DNSDies wrote:

Anyway, anything with 3D movement and inverted look controls and no remapping option gives me conniptions.

There are a lot of PlayStation 1 games with control schemes like that. Colony Wars is a series that annoyed the crap out of me with inverted flying controls. Only the last title in the series had an option for a better control scheme.

I kinda get why they did that back in the day - you fly a spaceship so they went with standard aircraft controls. Nowadays, it's very hard getting used to these, though.

Original System Shock for sure.

appiah4 wrote:

Original System Shock for sure.

People say this yet I find myself rebinding most old FPS games to mimic those "ASDZXC" bindings.

I've beaten the MS-DOS port of T-MeK on "Expert" difficulty using those bindings, with one hand even.

I still think the worst thing about game controls is when certain controls are arbitrarily disabled unless you have a specific input device present: i.e. you can't manually roll with the keyboard in Privateer 2 if joystick control is off.

dr_st wrote:

I think it comes down to you preferring a control scheme that uses fewer buttons, and achieves special functions through combinations of buttons, whereas the trend is using more buttons and a dedicated one per function, when possible.

To me it would seem harder to use a keyboard in, lets say, SMB 1-3 than a controller as the whole game only requires the use of your thumbs for moving, running, jumping and firing. With a keyboard you would have to use 4-5 fingers to achieve this.

sf78 wrote:

To me it would seem harder to use a keyboard in, lets say, SMB 1-3 than a controller as the whole game only requires the use of your thumbs for moving, running, jumping and firing. With a keyboard you would have to use 4-5 fingers to achieve this.

You say this as if it's an objective advantage of a controller, but it really isn't. Why do you assume that it's easier to use just your thumbs for everything versus a dedicated finger for each action? It's completely subjective and depends mostly on what you learned growing up.

dr_st wrote:

I think it comes down to you preferring a control scheme that uses fewer buttons, and achieves special functions through combinations of buttons, whereas the trend is using more buttons and a dedicated one per function, when possible.

The problem is that too many developers see all the buttons on a controller and feel that they have to use them all, even if doing so makes the game more complicated. Like one button to draw a weapon, another button to ready/aim the weapon, another button to fire the weapon, another button to reload the weapon, etc. Did anyone actually complain back in the days when you just pressed one button to make your character draw a weapon and fire it, reloading automatically as needed? Did people say "This game would be better if I had to use more buttons to accomplish the same thing."?

schmatzler wrote:

There are a lot of PlayStation 1 games with control schemes like that. Colony Wars is a series that annoyed the crap out of me with inverted flying controls. Only the last title in the series had an option for a better control scheme.

I kinda get why they did that back in the day - you fly a spaceship so they went with standard aircraft controls. Nowadays, it's very hard getting used to these, though.

And yet nobody has designed a real plane with non-inverted controls.

The part I find strange is that forward=down, back=up is how pretty much everything in the real world capable of tilting works. Put your hand on top of your head and look down. Which way did your hand move? If you have a camera on a tripod and you put your hand on top of it, do you pull back to make it tilt down? If you were behind a mounted machine gun and wanted to tilt it down, would you push down on the back end of it? So why would you move a mouse/analog stick back to look/fly down in a game?

As for controls I hate...

Postal - It looks like an action game, but it uses the control scheme of a first person shooter. In theory this gives you gives you great flexibility in how you move. In practice, it sucks because unlike an FPS game, the camera is always fixed at the same angle. It is NOT intuitive to push left to make your character move right if they're facing the screen. Or if they're facing right, then pushing left will make them go up, and pushing right will make them go down. I'd rather the game just control like a typical arcade game.

Resident Evil/Dino Crisis/Alone in the Dark/others - Stupid tank controls.

Auto-aiming in DOS games - I want to shoot the explosive barrel, not the enemy standing next to it! Stop hitting the damn wall and throw the dynamite into the doorway where I'm aiming!! STOP SHOOTING THE %$&#@! ANIMALS AND TARGET THE ENEMY I'M AIMING AT!!! ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

FPS games on consoles - Aiming with an analog stick sucks. Every console since the PS2 on has had USB ports, so why don't these games support mouse and keyboard?

