thinking that sticks were the “right” way to play FPS games had an artificial advantage over me.

Enter the FragFX. After my first infuriating hours attempting to cut my analog-stick teeth, I bit the bullet and ordered a FragFX by the fine folks at Splitfish. (No, they didn’t pay for this borderline advertorial. They unknowingly compensated me by righting quite possibly the single worst injustice in console gaming, something far more valuable than financial bribery.) If you haven’t heard about the FragFX, it splits the PS3 controls into a Wii nunchuck-like control for one hand and a mouse for the other, and works with every game because it acts like the regular SIXAXIS. Fifteen minutes after unboxing my own personal Excalibur, I went from the bottom of the scoreboard to the first or second position routinely. Not because of some underhanded NES Advantage-style-turbo-button shenanigans, but because I could actually aim where I intended to when I needed to.

Almost 10 years after it shouldn’t have been an issue, it took a third party to right a wrong the big boys couldn’t be bothered with. In this day and age of USB ports having replaced proprietary controller connectors, of firmware updates over the Internet, of console-based web browsers, of the industry being the strongest it’s ever been, there is no excuse for the glaring absence of something so rudimentary as mapping controls onto input devices the consoles already support at a driver level. A single developer at Sony or Microsoft could implement this in a day’s time, taking it off the developer’s plate.

Speaking of developers, huge props to Epic Games for doing it for themselves in Unreal Tournament 3 with an implementation that should have been an automatic industry best practice:

“‘we are doing it in a way that will be balanced without feeling “gimped” for either side,’ he said. Rein also added that there will be options to ‘allow people to choose whether or not they want to allow mixed controller vs. keyboard/mouse games or not.’”

(Epic Games Vice President Mark Rein from Joystiq’s “Keyboard and Mouse Support for UT3″)

They did it right instead of catering to the stick culture with autoaiming, enlarged collision detection meshes, any of the other myriad crutches relied upon to crutch an inherently broken system.

There are some arguments against the FragFX:

“I dunno, I don’t have a problem” I believe you. What I also believe is that if the parallel universe version of you that had always had mouse and keyboard support in these games played the current, stick-utilizing you, he’d kick your ass. There is no logical argument for sticks being *better* than mouse and keyboard. If you can think of one, I’d love to read about it in the comments. If sticks were better, I’m pretty sure that the clanners would be using them instead of the FragFX. Call it a hunch.

“It’s cheating.” Well, kind of. I admit it. But my refusing to have something made artificially harder by using an unintuitive, less precise control metaphor doesn’t so much give me an advantage as it gives you a handicap. I’m sorry that you’ve been lead to believe your method is the “right” way when the pedigree of first person shooters so thoroughly debunks that notion, and that it isn’t worth $60 to you to fix it.

The bottom line is that we should all be able to use whichever controller we prefer. Imagine if Gran Turismo didn’t have a wheel available, or if House of the Dead didn’t have a gun. Sure, you could still play it, but something would be missing. That “something” is what you don’t even know you’re denying yourself by using analog sticks.

Agree? Disagree? Want to lash out at my distaste for Goldeneye? That’s what the comments are for.