Reminded me of an old article I read during my late high school years in a magazine I am still reading (and subscribed to!), PC PowerPlay. I think this was a time of Playstation 2s and Nintendo Gamecubes, and also for PC gamers in particularly, Console Port ins. These were basically console games which were "ported" over to the PC platform. Popular examples were Final Fantasy 7 and Metal Gear Solid. Now, the writer of this article (pretty sure it was Timothy C. Best) mentioned that not only were most of these ports released several months and in some cases over a year later, he expressed his frustration that simple touches, such as changing messages such as, "Press X to kick" would not be changed to the appropriate PC control key scheme.
Being in high school with very, very limited income, I couldn't exactly go out and buy these games to see what the fuss was all about. All I knew was, my friends owned playstations and sega saturns, and darnnarnit I wanted one too!
Fast forward a few years, and working part time, I finally saved enough to buy my very own console for the first time. Alas, my partner (now wife), though she doesn't see herself as a gamer (played World of Warcraft with me for a few years, and is a KILLER PRO spider solitaire and freecell player! If there ever was a professional competition for spider solitaire and freecell, OMG she would own those so hard, even professional starcraft players would come to watch her AMAZING APM!), didn't like "violent games" but loved "Mario."... You guessed it, my first console, was a Wii. Nothing against it though, we had loads of fun with it, so many times we couldn't stop laughing, especially when we had friends over, but I couldn't play the so-called "blockbusters." So in the end I had to resort to buying PC versions of these games, which wasn't a big deal, since most of these were FPS (First Person Shooters), which I prefer controlling with the classic keyboard and mouse setup. (Keyboard for movement, mouse for aiming and shooting).
The big thing was NBA2K10. I bought that on steam, for PC, so excited about buying a basketball game for the first time since 1999, I eagerly awaited this download to finish. Once done, I patched it up, and off I went to the loading screen. I played a few games and thought, 'hey, I wanna learn some of the moves' and went into practice mode.' First thing I saw was "To do a stepback, hold the Left trigger and move your left analog stick back." ...... Make a long story short, I now have an xbox360 and 2K11 is NOT on my PC.
Going back to the FPS thing. I also read an article in a recent issue of PC PowerPlay by the tech editor, Matt Wilson (issue 187, Feb 2011 for those who may want to refer to it), about him building a gaming rig for his younger brother and installing steam and Call of Duty for him. To this his brother asked "Can you use a controller on this PC?" and which to this the tech editor was simply flabbergasted, as most PC gamers would agree, 'Why on earth would you opt a controller over the precision of mouse and keyboard?'. Maybe this is just a generation thing? I mean I've tried playing Call of Duty: Black Ops on the xbox a few months back, and I was absolutely hopeless. Yet, look up on Youtube and you will find loads of video replays of players doing some awesome things, things that I would be assuming were done using mouse and keyboard, not a fidgety controller. I've noticed a lot of my younger friends (still in high school), who grew up on consoles, are so good at using these controllers.
It's almost like being left handed or right handed. Of course there are those ambidextrous in this sense and are proficient at both modes of input, but generally people seem to have a preference.
I know this has been a long entry, but one last final interesting note. I was scrounging around teamliquid's website for some starcraft 2 strats, where I stumbled across this article.
Titled, Bumblebees Guide to Playing with low APM. For those who are not RTS players (real time strategy games), APM stands for (actions per minute), which is simply a measure of how many actions a player makes, generally not a be all end all measure of skill, but an aspect of it. Being a noob at starcraft 2, and thus naturally having very low APM I hastily opened this and had a read. It turns out that this particular player has a medical condition which hinders his ability to have high APM, but he has figured out different ways to work around this obstacle. The article goes really in depth, and even has a section on different types of input devices which people who have similar conditions, could use as alternatives if for the chance that they find the mouse and keyboard setup too uncomfortable.
Just a snippet,
"Replacing the mouse
The mouse is usually considered the optimal cursor device for most people. I realize there are many, many options and accompanying opinions about what mouse is best so I will only discuss alternatives to the mouse. I'm going to assume for this that you are not so disabled as to require some form of eye or head tracking to control the cursor. If you are, and are playing starcraft, please message me!
Trackball - Trackballs are the common solution for people who have physical difficulties operating a mouse. The main advantages are that a trackball can be operated without arm movement, and the buttons are independent of the tracking device. For general use trackballs are probably the optimal solution for those with physical difficulties. I spent a good amount of time playing SC II and other games with a trackball and I found some problems with trackballs for video game usage."
(from http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=163299)
So next time you load up your favorite game on whatever platform it may be, be it PC, Mac, console, smart phones, tablets, etc, have a think, are there other ways people use controls to use this game? Even simple things as key bindings, think about how you bind your keys on a keyboard/controller/whatever, and think why you have set it up as so.
EDIT: Just realised there's also motion sensor type controls such as via the Wiimote, Playstation Move, and Xbox Kinect. Looks like we're moving towards the whole no physical control scheme of things, but at the same time, I don't think these will completely replace them in the near future either. Reason being, certain games just will not feel right, or will not work well with motion sensor technology. (RTS being a prime example) So until we start seeing gaming platforms completely rewriting the ways we play ALL games, and start innovating some new ways to produce today's and tomorrow's genres, your mouse/keyboard/controller will still be in good shape.
Apologies for the wall of text!
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