next »

[falsion]

Killer7. Enough said.

You have to press the A button to make your character walk forward and your character moves along a set path. B button makes your character turn around. You have to scan for enemies using a dedicated scan button (mapped to the L trigger) and then to aim your weapon you press R to go into a very limited (shooting gallery-esque) first person mode.

This control scheme is kinda hard to get used to at first. But it does establish the whole mood and style of the game. There are numerous interpretations as to why it made like that. Some of which are covered in this article: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/killer7/killer72.htm (scroll to where it says "So you wonder, why did Capcom take so much control out of your hands?").

[LemonScented]

I knew a bunch of guys once that worked on a GTA-style game about drink driving . I don't think it ever got made available to the public, on account of it being staggeringly tasteless, but they did nice things with the controls where the more full your "beer-o-meter" got after visiting several pubs, the bigger the lag was between you doing something on the controller and the game responding. It was really disorienting.

Now I come to think of it, GTA IV actually has that exact game mechanic.

I'm sure I've seen games where the more injured a character got, the slower their character animations (and movement speed, as a result) became. Although I can't think which games I've seen that in off the top of my head.

The Bomberman games all seem to have had pickups which deliberately mess up the controls in various ways.

I suspect that the circumstances under which you'd deliberately want to make controls bad are pretty limited. I don't buy the justification that it adds to the tension in horror games (but then I'm not a fan of horror games anyway - perhaps that's why). If a character is ill/injured/drunk/drugged then it can make sense, but as a default setting it's going to annoy more people than it impresses.

[team_q]

I think in survival horror it aids in the helpless feeling, you aren't supposed to feel like a badass track star that can shoot like a champ, you are a journalist or a little girl or a rookie cop. I can't really comment because the closest I get to survival horror are the screaming zombies in Zelda.

[Seth]

That may be true, but at the very least you still play a human, which the RE characters didn't move like.

[s0]

Killer7. Enough said.

You have to press the A button to make your character walk forward and your character moves along a set path. B button makes your character turn around. You have to scan for enemies using a dedicated scan button (mapped to the L trigger) and then to aim your weapon you press R to go into a very limited (shooting gallery-esque) first person mode.

This control scheme is kinda hard to get used to at first. But it does establish the whole mood and style of the game. There are numerous interpretations as to why it made like that. Some of which are covered in this article: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/killer7/killer72.htm (scroll to where it says "So you wonder, why did Capcom take so much control out of your hands?").

But there's a difference between "hard to get used to" and "bad". It's true that K7's controls are pretty strange, but after a bit of play they're just as workable as any other action game, really. RE on the other hand has the "tank-like" movement, slllllooooowwww turning, a button layout that's all over the place etc. Also if you're talking about K7's on-rails movement, that was never really a hindrance or made the game harder or anything like that.

[FatHat]

I think in survival horror it aids in the helpless feeling, you aren't supposed to feel like a badass track star that can shoot like a champ, you are a journalist or a little girl or a rookie cop. I can't really comment because the closest I get to survival horror are the screaming zombies in Zelda.

I think you can do helpless without making the controls 'bad'. I think the Penumbra games did this really well -- the controls were really cool I thought. The cursor basically acted like a hand, and you could do cool things like grab a door and just barely inch it forward, or pick up an object and throw it. It felt very intuitive and well done, but whenever you saw a monster it was still terrifying because you still were pretty much helpless.

[konjak]

"Bad controls" are always bad controls and should never be necessary. I can't play games where it feels like the developers created a hard game because the controls are awkward or limiting, like the Castlevania games.

Several games have been called out already. I love Metroid, but I've always disliked the damn single-speed jumping.

[s0]

On the topic of Castlevania, I'm surprised no one has mentioned the game's finicky way of handling stairs yet. I hate that even more than the sluggish jumping. Also, walljumping sucks in nearly every game I've ever played that has it, with the notable exception of the new Runman game. 

Another thing that comes to mind right now are Devil May Cry's fixed camera angles and the way the controls switch around with them. Fighting at a camera angle "intersection" can lead to death in boss fights. 

[SidM]

Why? Why do controls NEED to work?
...
Another example I can think of is the spell casting in Brutal Legend, It's rhythm-gamey, and kinda fun, well to me.
...
It seemed to me that a lot of the spells are devastating, being able to interrupt a fan solo mid way has helped me secure victory an a couple occasions.

I suck at rhythm games. I haven't played Brutal Legend, but being unable to use tide turning spells (as you mentioned above) because you can't keep the beat seems like a big turn off - especially in a genre (RTS, right?) which shouldn't have that.

[battlerager]

Why? Why do controls NEED to work?
...
Another example I can think of is the spell casting in Brutal Legend, It's rhythm-gamey, and kinda fun, well to me.
...
It seemed to me that a lot of the spells are devastating, being able to interrupt a fan solo mid way has helped me secure victory an a couple occasions.

I suck at rhythm games. I haven't played Brutal Legend, but being unable to use tide turning spells (as you mentioned above) because you can't keep the beat seems like a big turn off - especially in a genre (RTS, right?) which shouldn't have that.

