Game controllers and complexity

[andygates]

Nice article in Newsweek's Level Up gaming blog today, tracking the growth of game controller complexity from the old Atari joystick to the PS3's outrageously button-studded piece of mil-spec hardware.  It blames Streetfighter II - the first of the many-button combo-tastic arcade games - for changing the game from the old, pure waggling experience to that ubernerdy one where the elite weren't hopped up on speed but on memory drugs.  Could you remember all of Dhalsim's combos?  Nor could I.  spike150, this is your curtain call.

N'gai goes on to declare the Wii controller a second big change, away from the zillion-button pads and by extension, dragging games away from that sort of experience.  Looking at the pick-up-and-play goodness in boxing, bowling and surgery over the weekend, I have to agree.  Looking also at the cumbersome and frankly ugly controls for the Wii version of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, I agree even more: the arbitrary combos make no sense when you have a physical control metaphor, but they're just fine on the Playstation version. 

The physical metaphor has its own rules, and games which break them are no fun.  And so the Wii remote as a space-mouse or glove is immediately obvious and elegant, even to kids and grannies.  N'gai is right: games which get it wrong will tank even if they're as lavish as Marvel:UA - I still feel cheated that Spidey's web isn't activated with a thwip action, but even if it was, I'm thwipping at the screen and Spidey can face any which way.  With a D-pad that's okay, but with a physical metaphor, it's jarring.  The Wii's first year has revealed this with the huge success of frankly dumb titles like Cooking Mama and Trauma Center and the really meh performance of the traditional shooters - it's all in the controls.

Clubbing a Playmobil opponent in the side of the head with friends yelling behind you is fun, pure and simple. 

Games like Okami - based around Japanese brush painting - are getting me excited for the second wave of titles, when developers get their engines optimised and start really creating.  [/wiifanboy]

Comments

[katebush.livejournal.com]

Played Okami to death on the PS2, one of my all time favourite games and very very pretty :)

[spike150.livejournal.com]

The second half of that article made some good points about the Wii and its games, but I thought the first half was very sloppily written.

Pedantic this may be, but saying the PS3 controller has 20 input options only works if you count the d-pad as four separate inputs. Seems like a bit of a stretch to me, but ok. The problem is that in the description of the NES pad, he counts the d-pad as only one input, giving it a supposed total of five. Using this figure he later says "In the modern era, we’ve gone from 5 inputs to 20. Four times the complexity" - er, no, not really.

The other thing that bugged me was a Street Fighter thing - if you're going to write about SF, you should get your terminology right. He confuses "punches" with "moves", "moves" with "buttons", and worst of all uses the term "combo" in completely the wrong context - "In Street Fighter II, a four- or five-move combo would result in only one movement onscreen."
In SF2, or in fact any fighting game at all, a combo is a sequence of different and/or repeated moves, what he's talking about here is just button presses combined with joystick motions to produce a single move.

The point he's making is still valid though, I think. Street Fighter 2 was the first _widely popular_ game to involve character moves that required multiple joystick and/or button inputs, it was the first game you ever needed to memorise move lists for. Hell, it had some of them printed on the cabinet decals!
I don't know which game really originated this, certainly the original Street Fighter had special moves that required joystick motions + button presses, but it wasn't very widely played and not very successful. Possibly due to being rather unbalanced and only giving you a choice of one character to play (Ryu, you could play as Ken against Ryu in a 2P game). Street Fighter 2 made the huge leap of giving you eight playable characters, with seven distinct sets of moves! That was a big part of what made it successful I think, it allowed people to pick a favourite character and learn it, then play against their friends. Reminds me of playing SF2CE in the Epi where everyone seemed to have their own character - katebush with Blanka, andygates with Honda, Marcus was the Dhalsim master (also had a mean Sagat, I seem to recall) and sciolist with Chun Li (and basically any female character in whatever was the current fighter of choice ;)
I never settled on one particular character, I generally swapped around to whatever I thought was better in a given matchup. In SF2CE I think Guile and Vega were my favourite characters, with some M. Bison thrown in for some Psycho Crusher cheese :)

[andygates.livejournal.com]

That all sounds fair, though the D-pad is often used as a bunch 'o' buttons (for inventory management, or powers or kata or whatever). ;)

In SF2 the cast of playable characters were very successful in getting more money out of players. You'd have to play every character a bit, to see which ones you liked. Once you completed with one, you'd want to complete with others. It was undoubtedly a richer gaming experience - we all loved it - but it also printed money.

Has sciolist discovered the Chun Li cosplay community yet?

(By the way, I finally saw the SF movie a little while ago. Now I see what everyone was saying about Raul Julia's final work...)

[andygates.livejournal.com]

...and this is where some of the 'serious' gamers start to dismiss the Wii as a toy, because it's, y'know, a play-thing. Like a play-station, sorta. Heh.

Brass knuckles and head deforming plz. Boxing mechanics + zombie gangster gore = win.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Things I didn't know #23: Miis are based on traditional Japanese Kokeshi dolls. I love cultural context, yes I do.