I, for one, prefer the quiet dignity of controlling Leon Kennedy like a runaway semi with a gun.

The one true joystick:

Y’all laugh but I spent a lot of years not gaming such that this is very recent. I grew up playing pong and Atari, then grew away. When I had kids, the Wii was perfect. Then my kids became teens and it wasn’t enough. Suddenly everything was Xbox, then pc gaming.

Suddenly if I wanted to interact with them I had to figure out this alien contraption with too many buttons and joysticks. After about five years (playing every 2-4 weeks because who has time), I’m ok technically. But there’s no way I can do fighting or any twitch moves, and I still sometimes blank on which button does what - it’s not engrained enough to just do it and I’ll never play frequently enough for that to become true

And Microsoft’s terminology doesn’t help - wtf do “bumper” and “trigger” mean? I still remember those buttons as “opposite of bottom”and “opposite of top”

I'm looking forward to using emulators to force older games into something like modern dual analog. Megaman Legends works pretty okay like that so far. Armored Core works pretty amazingly for it as well.

I need to try it with Fur Fighters, which I always felt had a lot of potential as a platforming third person shooter. But it only has one built in dual analog control scheme that works backwards - right stick is movement, and left stick is aiming. Now I can switch it!

Yup, one of my first experiences with this was during a splitscreen multiplayer match of TimeSplitters 2 with a friend who was already clearly well-practiced and highly competitive. Sink or swim they say.

A few years back I was at a bar and they had golden eye on an N 64. Man the controls were hot garbage.

I wonder if that was actually just an attempt to sell more copies by describing the clearly better control scheme as scary as a challenge to anyone who thought it sounded ok. Like I don't think it took me long to understand that the Halo control scheme was a game changer compared to the ones that preceded it (other than mouse and keyboard).

As someone who didn't have dualshock controllers back when I had the PS1, FPS games always felt awful. Most of the games had like L2/R2 for aiming up/down and L1/R1 for strafing, pretty sure Quake 2 was like that. I recall Medal of Honor had you hold R2 to fine aim with the d-pad

Ape Escape was peak dual stick gameplay.

Left stick to move. Right stick for gadgets.

My best friend still uses “Legacy” (goldeneye) controls and gets mad when games don’t have that option. He has even emailed developers about it. Half of them have no idea what he is talking about because they are not old enough to remember the before time.

We roast him for his special controls but he is better than all of us so I guess, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I grew up on n64 and I don't recall having any issue with jumping to dual joy sticks. Like it was so natural... I probably had a week of adjustment that I just don't remember.

For me, the cherry on top of this little piece of embarrassing history is something that only a handful of people remember: The PS1 had an official mouse controller, and this was one of the few games that supported it.

I bought the mouse when it came out, and I got a copy of this game about 10 years ago, and I've gotta say it works very well. It was also how I played the single-player campaign of Quake 2 back in the day.

Over time I completely lost the ability to play a shooter with the controller. I just can't hit anything after close to a decade of playing with just mouse and keyboard. 15 years ago it was the other way round for me.