MMaximus wrote:

I think descent plays fine with a CH flightstick pro.

Agree. I use that joystick + WASD on keyboard for full control

Talking about current gen games: Battlefield Bad Company 2. I have never played an FPS before that feels as clunky as this. Can't even run while slighty strafing + forward keys at the same time

Rise of the Robots!

I really wonder about the complaints about bad control in games due to low mouse sensitivity in DOS.
Why don't you set the desired sensitivity with the mouse driver you load?
Some even allow to readjust it on the fly.

It not like that mouse sensitivity control is a feature that requires windows.

Descent is only playable. Using joysticks like wingman extreme or others with that little 4way thingy on top of the stick. That is used to strafe left-right and up-down.

I think System Shock gets an undeserved bad rap in this regard.
Once you get used to it, the control scheme is very flexible/powerful.
I played through it years ago and never once felt that I was fighting with the controls.

One thing I can't get my head around is old C64 or Amiga games that use up on the joystick to jump. I know this was born out of necessity as most joysticks at the time had only one button which was used for something else, but it just doesn't work for me.
I modded a 3 button Sega gamepad and connected A button to up on the D-Pad to work around this.

Perhaps some of you who claim to like System Shock's controls could share your technique? I enjoy the game and would like to learn to play it better. It is entirely possible that I have been doing it wrong.

I know the game has strafe keys, but I could never figure out a natural way to use them. As far as I can tell, there is no way to remap keys or enable mouselook without installing third party mods.

It's actually pretty easy. Instead of WASD, you've got SZXC. A and D are turn keys. W is your run key and Q and E are lean keys.
I believe RFC are different height positions and TGB are different look keys (G centers). Maybe these are reversed, I can't really remember right now.

15 keys, but damn, they give you complete control 😁.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

maximus wrote:

There are few things more frustrating than a good game dragged down by a bad control scheme. A few examples:

System Shock (1994): To be fair, the WASD / mouselook paradigm was still in its infancy when this game was released, but System Shock's control scheme is still one of the clunkiest, most unintuitive things I've ever seen. It's a damn shame, because the rest of the game is fantastic.

Believe it or not, I actually like System Shock/Ultima Underworld mouse and keyboard scheme. Sure, it's not as fluid as typical FPS mouselook, but it didn't take long to get used to it.

I agree that Ultima Underworld is not all that hard to pickup, but sadly I was one of those that never got comfortable with System Shock, nor very far into it as a result. I have a mouselook/WASD mod that I need to try out...

maximus wrote:

Perhaps some of you who claim to like System Shock's controls could share your technique? I enjoy the game and would like to learn to play it better. It is entirely possible that I have been doing it wrong.

I know the game has strafe keys, but I could never figure out a natural way to use them. As far as I can tell, there is no way to remap keys or enable mouselook without installing third party mods.

Right. But something people often forget, System Shock is NOT an FPS! :O

At least, not the way we think of FPS games. It's more of a First-Person Adventure, even more-so than the Metroid Prime games which commonly used the term.

VERY rarely do you need to sidestep and shoot at the same time because if you're doing that then you're playing the game wrong. Stealth is first and foremost to survive, so you need to go slow. Approach a corner and carefully lean past it using the Q/E buttons. If you see something, shoot it while it can't see you. If you go past a corner and something attacks, strafe back behind the corner with Z/C. R/F/V and T/G/B also control both looking and crouching, though I forget which is which at the moment.

It takes a bit of practice and even once you have it down-pat you may still press the wrong buttons at times, but so long as you're playing the game with stealth as an important factor instead of rushing head-first into combat like you would in Doom or Quake, you should be fine. :B

Gemini000 wrote:

Right. But something people often forget, System Shock is NOT an FPS! :O […]
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maximus wrote:

Perhaps some of you who claim to like System Shock's controls could share your technique? I enjoy the game and would like to learn to play it better. It is entirely possible that I have been doing it wrong.

I know the game has strafe keys, but I could never figure out a natural way to use them. As far as I can tell, there is no way to remap keys or enable mouselook without installing third party mods.

Right. But something people often forget, System Shock is NOT an FPS! 😳

At least, not the way we think of FPS games. It's more of a First-Person Adventure, even more-so than the Metroid Prime games which commonly used the term.

