Bobinator

@Bobinator

That guy who talks about video game

He/Him/They

Bobinator @Bobinator10/12/2023, 3:03 PM

Techokami @techokami

gravis again @cathoderaydude10/12/2023, 2:57 AM

i shitposted about hating single button joysticks earlier, because they were a scourge of home computer games, but what's interesting about this imo is that, if i think about it, it seems like it's the devs fault for overreaching.

whenever i'm thinking "fuck single button joysticks" it's because i'm playing Tedious Tim's Platform Shitheap for the Atari ST, and i find out that i have to hold up and press fire to activate switches or throw grenades or whatever. i always think, "christ, a controller in 1987 or 1993 that only has one button, that's caveman shit." but then i have to remember that these are always mids-as-fuck platform games, and if you go over and look at what was being published on consoles, a lot of the time they just... didn't use that many buttons! even if they had them!

super mario world for the snes might require you to use three or four buttons over the course of the game, but i'm pretty sure most snes and genesis action titles really don't go much beyond two. most mids platformers just have two verbs, "jump" and "fire"; and, okay, sure, it sucks that you have to press up to jump in home computer games, but that's rarely actually what bothers me.

if that was it, I'd just rebind button 2 on my xbox gamepad to up in my emulator. this wouldn't be a problem because up is rarely useful in 99% of side-view 2D videogames. you know, because of gravity - you generally cannot just walk up or down, except on ladders. I would not mind if my "jump" button also climbed ladders.

the actual problem is that these games always have a curiously complex set of actions. there are offhand grenades, you can flip switches in the environment, you do have to select from items in your inventory. and like, sure, megaman had you change weapons, but you could also just not do that for like 95% of the game. i hate using anything other than the buster and I only switch to special weapons to fight bosses, partly because I don't like the UI for it.

when i think about it, if the Amiga, for instance, had had six-button gamepads as standard equipment, these same devs would have gleefully put actions on all six of them and expected you to remember them at all times. this would have sucked just as much as what they actually made. the problem, fundamentally, is that most home-computer action games are just garbage. I've played hundreds at this point, overwhelmingly they just struggle to be fun at all, and that would probably have been true no matter what control surface was in use

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

Thomas Winwood @ketsuban10/12/2023, 5:29 AM

if the Amiga, for instance, had had six-button gamepads as standard equipment, these same devs would have gleefully put actions on all six of them and expected you to remember them at all times

I note that this is what the Atari 5200 did (except worse, because rather than a six-button controller it was a phone keypad because that was what the Intellivision and Colecovision did) and this is exactly what happened, complete with awkward slide-in cards to label all the buttons.

gravis again @cathoderaydude10/12/2023, 5:32 AM

GOD

yeah, i forget about this a lot - the NES was a simplification compared to what had come before

Rena @RenaKunisaki10/12/2023, 12:52 PM

I don't much like the controller designs, but I always thought the slide-in cards were clever. I wished Nintendo would do something similar with cards that, at very least, give the controllers a number, if not also having some little instructions for the game.

It took until Wii to finally have the controllers tell you what number they were, since without a cable you'd have no other way to know.

Weasel Hills Golf & C.C. (hole 19)@wildweasel10/12/2023, 5:46 AM

i almost refuse to play most older computer games without the manual present for precisely this reason. not that console games were 100% immune to it - it took me hours to figure out how to progress beyond the second room of Nosferatu for SNES, because for Some Damn Reason, you can only get under gaps in walls by doing a running slide, which requires you to be running (Y button) and then pressing Down+B at the precise moment. Do it too soon and you stop at the wall. Do it too late and your guy comically face plants into the wall.

Gadfly Goods @Gadfly-Goods10/12/2023, 6:12 AM

induced demand, except for joystick buttons instead of traffic

Seaside @8bitdemongirl10/12/2023, 7:25 AM

This makes me think of how a lot of fighting games have you input special moves by turning the control stick or joystick in weird ways; even if they're usually simple things like a quarter-circle or down twice, and rarely have stuff like Geese Howard's pretzel-shaped Raging Storm input, it's something that requires practice to both know what inputs you can use on a given character, and to be able to actually input them consistently without missing the timing, going in the wrong direction, or getting hit while you're still doing the input. Definitely a big part of why that genre's viewed as something mainly for those who wanna go all-in on learning it while being harder for casual play, I think.

Rena @RenaKunisaki10/12/2023, 12:51 PM

Super Mario World even has a bunch of "redundant" buttons!

X does the same thing as Y (only useful if you need to throw fire while holding something)
L/R do a screen scroll thing that's rarely useful

But one that bugs me is Link to the Past, where you have a dedicated Map face-button, and two shoulder buttons that do nothing. In a game where you have a dozen or so different items, could they not have moved Map to the shoulder buttons and let you equip two items?