Controls: The Current Achilles Heel of Console Gaming - Page 2

Let Me Decide What This Button Does
Further, the inability to remap controls within the available control schemes is simply idiotic. Between Rainbow Six Vegas 1 and 2, Ubisoft decided to swap the buttons for throwing grenades and switching on thermal/night vision. Why? I have no friggin idea, but it's led to plenty of times when my teammates have accidentally suicided by dropping a frag at their feet when all they really wanted was to see better in the dark. Does the PC version have this limitation? Nope, you can reconfigure all the controls to suit any preference. Omitting that option from the console version was utter laziness and a failure on the part of the developer.

Another example of this goes back to World at War. On the PC, you can remap all the controls any way you want. As such, I have the buttons for reloading and interacting with the environment mapped to different keys. I understand that the fixed number of buttons on the controller poses certain limitations here — though if they had keyboard support for the PS3 version of the game, this would all be moot — but the L2 button (normally used for throwing secondary grenades) would be ideal for repairing barriers in the popular Nazi Zombies mode since it doesn't use that button anyway. As it is, I have to hold down the square button to do this, meaning I have to reach across the controller and aim/shoot/defend myself with one hand while repairing the barrier with the other. It's unintuitive and clumsy, and the lack of player choice in control configuration is an asinine design decision. If people don't want to modify setups, they don't have to, but it's a much bigger pain in the ass for people who want the option and don't have it.

Yet another case comes in comparing Burnout Paradise to Midnight Club: Los Angeles. Both are remarkable games in their own particular ways, but guess which one I actually still play anymore? MC:LA. Why? They let you remap every goddamn control in the game to suit your liking, including seemingly frivolous options like putting the top down on your convertible (it's similar Test Drive Unlimited's option for a button to put your windows down). Burnout Paradise held my interest long enough to rack up about 53% of the trophies (i.e., about four days), but short of the pending cops and robbers expansion content, it's not worth the claw-hand-inducing cramps from having to hold down R2 and L2 for gas and brake, respectively.

Article Author: Mark Buckingham

Mark Buckingham is not only BC's Sci/Tech Editor-In-Geek, but also an avid freelance writer, gamer, techhead, reader, movie watcher, pianist, and hockey player.

Visit Mark Buckingham's author page — Mark Buckingham's Blog