VERY rarely do you need to sidestep and shoot at the same time because if you're doing that then you're playing the game wrong. Stealth is first and foremost to survive, so you need to go slow. Approach a corner and carefully lean past it using the Q/E buttons. If you see something, shoot it while it can't see you. If you go past a corner and something attacks, strafe back behind the corner with Z/C. R/F/V and T/G/B also control both looking and crouching, though I forget which is which at the moment.

It takes a bit of practice and even once you have it down-pat you may still press the wrong buttons at times, but so long as you're playing the game with stealth as an important factor instead of rushing head-first into combat like you would in Doom or Quake, you should be fine. :B

I loved the way you aimed and fired within the screen. It just feels awesome.

Given how many poorly designed game interfaces there seem to be out there it's telling the way System Shock has come in for so much comment here. A game with such a fantastic look and feel - even by today's standards it's cool to fire it up and dream about playing - it seems to have left a trail of bittersweet admirers in it's wake. It comes to mind so easily since it *IS* so compelling. But regardless of the merits and rightful justification the UI may have, too many people have had to forgo the experience because of it. A real shame since even people who can't finish the game don't hate it at all - they love it - in a bittersweet way.

Might get some hate from people but I could never get into the controls for Die By The Sword, both the VSIM and arcade controls never worked well for me. It controlled well enough, sure, but it just felt a bit clunky at times, too much for my liking anyways. Shame since I generally liked the atmosphere and the vocal protagonist, especially with the Cuss Pack.

tincup wrote:

Given how many poorly designed game interfaces there seem to be out there it's telling the way System Shock has come in for so much comment here. A game with such a fantastic look and feel - even by today's standards it's cool to fire it up and dream about playing - it seems to have left a trail of bittersweet admirers in it's wake. It comes to mind so easily since it *IS* so compelling. But regardless of the merits and rightful justification the UI may have, too many people have had to forgo the experience because of it. A real shame since even people who can't finish the game don't hate it at all - they love it - in a bittersweet way.

I love the game, but I've never made meaningful progress in it. That really is due to the controls. System Shock 2 I've played through a half-dozen times, because the controls fall much more easily to hand (and the graphics don't give me a headache).

I'm going to throw in a vote for every 3DS game with Gyro-controls. Holy hell. It makes games impossible. Star Fox 64 3D is very hard to play when you're yawing around like a drunken pelican. In Ocarina of Time 3D it causes your aim controls to wobble a tiny bit and never stay still, so slingshot and archery marksmanship is made impossible.

And of course you can't maintain the delicate 3D effect while waving your system around your head.

maximus wrote:

There are few things more frustrating than a good game dragged down by a bad control scheme. A few examples:

System Shock (1994): To be fair, the WASD / mouselook paradigm was still in its infancy when this game was released, but System Shock's control scheme is still one of the clunkiest, most unintuitive things I've ever seen. It's a damn shame, because the rest of the game is fantastic.

You can play System Shock using the standard WASD keys and mouse control (or redefine the keys) using either the keyboard and mouse hack for the DOS version, or a Windows (sort of) game engine fix:

https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=1719.0

https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=2123.0

Or you can use the brilliant System Shock Portable. To quote from SSP's web page:

This is version 1.2 of SYSTEMSHOCK-Portable (SSP), based on the CD enhanced version originally released by Looking Glass Technologies (later known as Looking Glass Studios) in 1994. It unpacks to 117MB and can be played from an USB-key or from your local HD. SSP includes the complete original English game of System Shock. German and French addons are available separately.

SSP contains several features not found in the original game: higher resolutions, mouselook, custom key binds, true2audio log texts... But more importantly there's a chance that it will run on your computer without too much hassle.

SSP runs on Windows XP/Vista/7/8 via the included DOSbox emulation. On XP it can also run outside DOSbox emulation via NTVDM.
You might also want to take a look at SHLINK the new System Shock loader that allows the game to run outside any emulation on modern Windows OS. Note that SHLINK is still work in progress.

