This week's idiot corner : Control Schemes, part I

Warning : The following is an Anger Rant(tm), and as such, it contains a variety of colorful language. I really doubt you have your kids reading some random bloke's blog, but if you do, turn them away this week.

The picture above is a very special thing. Obviously, it's a badly modelled controller, sketched up for the sole purpose of providing a quick example. You'll note that it essentially looks like those crappy PC game pads you find at your local computer retailer for like ten bucks. Maybe they have a few more buttons, or a thumbstick or two, possibly even a jog dial, but this is essentially the lowest common denominator as far as controllers are concerned. And that's why I used a mash-up of shapes rather than snatch a photo of Game-o-tek's Fighter Pad PC Duel Pro.

This is, essentially, the every-pad. It's the standard button arrangement we've had since like 1991, when the SNES came out. It's essentially the control scheme you can count on, because it exists, in some way, shape, or form, on every controller since then. At least every controller worth a damn, especially AFTER the 16-bit generation. It's been on every major console since. To clarify my point, let me list off, in most-recent order, which consoles support a game that uses every one of those buttons.

Playstation 3
Xbox 360
Playstation Portable
Nintendo DS
Xbox
Gamecube
Playstation 2

With the exception of the Xbox, each of these consoles are currently actively developed for. Meaning that if your game's design is limited to less than these six buttons, you can use the exact same control scheme on every console currently being purchased.

Most Japanese titles, arcade derived titles (not counting light gun shooters, vehicle games, and music titles), and pretty much every genre that doesn't have its roots on the PC, work fine under six buttons. And for pure home titles, context-sensitivity (where a game lets a button perform different actions based upon the situation at hand) lets you do a LOT with a few buttons. Heck, most games work fine with the four face buttons. And with that, the issue at hand.

Dear game companies : Stop changing your goddamn control schemes.

What am I talking about? Try playing a fighting game with more than two people in the room. Try playing Lumines with some friends. If you're lucky, you won't come across any problems. If not, this is what happens.

Player A started playing the Game X series at part II. Player B started playing it when part III came out. They both had that game for months, and the control scheme became second nature. However, regardless of the fact that Game X only has 3 or 4 major action buttons, Company X saw fit to change the face button arrangement from part II in part III. This usually happens because they were releasing it on a different console.

Now, both of these consoles have the exact same face button arrangement: The four face buttons arranged in a cross that you saw in the pic above. However, Company X still saw fit to change these buttons for, what I like to call, "no good goddamn reason". Now, a funny thing about the human condition: one of the major safety mechanisms in the human brain is to revert to old behavioral paterns when panic sets in. This is what caused a series of pilots to eject themselves from their plane for seemingly no reason. While nowhere near as dangerous a scenario, nothing's more annoying in a video game than a panicky situation (which happens in just about every game, from Tetris to Halo) on a different control scheme. What happens? Someone starts shooting at you from a vantage point you can't immediately see, and as your health beings to dwindle, you immediately stare at the ground instead of moving out of the way or looking up because your thumbsticks aren't set up right. Or you wildly turn a fast dropping puzzle piece because the buttons turn it in the opposite direction you're used to, they're dropping fast, and you drop the piece in a way that pretty much ends your game. Or you walk up to a pit and Mario throws a fireball and falls to his death instead of jumping over it. And assuming you spend the hours needed to embed a new control scheme into your brain, not only have you not completely eliminated the risk of dying/losing due to panic, you're also in for a wild ride if Company X changes it next year.

However, all is not lost! Dealing with the problem is as simple as changing your buttons, right? And just about every game lets you change the controls, so what's the problem? The problem is that this option is almost NEVER fast. Let me list the games I've played that make this issue trivial :

Halo

In this title you have a profile you can save that contains your control scheme, is easy to edit, and is trivial to change. When the match over and a new friend hops in, he just picks his profile, which he/she'll need to create and set up once, no matter how often you folks play together.

And the titles that make this issue a goddamn mess?

Semi-bad :
Soul Calibur
Guilty Gear
Tekken

Bad :

Street Fighter III

Street Fighter II
Street Fighter Alpha
Street Figh... you get the point.

Goddamn Embarassing:
Virtua Fighter
Dead or Alive
Lumines

In the above titles, you have to stop playing completely, exit out of your current game mode, go into the fucking options screen (you'll call it that too, by the tenth time you have to go to it), and change it. This scenario takes between fifteen seconds and a minute to go through, depending on the game and its interface. It essentially has the value of loading time, 'cause there's pretty much shit else you can do while waiting for your buddy to customize the controls. Can you recall any games you've played lately with fifteen seconds to a minute of loading time? You don't, 'cause that's a fucking ridiculous a mount of time to wait every single fucking time you have a match.

Before you point out that I only have an issue with half a dozen games, I'd like to point out that they comprise pretty much the entirety of the fighting game genre. I'd also like to point out the most important part of this rant : what fucking year is this? Every game system currently up has a fucking hard drive, and it is goddamn arbitrary to make a profile system work.

What pisses me off is not one or two of those issues, it's essentially the systematic retardation that leads to failure on every single point. First, the Xbox controller was fucking modeled after the Dreamcast controller, so why, oh dear God why, is the control scheme in Dead or Alive 2 different from Dead or Alive 2 Ultimate? The Xbox 360 and PSP have the exact same face button and shoulder pad arrangements, so why in all damnation did Lumine's developer's feel the need to swap the primary block rotation buttons, along with eliminating the PSP's default config, even as an option? The closest thing they offer keeps the function of the lower left hand button but assigns nothing to the lower right hand button, for, once again, "no good goddamn reason". It's new kinds of fucking stupid. If your company doesn't have a choice, why haven't you implemented custom player profiles for control setups? Halo had that shit in 2001. What. Fucking. Year. Is. This. If you can't make profiles, at least let me pause and change. That leads to much less hair pulling. "Pause and change" is why Tekken and Soul Calibur top the "mess" list. Soul Calibur moreso, because you can do this during character selection, meaning you don't have to wait for the fight to start and then pause/change buttons, which disturbs the flow of the game a smidgen but nowhere near as much as exiting and going back three menus, ala Virtua Fighter. Street Fighter III is a special case : You can change the scheme in the single player mode, but not in multiplayer. That just reeks of retardation. Fortunately, Street Fighter's had the least amount of control scheme changes over the years, and they were all relegated to the shoulder buttons. However, it really just comes down to the fact that every goddamn fighting game currently on the market assumes you have only one fucking friend, and that for both of you, this is the first time you've played a title in their series.

It's not all bad news, however. Nintendo has announced that Smash Bros. Brawl will include a profile system which allows players to change button configurations and link them to their nickname, making the process of switching configs in and out pretty easy. It's actually pretty sad that Nintendo is at the forefront of making a game enjoyable when more people are playing than the amount of available slots for a single game, and people are switching in and out.

Next week we'll cover analog sticks and shooters! It will be a much shorter article, but way too big to make a part of this already large post.