This one?
Cat!
I’ve heard that before, so no, but it’s not at all how I came to use the controls I use, and I have very large doubts that before they choose/habituate to a control scheme anybody sits down and draws a schematic of a head and line and rationally chooses which way they conceptualize it. I inverted sticks because I played Wing Commander and control sticks meant back=up and forward=down, and I didn’t invert mice because when I moved the mouse up the pointer went up and when I moved the mouse down the pointer went down, and thus each felt natural to me in their own context.
This kinda feels like the thread for it; do I have any sisters or brothers here that play using arrow keys instead of the grotesque key soup that is WASD?
Are you left handed?
I’m right handed, so it’s more natural for my right hand to be on the mouse. And then the left hand’s natural position has always been near Tab and Shift and WASD, if I try to use the arrow keys with my left hand, it means bring it really close to the mouse and unnatural. I used A and Z for forward and back, and even changed arrows to that left part of the keyboard even before games started having WASD.
I never noticed that, that is quite clever.
There’s a bunch of games that do that. The first Halo game has you ‘calibrate’ your controls upon waking out of cold sleep and asks you to confirm that you’re good with normal or would prefer to swap inverted - that’s the first one I remember doing it that way, at least.
Claw grip is horrible but understandable. I think the last game was… AC Odyssey, i think? Where in order to switch arrows i have to use the d-pad but i’m also using the left stick at the same time to move or aim or whatever, so basically in practice i can’t actually switch arrows in combat and have to run and hide somewhere just to be able to press the right buttons and not die.
Maybe the worse inverted control schemes are when they’re split between air and land and the game has both air and land vehicles at the same time. That muscle memory you develop for one throws you into the dirt when flying the other vehicle a few minutes later.
Heh…
I am not sure understanding is the right word though. If you have to lose understanding to get understanding then… what are you really getting?
What I like about the way that Portal does it is that in never mentions “normal” or “inverted” controls; it just asks you to look up. If you push up to look up, then it sets Normal. If you push down to look up, then it sets Inverted. You just do what feels natural and the game responds to that; you never even have to know that there’s an option.
How did you even figure out this feature?
I ask because I played the game on PC and then Xbox 360. On PC, the first thing I did on loading The Orange Box was to change the controls to inverted. And the Xbox 360 has a system level setting, so I’ve never had to set any game to inverted because it’s all done automatically for EVERY game.
So for someone to figure out that Valve did this, either Valve themselves talked about it, or someone who plays inverted for some reason didn’t go into options to invert controls when they first launched The Orange Box.
Actually, I think it was Portal 2 and not Portal. We figured it out because I play inverted and my son plays normal, and neither of us ever set the option.
Sometimes it scares me to think that if I’m ever on an airplane and the pilot is incapacitated due to food poisoning or something, there are a lot of videogames who will get everyone totally killed if they’re asked to fly the plane.
-Tom
Am I flying? Inverted
Am I not flying? Non-inverted
If I ever made a FPS or something, I would purposefully remove the inverted option. Adapt or die suckers. I say this as someone who has successfully switched between using Inverted and non-inverted several times. I’ve landed more towards non-inverted because it is the default in most games.
This explanation has never made much sense to me. If I want to look down, I lean forward. If I want to look up, I lean back. Moving a mouse up and down does very little, so naturally I play the correct way and move the mouse forwards to look down and backwards to look up.
I do suspect that people who don’t invert the camera are moving the crosshair, so moving the mouse forwards is up for them. People who invert the controls are moving the view. But I don’t know if this is true, or simply my inverted bias.
I probably learned inverted controls from playing first person games on a joystick in the 1980ies, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was some more general mental wiring that would be commonly associated with inverted/non-inverted fps controls.
I have a theory that it depends on how one tends to hold a controller. If you hold the controller up facing you, you might favor normal controls since pulling back is pulling down. If you hold the controller down on your lap, you might favor inverted since pushing forward is pushing down. Probably not a one to one correlation, but I do find it helpful to bring the controller up to my chest when I have to play a game without an option to invert.
Exactly. I don’t understand all the fuss – it’s so simple!
I think it’s more important for a passenger to be fluent in jive than it is to know how to fly a plane.