Most broken controls out of the gate?

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

I had a sudden flashback to my Microsoft Flight Simulator/Combat Flight Simulator days and how I wasn't at all amused by the fact that I had to spend an extra $50 on an USB controller because the games were absolutely unplayable if handled with either the keyboard or mouse (both technically supported from day one).

I don't even know how to explain it, but trying to steer your plane with the keyboard felt like arm-wrestling the computer itself for commanding of the aircraft -- it literally felt like a hijacking simulator more than a flying one, since they made you feel like an outside force trying to control the yoke. It was just really strange, man.

Surprisingly, it was actually doable with the mouse itself... if you had enough physical space on your desk to perform the wide, violent maneuvers required to keep a level flight.

Once you plugged in a regular joystick, though? It just felt like a damn game you could zigzag, dive and barrel-roll around.

I don't know what happened there, but I will always remember those awful controls first whenever I recall my time playing games I actually love.

What about you? Got any examples of this sort of thing?

 

[Tonberry]

The PC port of Dark Souls had such awful KB+M controls that it almost single-handedly caused a paradigm shift where it suddenly wasn't a weird thing to play PC games with a controller anymore.
Literally everyone I knew who were a PC gamer got a controller for that game.

Also this little nugget lol:

 

[Eclipse14]

No game has more broken controls than SQIJ on the ZX Spectrum.

Case in point? Under normal circumstances, it is literally unplayable. The game registers inputs in lowercase, but the code forces the system to be in CAPS at all times. Therefore, it fails to register any input at all and you're just stuck there.
The only way to actually play the game is to hack into the Spectrum's memory, and run a POKE command that turns the Caps Lock off. If one is smart enough to manage all of that...hooooly dingus, does it remain atrocious to control. This video pretty much sums the entire game up.

 

[Clippy]

I had a sudden flashback to my Microsoft Flight Simulator/Combat Flight Simulator days and how I wasn't at all amused by the fact that I had to spend an extra $50 on an USB controller because the games were absolutely unplayable if handled with either the keyboard or mouse (both technically supported from day one).

I don't even know how to explain it, but trying to steer your plane with the keyboard felt like arm-wrestling the computer itself for commanding of the aircraft -- it literally felt like a hijacking simulator more than a flying one, since they made you feel like an outside force trying to control the yoke. It was just really strange, man.

Surprisingly, it was actually doable with the mouse itself... if you had enough physical space on your desk to perform the wide, violent maneuvers required to keep a level flight.

Once you plugged in a regular joystick, though? It just felt like a damn game you could zigzag, dive and barrel-roll around.

I don't know what happened there, but I will always remember those awful controls first whenever I recall my time playing games I actually love.

What about you? Got any examples of this sort of thing?

If I were to wager a guess I'd say that keyboard being digital happened. With joysticks or mice you have a certain degree of control over how hard your inputs go. Tilt the stick just a little bit and your character will walk slowly, tilt it as hard as you can and your character will sprint like their life depends on it.

Can't do that on a keyboard. A button is either pressed or not pressed so the game probably thought that you were yanking on that yoke as hard as you possibly could whenever you pressed any button and acted accordingly.

 

[moonbits]

Also this little nugget lol:
View attachment 136796

PC gamers really need to be reminded that not everything is meant to play on a typing board.

Console to PC ports back in the mid 2000s were almost guaranteed broken in some way or another. RE4 and DMC3 ports by Ubisoft are a standout.

 

[Zerpina]

I have two candidates...

1. The CD-i

And I have physically owned both of these systems. The Philips CD-i doesn't matter if you had the wireless controller, the wired one, or which variant, and I had three of them.
They all sucked ass... stiff, unresponsive controls, a clunky and awful interface, and if you were cursed to have the remote control type controller, I feel for you. The games were basically Java games with a marked up price tag, and well, they weren't good. It was like a less awesome Sega CD.

2. The Atari Jaguar
Some of the games like Kabuki Ninja, are kind of neat. That's about it....
The thing was an overhyped 16-bit console. Yes, I know it was 64 bits, but most of the games would have looked right at home on a Sega Genesis or SNES honestly.

And I have no idea why they put a push-button phone pad on the controller....
The buttons were hard to hit, even if you needed to, which a lot of games, save for things like Alien vs. Predator, used. I probably had 10 games, and I think that was the only one that used the keypad...
The thing had a freaking # and * on it! You can't tell me they were thinking of some way to make use of that for a subscription fee with some add on later to dial into something.

Anyway... it was an awful, broken mess of a controller. And again 90% of the games hardly used 2 of the 3 face buttons. Atari... at its peak here, folks.

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 5:58 PM

*Edit.
The CD-i was in fact a Badass CD player, i will give it that

 

[Clippy]

The funniest example I can think of is Terminator 2 for Commodore 64GS. The GS is a fairly little known Commodore's attempt to enter the console market; it's basically a C64 without a keyboard. Since that's the case Commodore thought that simply repackaging an existing C64 game as the pack-in title would be a free license to print money.

It was a sound idea. The problem was that Terminator 2 would get to the title screen and ask the player to press enter to start playing. On a 'console' that doesn't have a keyboard. Genius.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

If I were to wager a guess I'd say that keyboard being digital happened. With joysticks or mice you have a certain degree of control over how hard your inputs go. Tilt the stick just a little bit and your character will walk slowly, tilt it as hard as you can and your character will sprint like their life depends on it.

Can't do that on a keyboard. A button is either pressed or not pressed so the game probably thought that you were yanking on that yoke as hard as you possibly could whenever you pressed any button and acted accordingly.

I have never thought about it that way, but it makes a lot of sense.

Makes you wonder why they would program it that way when the game was downright unplayable if used with that set-up, though.

 

[sijaab]

alone in the dark (2008) on the wii

its a bad wii port of a decent game (almost everything is done with some of the worst motion controls on the platform)

 

[Stingy Perry Stingy Perry]

This may not be out of the gate but we can all agree that any great console will turn into a dumpster fire if you use a MadKatz controllers.

 

[Tonberry]

alone in the dark (2008) on the wii

its a bad wii port of a decent game (almost everything is done with some of the worst motion controls on the platform)
View attachment 136873

Ah man I remember this. Driving the car or whatever was an absolute nightmare.