SSP really is fantastic, solving almost every problem you could have with the game. But since it contains the game System Shock then it's not legal to download if you don't own the game, so I won't post the link (It would be against VOGON's TOS). But if you own the game then google for System Shock Portable, it's not hard to find.

Descent (1994): The closest I've ever come to making this game really playable is by playing in DOSBox and cranking the mouse sensitivity all the way up, both in the game and in DOSBox. Mouse control is impossibly sluggish in real DOS, and even joystick control is clunky. Thankfully, this huge problem was completely fixed in Descent 3.

Descent 1 and 2 were unofficially ported to the original XBox (when the source code was released by the company who own Descent 1 and 2's copyright - I wish more software houses were so altruistic)and from what I remember, the controls worked very well on the XBox's two analogue stick joypad, though I might be misremembering how well the game controlled.

Regarding games I don't like the controls for, I can't recall any offhand. I was not a PC gamer in the DOS years, and since then controls for first person shooters (my favourite genre) have tended to become standardised and also definable, fortunately. Oh, I have seen a couple of amateur made first person shooters (made by a FPS maker, I think), which suffered from the problem (to me) that you couldn't invert the Y axis. This is a problem, but it's not major, as you can soon adjust to either method of control.

Since Descent appeared on the list, I have to say, I don't see it as uncontrollable either. I used to play it on two sticks under each thumb with a modern gamepad and now I switched to SpaceOrb 360 for the sake of "The way it's meant to be played". It took some time to adjust, but I like the controls very much.

Btw, I find Descent 3 controls worse than Descent. There is an option, ON by default, which automatically turns your ship to the closest 90° angle. I struggled a lot with the controls before I found it.

RacoonRider wrote:

Btw, I find Descent 3 controls worse than Descent. There is an option, ON by default, which automatically turns your ship to the closest 90° angle. I struggled a lot with the controls before I found it.

You must have a different version of Descent 3... 😕

My preferred control setup is ESDF for sliding left, right, forwards, and backwards, Space and A for sliding up and down, W and R for rolling left and right, and mouse for aiming. Works like a charm.

I think there's a setting to use the mouse in mouselook or flightsim style, but I've never seen the game snap to 90° angles. Perhaps you're thinking of auto-leveling?

DonutKing wrote:

I think System Shock gets an undeserved bad rap in this regard.
Once you get used to it, the control scheme is very flexible/powerful.
I played through it years ago and never once felt that I was fighting with the controls.

This.

System Shock WASD/mouse combo may not as fluid as that of typical first-person shooter, but it's more versatile and powerful. After all, combat in System Shock is generally slower and more calculated than the fast action of a typical FPS. Comparing System Shock's control scheme and a typical first-person control scheme is like comparing combat system in Fallout and that of Diablo.

Anyway, hasn't anyone mentioned SCARAB yet? The control is awkward with either joystick and mouse, and while keyboard is more precise, it's also less fluid. I really hate an FPS game where pushing the joystick forward means moving forward. If anyone could mod the game to use WASD control scheme - with either joystick or mouse - I would be very thankful.

But the worst part of SCARAB is "Dead Eye Aiming" feature. That is, when you press the 2nd button of your stick to move the target reticle instead of moving the mecha around. Theoritically, it should provide more precise aim, but when the target reticle reaches the edge of the screen, the screen just "jumps" to the aiming direction instead of moving smoothly with the reticle, which defeats the purpose of precise aiming.

"Head Bob". While not an actual part of the interface it sure is nausea inducing if you can't disable it. Totally unrealistic too since your eyes compensate for body movement when you walk or run. The eye should stay reasonably steady, and the effects of bouncing around or vibration should be conveyed by moving the image frame - not the image. or if you're in a vehicle, the vehicle should bounce but the view of your surroundings should stay reasonable steady..

tincup wrote:

"Head Bob". While not an actual part of the interface it sure is nausea inducing if you can't disable it. Totally unrealistic too since your eyes compensate for body movement when you walk or run. The eye should stay reasonably steady, and the effects of bouncing around or vibration should be conveyed by moving the image frame - not the image. or if your in a vehicle, the vehicle should bounce but the view of your surroundings should stay reasonable steady..

Couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, head bobbing seems to be standard feature in highly realistic flight sims like IL-2 Sturmovik. 😵