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.
Did you know that GoldenEye actually has dualstick controls, you just had to use two controllers
That’s horrifying. Someone needs to tell the McElroy brothers. I bet they would have fun with that.
I remember Goldeneye but I played it on GameCube so have no idea how more traditional controllers handled input.
Goldeneye Rogue Agent is a very different game to 1997’s Goldeneye, tho.
N64 only has 1 joystick so games had to work around that. The joystick makes you walk forward/backwards and look left/right. There are also the C buttons that act as a D-pad for your right hand. Up/down is look and left/right is strafe. There were considered advanced movements that the majority of casual players could ignore.
One of the first console shooters where you could reasonably circle strafe.
Thats because he discovered the secret that we all eventually discover when playing with dual sticks:
You don’t actually aim with the right stick, you aim by strafing.
Think about it, when you’ve lined up the perfect shot in the distance but the enemy keeps moving, do you readjust your aim? Or do you duck walk in a little circle whilst prone until the crosshair lines up
No. I plug in my mouse
It’s hard to use a mouse while seated in the couch
Youtube thumbnail: Bearded guy pointing backwards at a mouse, title: “The one hack gamers don’t wan’t you to know!”
The one true joystick:
You whippersnapper!
I have this too! Wanted to sell but SO likes it ha
I bet my old generic Sears pong set still works.
Prove it. I don’t believe you.
Well, I’m pretty sure it left us in a yard sale when we moved out of state.
By then I was all about my TI 99/4a. Rockin my tape drive. Writing my first games in line-number BASIC.
God, it’s so…pure.
I broke so many of those. The kids today just do not know. Hated those fuken things.
I made one a few years ago with some arcade parts. It’s a little bulky, but works. And, hopefully, shouldn’t break.
Boss fight cx40
That’s a fuken UNIT. Cool!
Thanks! It definitely elevates a game of Yar’s Revenge.
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 played the original HALO when it came out and did awfully at it.
I recently bought the PC Master Chief collection and was surprised it was so easy since I’d had so much trouble with the original.
Then I realized the difference was controller vs. m+k. Controllers are good for some styles of games, but IMHO, shooters ain’t one of them.
I’ve never been able to aim and shoot (and hit anything) with a controller, glad to see I’m not the only one.
Controllers are best for platformers imo. I actually hook up a controller to my PC for most platform games.
Oh man, when I played The Last of Us on my flatmates Playstation because it wasn’t on PC at the time, I died like four times to the first few tutorial zombies. It really took a while for me to pick it up enough for even that kind of simple PvE action.
That’s the exact game I had trouble with as well and I believe it even had an aim assist mechanism. I managed to get by on story mode but the shooting parts were just frustrating. (Still totally worth it though)
I do like the motion controls a lot of early PS5 games had. It’s a shame that devs seem to have forgotten how to implement it in just a few short years. For God of War Ragnarok and Days Gone it was a game changer. It just gives you that last few inches of accuracy that the stick doesn’t have.
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 super Nintendo had a mouse controller. You could use it to swat fly’s in Mario Paint https://youtu.be/L9oJRsw_Abs
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.
arrow keys, alt to strafe, ctrl to fire, space to interact. we made it work.
Did you do any old Classic Mac gaming? Do you remember Pathways Into Darkness?
I don’t think it had mouselook. It was all keys. Damned difficult game that I finished right as I was becoming a mouser on other more modern games.No, I never had a Mac.
Doom and Lemmings on MS-DOS and Anno 1602 and Age of Empires on Windows 95 or 98 were the first few titles my dad showed me on the old PC I got to use. He showed me how to interrupt the Windows boot so I could launch the DOS games instead.
I’m not sure if Doom was just on there because he played it, because this must have been in 1997 or 1998 or maybe 1999, a few years after it released anyway.
Everyone had Doom, because it was shareware. You could play the first 7 levels or some shit for free. Given that most people died well before that, it was a pretty good deal. Doom was on every computer.
Much respect to your old man passing the torch. Game on, friend.
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.
nahh i remember the struggle going from armored core with the shoulder buttons to the 2nd joystick. it was real, and the struggle wasn’t all the players. the devs really didn’t seem to get it.
nothing to do with the n64 other than i was there in the trenches with ya
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”
Bumper is the smaller top one, because it acts and feels kinda like a car bumper. Trigger is the larger bottom one, because it acts like the trigger of a gun.
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.
try the claw grip
nostalgic Monster Hunter on PSP noises
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.
Back paddles like the steamdeck or steam controller has are a godsend for any game where you have to run, jump, and shoot at the same time. Or any other combination of actions. I don’t think I could go back to not having access to those. I don’t remap them for every game but the times I have its made those games so much better.
