The mouse is broken as a device for controlling weapons. It's like firing a gun by telling someone else to pull the trigger for you, or blowing a kiss to a girl you like instead of making with the slobbery intertwined tongues.
'Click'. How is 'click' anything like 'boom ratatatata 'SPLODE shudder whirrrrrrrrr splat'? How is gently moving four inches of ovoid plastic across a smooth surface anything like painfully levelling a monstrous construct of steel and death at some slavering mutant's face?
Sidestepping for the time being the small matter of increased accuracy and neatly-packaged one-handedness, consider the oft-maligned gamepad as an alternative. It's an inherently more 3D object: one that's held and manipulated rather than one that traces patterns.
You can put your full body into it, tilting it fruitlessly to avoid attacks, raising it aloft in synchronicity with your desperate hope that you'll make that impossible jump, hurling it against the wall like an unwanted baby when failure strikes. Newer models have triggers on each shoulder - now that evokes maniacally emptying a full clip into a bloodied corpse that was already dead 200 bullets ago.
If we peer with rare jealousy over the walls of Consoletown, we'll see they have an extra treat: vibration. Shoot a man with an Xbox 360 gamepad and it rumbles, replicating both the recoil of a massive a gun and the anger of God himself at such violence.
Attempts at vibrating mice have been poor. Game support was limited, and the rumble motors so puny it felt more like stroking a bunny rabbit quaking with terror than raining high explosive death upon all comers.
Clearly, serious PC gamers will have no truck with the gamepad as a solution - thumbsticks track too slowly, requiring harsh compromise in the games themselves to compensate for their soupy inaccuracy. Please don't tell me I've got a headshot when I've clearly just grazed his little finger. So the answer is to fix the mouse.
Here is the solution: attach a series of tiny jet engines to each side of the device, forever pulling against each other. Just to inch the cursor from one side of the screen to the other should rupture at least three tendons. Each of the buttons should have a car tyre footpump fitted to them - you'll need to hit that bad boy with a closed fist to squeeze out a single bullet.
Finally, ditch the flat desk and use a floating balloon half-filled with helium as your mousing surface. This, truly, will evoke the feeling of struggling with car-sized weaponry, but without losing the mouse's beloved pinpoint accuracy. The mouse is unquestionably the superior tool, but it's the very limitations of a gamepad that make it so much more visceral a weapon.
A gamepad can also paper over the cracks: the PlayStation community adores Star Wars: Battlegrounds, for instance, while the unforgiving glare of the mouse reveals it as the moronic, shallow thing it really is. The Wii controller attempts a brave middle-ground, but finds it more inaccurate than either. Fine for tennis, less so for machineguns.
The mouse it shall remain, then. Yet I still pray for a control device that can make the gravity gun feel like ungodly science somehow holding a sofa aloft... rather than like a stick with a plastic bucket on the end.
the mouse not as good as a game pad? don't ever say that again.
The Wii controller attempts a brave middle-ground, but finds it more inaccurate than either. Fine for tennis, less so for machineguns.
even though it isn't as good as a mouse I found it more accurate than a game pad in red steel even though the other controls weren't done as well, and metroid looks like it is going to prove that the wii remote is the next best thing soon enough.
I haven't played any FPSs on the Wii yet, but Resident Evil 4's use of the wiimote for aiming and shooting is perfect. If they can do it well in a third-person shooter, isn't it possible to recreate it in a first person perspective? Apparently not so far, but we will see. If dont properly it could finally be the control pad that's acceptable for use in an FPS without severely comprimising your accuracy and speed.
Regarding the first couple of paragraphs, if this had been a feature about lightguns or the wiimote, then the stuff about the mouse and weapons would have been spot on.
However, I fail to see how a gamepad is in any better or more realistic than a mouse when it comes to simulating weapons. It's still "click", only with a smaller button.
Regarding the first couple of paragraphs, if this had been a feature about lightguns or the wiimote, then the stuff about the mouse and weapons would have been spot on.
However, I fail to see how a gamepad is in any better or more realistic than a mouse when it comes to simulating weapons. It's still "click", only with a smaller button.
Absolutely. That's probably why the article is called 'Devils Advocate' though, ie. 'Let's see how much s**t we can get away with talking before people say "steady on"'.
Regarding the first couple of paragraphs, if this had been a feature about lightguns or the wiimote, then the stuff about the mouse and weapons would have been spot on.
However, I fail to see how a gamepad is in any better or more realistic than a mouse when it comes to simulating weapons. It's still "click", only with a smaller button.
Well the click on that is a lot more like a trigger, rather than... well.. a click
Why dont all u guys be quiet about the click/buttons/triggers nonsence. Joy-Pads and KeyBoard/Mouse have their advantages as well as their flaws..We all know this, so CVG and may I ask..Whats the point of this article?
Why dont all u guys be quiet about the click/buttons/triggers nonsence. Joy-Pads and KeyBoard/Mouse have their advantages as well as their flaws..We all know this, so CVG and may I ask..Whats the point of this article?
A quiet news day? Wasn't exactly a stunning critique on the subject of control systems and game interaction was it?
I think you're either a pad person or a mouse person. Personally I so rarely play PC games that my mouse control for gaming is utter pants. But on the other hand I could pull off head shots on Timesplitters 2 with my eyes closed. A PC gamer may stand little chance against a Halo 2 maniac when playing on Xbox, but slay everyone in sight with a mouse.
Regarding which one is better, I'd say a control pad is a far better "catch-all" solution over and above the mouse/keyboard combo, just because of it's practicality (don't need a desk or table) and because of it being able to provide an adequate quantity of commands within easy reach of each hand. Of course some genres suffer (FPS and RTS) but surely PC gamers must find themselves needing a pad for some of the console conversions? So like I say, it's a catch-all.
As for the wii-mote, I'd love it to be a mouse/keyboard and pad beater, but I'm concerned over the quantity of buttons within easy reach that would allow for games of greater depth to be accomodated. How would you assign the controls for GRAW2 or even Bioshock? I wouldn't want to waggle to change between weapons and plasmids!
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