Well, why shouldn't it? And why should a game have to neatly fit into an existing genre?

[SidM]

Why not have a control scheme that needs you to press X+I+N to move one step to the right as opposed to the Right arrow key in platformers?

[team_q]

Why not? It could be interesting!

The Music game mechanics in Brutal Legend aren't that hard and really fit the theme.

ALSO, CAsinclair

Intentionally bad =/= neglectfully bad.

[Lucaz]

I don't get everyone's problem with Castlevania. I understand people don't liking that jumping, but only if they expected to play Mario or something. I prefer it to most. Actually more floaty or dynamic jumps are awkward to me since I got into Castlevania. Together with the whip, they give Belmont a quite distinct feeling. Stairs are bad, but in later games like Chi no Rondo you can jump on and from stairs.

Survival game controls are just horrible, and the fixed cameras are more than often misplaced. It seems like designers played RE and Alone in the Dark, and decided it was perfect and no one hould even consider changing it. The cameras do help towards creating a mood, and character relative movement is needed when camera angles change randomly. But most survivals have too much action for those things to work. Then came RE4, but that one is a shooter where you suplex cultists and their heads explode.

Then RTS hotkeys are the most sub-optimal around. You have a GUI with 9 buttons. In any other genre they would be mapped to nine keys depending on the placing. Say, the first nine keys, mening the square between Q and C. In an RTS you have them mapped accoring to letters that change all the time. And yet they are supported by players, so I guess there something about this I don't get.

[Montoli]

Well, how about the helicopter game.

The controls are deliberately hard.  I mean, the whole game is just "how long can you fly before the controls get you killed?"  There are dozens of control schemes that would give you much better control over the helicopter.  Heck, it could just be up-down-left-right.

But that wouldn't be a very fun game any more, would it?

Games often have challenges.  Nothing wrong with making that challenge be the controls.  It's no better or worse than any other source of challenge, as long as it's deliberate.

[alspal]

On the topic of Castlevania, I'm surprised no one has mentioned the game's finicky way of handling stairs yet. I hate that even more than the sluggish jumping.

Together with the whip, they give Belmont a quite distinct feeling. Stairs are bad, but in later games like Chi no Rondo you can jump on and from stairs.

Well with Dracula Densetsu (Castlevania: The Adventure​) the game started to implement jumping on/off a rope. While Akumajō Dracula (Super Castlevania IV) allowed you to automatically walk up some stairs and also allowed jumping on stairs, but your right it wasn't till Akumajo Dracula X Chi no Rondo that you could jump off stairs.

What disapointed me most was in Dracula Densetsu Rebirth (that came out recently) where the designers had chosen to go back to the original way of handling stairs and even abandoned the more precise rope climbing of the original game it was remaking.

[siiseli]

3D mario games and its weird controls.
La Mulana.

How dare you say La-Mulana has bad controls? It has great controls.

[battlerager]

Then RTS hotkeys are the most sub-optimal around. You have a GUI with 9 buttons. In any other genre they would be mapped to nine keys depending on the placing. Say, the first nine keys, mening the square between Q and C. In an RTS you have them mapped accoring to letters that change all the time. And yet they are supported by players, so I guess there something about this I don't get.

I'm currently playing Heroes of Neweth a lot. Its probably not a 100% example for RTS (Its a DotA clone), but it has the abilities for all heroes mapped to QWER standardly and the itemslots are mapped to alt + qweasd.

Also, all hotkeys are freely customizable.

It makes playing so much better, really have to agree with you here.

[Dacke]

The RTS thing really bugs me too. I guess the hardcore RTS players want to keep the keymappings obscure, so that they can stay ahead of any newcomers. But if the keys were mapped to make sense, more people would become RTS players. And in turn, more RTS-people would support sane keymappings.

[Chris Z]

FWIW, Red Alert 3 did just that although I forget which adjacent keys it used.  RA3 also had just one key (F, I believe) that you had to memorize for every units special.  As much as I love Starcraft/Warcraft, it was a pain remembering the unique keys for each units abilities.

[TheDustin]

About a month ago I downloaded all of the major Survival Horror games for PS1 (I'm a terrible person, I know) to try to find what makes a good horror game. I never played any SH games as a kid (strict parents) so these were all new experiences for me. From what I gathered the unwieldy controls were an easy cop out to artificially create tension. There's a difference between having an unpowerful and vulnerable character and controling someone like you would a World War II tank. So far I've found that horror in games works only in small doses; I can appreciate the terror of being 18 levels deep in DoomRL and running for your life sans ammo or the surreal horrors that occasionally pop up in the Japanese-only PS1 title LSD. Or maybe dropping your flare in water in a dark jungle area full of undead in Spelunky. If you try to sustain the horror elements for a prolonged period of time it wears thin and loses its appeal. So yeah, Survival Horror games suck due to their asinine controls.

Speaking of Spelunky, I've seen that a lot of people complain about its controls. I think that's actually part of the learning process though, those little quirks that you can use to your advantage. Using the backswing of your whip to hit perched spiders or cycling through bombs and ropes and dropping them to disarm traps, for example.

I talked about control in my review for increpare's Home, so I won't repeat that.