When I play PC games, I can’t stand it if the mouse isn’t inverted. I don’t know why, but that’s how it is. I guess all the years of flight simming or something. However - when I play on a console, up = up and right = right to me.
I picked up Shadow of the Colossus last week, and played it like an hour before I put it down because I was disgusted with the SOB of a camera. When you’ve got something as big as the Chrysler building walking around and you’re 50 feet from it and you just cannot find the bastard because the camera controls suck that bad… inexcusable. I run left, the camera auto-spins to the right. WTF is that? So I have to use the camera controls just to keep the camera pointed so I can see where the hell I’m going? Yeah, I know I can hold the button to lock onto the monster BUT it tilts way up and then I can’t see what my character is doing or what’s going on with the big guy’s feet - which is really important when he’s trying to plant a size 200 wide reebok on your head.
I’d say though that the camera in Ninja Gaiden was the worst goddamn thing ever. There was NO camera adjust at all unless you dropped to first-person “I’m frozen and can just gawk around” view. I nearly crushed my controller into dust between my hands in rage playing that thing. As I understand in “black” they added the camera control that was so dit-de-dee absent in the original release. Hell, I’d have even bought the “patch” version except the difficulty is way cranked up - and the game was already beating my ass beyond my ability to play it.
Now, I’ve noticed that in a great variety of games, the ability to freely reassign your controls is absent. Ok, they give you “config A” and “config B” and you just have to live with that. Bastards, it would take FIVE FUCKING MINUTES to code a screen that lets you remap everything. MAME does it for god sakes. SNES9X. Get with the program.
I’d say though that the camera in Ninja Gaiden was the worst goddamn thing ever. There was NO camera adjust at all unless you dropped to first-person
Aszurom, me and my friend got through Ninja Gaiden thanks to the one camera control option that they DO have, which is essential to use if you want to keep your sanity: I believe it was one of the triggers, either left or right trigger centers the camera behind your character. Believe me, without that there’s no way we would have gotten through the game, it’s a HUGE lifesaver.
Charles and anyone else who’s also having trouble with the FF XII camera like I am: The camera reset is an awesome way to bypass having to control the camera in FF XII. I usually always turn the camera the wrong way at first and get all turned around with my character stuck in some corner, but I just click the right thumbstick, and presto, the camera is behind the character.
In fact, I’m trying to avoid using the right thumbstick for looking whenever I can. I just turn in the direction I want to look, then click the right thumbstick to center the view that way. It works well.
In a similar vein, try switching between playing a FF and a Xenosaga game, where one uses X to confirm and Square to cancel while the other series insists on doing it the other way around. It’s maddening.
edit: I should add, with no way of customizing the controls.
Haven’t played FFXII but I had a similar experience from Okami, which lets you invert both X and Y for camera movement. Okami being such a faithful Zelda template game, I had X and Y set so that it felt exactly like Wind Waker. It worked fine, except that you can hit L2 to go into first person “gaze out at the world” mode, at which point my bindings were exactly the opposite of what I wanted them to be (traditional console FPS freelook). So close, yet so far. Fortunately the FP mode in Okami isn’t very important at all.
Is it possible that the relative obscurity of the FPS genre in Japan contributes to this inflexibility? Western gamers have been dealing with the issue of axis view controls since Doom, and it’s definitely one of those things where there’s not a “right way”, just the way you individually are comfortable with.
What I’m suggesting is, maybe in the Japanese market there’s an assumed convention within which nobody sees the need for configurability.
I am hoping the Wii will make a lot of these issues moot… you point up to look/aim up, simple as that.
That’s what I’m hoping too, and that this setting is a console setting, not a
per-game setting. With a wiimote (or whatever it’s called), it’s not a question
of whether the game considers the controller a flight stick or a pair of eyes.
Movement simply follows the direction you move the 'mote.
I started playing Okami today, and I’m so happy they included the double
inversion. 18 minutes of cut-scenes before I ever took control, though :P
So, unless I’m missing something, Gears of War has no options for inversion of X-Axis. It was giving me fits at the beginning because, after 20 or so hours of FFXII, I was actually used to inverted camera control and wanted to keep it on for Gears, but that didn’t seem to be an option. Now that I’m used to “normal” controls for Gears, I feel like I can’t go back to FFXII until I beat it since I know I’ll just be confused every time I switch between the two.
You wouldn’t want to switch your controls in gears of war anyway. Since it directly controls your character as well, if you trained your brain to turn a character left while pressing right, you’d fuck your brain so bad I wouldn’t be surprised if you just fell over all the time while trying to walk around.
Guess I’d have to jump back in to FFXII to verify, but the basic controls don’t feel that much different on the right stick since I think FFXII also moves your character in whatever direction you point the camera.
So I just got Bully, and after conditioning myself to FFXII’s camera 70 hours through, Rockstar comes along and reorients EVERYTHING! Left-right, up-down; it’s all ass-backwards to me now and I’m ready to scream. How could Rockstar not include invert options??
Going back and forth between Bully and FFXII is going to break my brain.
Then just stick with Bully. That’s not to say that FFXII is a bad game or anything. I’m actually enjoying it enough to keep playing it, which I’ve not been able to do with a Final Fantasy game since the NES days. However, given the choice between Bully or FFXII, I’d choose Bully any day of the week. It’s just a great game that really focuses on what I look for most in games, and that’s atmosphere. Bully nails that with a seemingly effortless ease, which translates to lots of hard work to get it there.
As for my position on the camera controls, I have to agree with Charles. All he’s asking for is a simple option, and the lack of its inclusion in this day and age is not so much an oversight as it is the developer saying %&$ you to any players who like the camera the other way. Since there really is no technical or financial reason to not include the option, can there be any other explanation?
I’m having the exact opposite problem with “Gears of War”. I’m totally used to the Japanese way of doing things, and GOW doesn’t let you invert the X-axis.
Got to say I agree with Charles in the inverted control scheme. It’s so simple to have a switch that it’s criminal not to put it in. Sneak King for instance, is unplayable for me because I can’t change the camera. Luckily it only cost me $5.
I agree with the OP: control configuration should be 100% in the hands of the player. Its design ABC for me, and can make the difference between minor frustration for some players, and terminal frustration for others(leading to them to not playing your game…and worse publicly slamming it).
Not giving the player that power is lazy at best, game breaking at worst.
While I agree that the option should always be there, I can’t imagine flipping the X on Gears. You’re turning the character, not moving a hypothetical camera. I guess it’s an odd mental abstraction that just works differently in different people. If the character in Gears didn’t turn with my X adjustments, I’d want it flipped, because it would feel like controlling a floating camera object, but since he does turn, it feels like controlling him, and thus standard X controls feel correct.
It’s this aspect that I imagine causes the X inversion option to be left out of games like GoW and FFXII. I don’t know if it’s a “fuck you player” thing so much as the devs never imagined anyone would want to change it.