A lot of games now still have motion control aiming, you just tilt the controller. Sometimes it’s off by default though. I typically use the stick for big movements and tilt aiming for zeroing in.
I, for one, prefer the quiet dignity of controlling Leon Kennedy like a runaway semi with a gun.
I’m looking forward to using emulators to force older games into something like modern dual analog. Megaman Legends works pretty okay like that so far. Armored Core works pretty amazingly for it as well.
I need to try it with Fur Fighters, which I always felt had a lot of potential as a platforming third person shooter. But it only has one built in dual analog control scheme that works backwards - right stick is movement, and left stick is aiming. Now I can switch it!
Ship of Harkinian is a PC port for Ocarina of Time that includes a bunch of quality of life improvements. You can set it to use right stick for camera controls, makes the whole game a much better experience.
I might try that someday, but I’m probably not going to do another OoT playthrough unless it’s a modded version with a lot of new content or something.
I love these decomp projects though. Really looking forward to the SotN one being finished. A lot of great romhacks and stuff are already coming out of it.
Yup, one of my first experiences with this was during a splitscreen multiplayer match of TimeSplitters 2 with a friend who was already clearly well-practiced and highly competitive. Sink or swim they say.
The reviewer was right, you know. Playing an FPS with a controller is the most horrifying thing in gaming history. (Except if it has gyro).
Stick a trackball in place of the right stick, and we have my dream FPS controller.
A few years back I was at a bar and they had golden eye on an N 64. Man the controls were hot garbage.
But because there wasn’t anything better to compare it to, it didn’t feel that bad.
Metroid Prime transcended its crappy controls. Like one of the worst control schemes but still one of my all time favorites.
Have you played it on Primehack? Among other fixes it gives it modern dual-stick controls.
No, I haven’t tried that. How is it? As awkward as those controls were, they also feel like a core part of the game, so I’m feeling oddly both attracted and repulsed by the idea. But I’ll look into it, thanks for making me aware if it!
I never played the original on GameCube but I did all three on Primehack on the Steam Deck and it seemed to work pretty well. It took a bit of tinkering to get it working, but it was definitely worth it. Happy to assist if you have any questions!
Oh wow, just looked it up and the description is even better because it was intended to give the games mouse look controls, which IMO is superior to even dual stick for fps. Like set up a mouse and keyboard for a console fps that supports it and it’s like easy mode because you can aim much more quickly.
Guessing you need to bring your own ROMs (I wonder if I can rip my GCN discs with a blueray reader). Though to clarify, is this for the GCN versions or one of the other ports/remasters? I’ve got 1 and 2 for GCN and 3 for Wii.
Yeah it’s bring-your-own ROM because it’s just a modified version of Dolphin Emulator. I used the Wii trilogy version, had it installed on my WiiU and it was ridiculously easy to dump the ROM with Dumpling (you don’t need a modified console). If you’ve got GameCube/Wii discs then you’ll need a hacked Wii, I think it’s not too hard to hack a Wii if you own specific games (like Brawl which lets you read stages from an SD card and run arbitrary code), I think CleanRip is the tool you use to dump the ROM.
Ah so I might be able to do it with 3 just with what I have already but need a Wii and brawl, which is the one I’m missing from the three systems (have melee and the wii u one but not the wii smash bros lol).
Thanks for taking the time to write that, it’s a lot more info than I was expecting!
You can change it so the joystick aims, and you move with the yellow buttons…I think. Either that or the d-pad.
But even better? You can use TWO N64 controllers at the same time, one in each hand, for dual joystick controls. I didn’t even realize that was an option until I saw it in the Switch Online Emulator
Oh, I do recall hearing that recently I think. I would love to try that. How do the other buttons work? Do you shoot twice as fast with 2 triggers? (/S haha…unless it’s true)
As someone who didn’t have dualshock controllers back when I had the PS1, FPS games always felt awful. Most of the games had like L2/R2 for aiming up/down and L1/R1 for strafing, pretty sure Quake 2 was like that. I recall Medal of Honor had you hold R2 to fine aim with the d-pad
That first Medal of Honor game felt so epic though. The music, the ambiance. I’m playing the damn History Channel over here!
First game I ever played that had that had an arena where you’re running around fighting enemies and the emcee bad guy was like the dude from The Running Man, and he would yell “TOTAL CARNAGE! IIIIIIIII LOVE IT!!!” damn what was that game called? SMASH TV!
“Good luck! You’ll need it!”
I’d buy that for a dollar!
