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A look back...
Posted: 2004-06-23 06:23pm
by YT300000
I found an article about Marathon in a magazine, an old one, from 1994. There was a funny (with the benefit of hindsight) bit in it:
What really astounded me was their mapping of mouse functions. In Doom, left-right motions of the mouse rotate the player, while forward-backward motions move the player forwards or backwards. All absolutely intuitive. But for some unfathomable reason, the designers of Marathon chose to make the forward-backward motions of the mouse move the player's aim up and down! The result is one of the most insanely counterintuitive interfaces I have seen on any piece of commercial software. You swing right or left with the mouse, but move forward or backward with the keyboard. Thus, any kind of maneuvering requires your hand to jump frenetically from mouse to keyboard and back.
Posted: 2004-06-23 07:18pm
by SPOOFE
Heh.
Amazing the kind of stupidity that pops up when people get it stuck in their heads that there's only "one way" to play a type of game.
Posted: 2004-06-23 07:22pm
by DPDarkPrimus
I can't wait until a FPS has the movement keys bound default as "ESDF", and everyone bitches about that, before they realize that "Hey, this actuallly works better!"
Posted: 2004-06-23 07:56pm
by Mad
DPDarkPrimus wrote:I can't wait until a FPS has the movement keys bound default as "ESDF", and everyone bitches about that, before they realize that "Hey, this actuallly works better!"
Actually, Tribes 2 did that. Not sure what people thought of it, since it was my brother who got and played it. I do know that he moved to that control scheme for a while.
Posted: 2004-06-23 08:08pm
by DPDarkPrimus
Utsanomiko told me about the configuration a while ago. He uses it for GTA:VC.
I didn't try it for that, but I
did try it in Half-Life... and I use it for all my FPS games now. Really, it has a lot more buttons available to use.
(In case you're curious, for HL, I use R for reload, W for flashlight, and A for use. I used to use G for something, but I press it accidentally sometimes.
)
Posted: 2004-06-23 08:27pm
by Alyeska
DPDarkPrimus wrote:I can't wait until a FPS has the movement keys bound default as "ESDF", and everyone bitches about that, before they realize that "Hey, this actuallly works better!"
You mean instead of WASD? Right now WASD is the standard and as far as I can tell its identical to ESDF, its just preference to how you've been playing. Tribes forced me to use WASD rather then the old arrow keys, and I've never been looking back.
Re: A look back...
Posted: 2004-06-23 08:28pm
by Alyeska
YT300000 wrote:I found an article about Marathon in a magazine, an old one, from 1994. There was a funny (with the benefit of hindsight) bit in it:
What really astounded me was their mapping of mouse functions. In Doom, left-right motions of the mouse rotate the player, while forward-backward motions move the player forwards or backwards. All absolutely intuitive. But for some unfathomable reason, the designers of Marathon chose to make the forward-backward motions of the mouse move the player's aim up and down! The result is one of the most insanely counterintuitive interfaces I have seen on any piece of commercial software. You swing right or left with the mouse, but move forward or backward with the keyboard. Thus, any kind of maneuvering requires your hand to jump frenetically from mouse to keyboard and back.
Apparently the reviewer never heard ot using TWO hands to play the game...