Rekrul wrote:

The problem is that too many developers see all the buttons on a controller and feel that they have to use them all, even if doing so makes the game more complicated. Like one button to draw a weapon, another button to ready/aim the weapon, another button to fire the weapon, another button to reload the weapon, etc. Did anyone actually complain back in the days when you just pressed one button to make your character draw a weapon and fire it, reloading automatically as needed? Did people say "This game would be better if I had to use more buttons to accomplish the same thing."?

That's certainly a good point. Coming up with a good control scheme is not trivial. I certainly know that the control change Blizzard had made to the freeware release of Blackthorne (separating Jump and Fire into separate keys) was a bad idea.

Rekrul wrote:

Auto-aiming in DOS games - I want to shoot the explosive barrel, not the enemy standing next to it! Stop hitting the damn wall and throw the dynamite into the doorway where I'm aiming!! STOP SHOOTING THE %$&#@! ANIMALS AND TARGET THE ENEMY I'M AIMING AT!!! ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Vertical auto-aim is rather useful in Doom, which has no ability to look up/down. Horizontal auto-aim has a bigger potential to get in the way of things.

dr_st wrote:

Vertical auto-aim is rather useful in Doom, which has no ability to look up/down. Horizontal auto-aim has a bigger potential to get in the way of things.

I understand that the vertical auto-aim in Doom was pretty much required as Doom had no method for looking or aiming up and down. Maybe other games included it for the same technical reason even though they allowed you to look up and down, but it's still annoying. For example;

Dark Forces - There's a bunch of Storm Troopers next to a bunch of exploding canisters, but the game won't let you shoot the canisters until all the enemies are dead. Near the end of the game, you're on a ledge and there are some Storm Troopers on the ground in the distance below you. Doors open up across from you to release Dark Troopers, but when you try to shoot at them, all your shots go down at a 45 degree angle to hit the Storm Troopers. The concussion rifle is completely useless for hitting enemies on a ledge above you, even though firing at the ceiling above them would be enough to kill them.

Blood - I can see an enemy standing in a doorway, but all my explosive shots harmlessly hit the wall next to it because auto-aim is trying to take a straight line to the enemy instead of going where I aim. Even at the end of the first level, you can lean out of the hole in the wall enough to see the enemies waiting for you, but when you try to shoot them, your shots hit the wall.

Redneck Rampage - There was an enemy on the roof of a barn, I aimed an explosive arrow at him and it blew up a chicken on the ground. There was a large enemy behind a bin and a small enemy in the bin. All my shots hit the side of the bin because the game was trying to target that enemy first. At the end of the game, there are a bunch of flying saucers and three large enemies. The game insists on targeting all the flying saucers before it will let you shoot at the large, much more dangerous enemies.

Even if the maps were only 2D, the games had enough information to draw the map as 3D on the screen and it could tell when it was supposed to draw an enemy above or below you. It seems like they should have been able to work out an optional way to disable auto-aim and send the shots exactly where you're aiming.

DracoNihil wrote:

People say this yet I find myself rebinding most old FPS games to mimic those "ASDZXC" bindings. […]
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appiah4 wrote:

Original System Shock for sure.

People say this yet I find myself rebinding most old FPS games to mimic those "ASDZXC" bindings.

I've beaten the MS-DOS port of T-MeK on "Expert" difficulty using those bindings, with one hand even.

I still think the worst thing about game controls is when certain controls are arbitrarily disabled unless you have a specific input device present: i.e. you can't manually roll with the keyboard in Privateer 2 if joystick control is off.

To be fair, the topic is not about broken or unusable game controls. It's about most annoying ones.

System Shock is certainly MOST annoying because it is an FPS that does not control like an FPS. What is more aggravating is that it came after Doom and still failed to understand or imitate its superior controls. What's even worse is that Ultima Underworld, which came out two years before System Shock, has controls that (while also feeling terribly outdated) retains playability while System Shock has an Enhanced Edition on GOG whose main gimmick is fixing the controls, for the one and only reason that it is near unplayably annoying (if not unplayable) with the original controls.