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| Worst gaming blog post ever; So bad it deserves its own thread instead of a wall banger thread post | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Monday Jan 23 2012, 09:11 PM (169 Views) | |
| NamelessFragger | Monday Jan 23 2012, 09:11 PM Post #1 |
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Kotaku: Why The Apple Trackpad Might Be The Best Video Game Controller Ever Made The headline is already facepalm-worthy. Trackpads in general suck, and I hate using them on laptops most of the time just for general navigation, let alone gaming. But it gets worse, so much worse, once you actually start reading.
Hey, that's exactly how I feel about trackpads! Maybe not ugly, but clunky as fuck. The last thing I want in a gaming peripheral or any input device at all is clunkiness. Hell, I'm pretty sure that even the Mac gamers out there wouldn't even dare to game on a damn trackpad.
No, that honor belongs to the very last generation of PowerBook and iBook G4s. Not that most of the current Apple fanbase would even notice, since they only started to give a shit after the Intel switch, or after the iPhone's release. That said, two-finger scroll, at least the smooth way Apple did it, is the only good thing I have to say about trackpads in general.
That's because tap-to-click sucks ass. I've lost track of the times where it clicks whenever I accidentally brush my palms against the corners of a laptop trackpad-or, worse, I'm typing a long paragraph and that unintended tap-click highlights a good chunk of what I just typed to be immediately overwritten by my continued typing, forcing me to stop, undo the damage, and start typing again. That is a horrible user interface failure, and all too common with tap-to-click.
What the fuck kind of person makes that kind of simile? It's not a trackpad-related argument, I know, but something is deeply wrong with the writer's head.
One thing I've noticed about multi-touch gestures in general is that they're actions that can be easily done with a few extra mouse buttons. And between the second spent to swipe my fingers across a capacitive surface and the microsecond spent pushing a button, I'd take the button. Especially seeing as extra buttons on a mouse can easily be clicked while moving the mouse, which is absolutely critical for gaming. Imagine not being able to aim and shoot at the same time-that would suck. Except that's exactly what happens on trackpads without discrete physical buttons, as if the old ones didn't suck enough for gaming. The Apple ones may not be so bad, but the Synaptics ClickPads are similar and have found their way onto several HP notebooks at the very least...and you cannot left-click and right-click simultaneously. Given how many games require that exact combination, that is very bad.
First off, what game designers own MacBook Pros? I'm pretty sure most game designers I'd encounter in the industry are probably packing some Clevo/Sager/Malibal or Alienware or Asus monstrosity of a gaming notebook. Second off, do I really need to repeat the reasons I've already stated as to why trackpads suck for gaming?
This all sounds needlessly convoluted and mostly workarounds to shoehorn a game genre into an interface it wasn't meant for. I mean, Super Mario Bros. can be hard enough with the tried-and-true NES pad, especially the true SMB2/The Lost Levels. Now imagine playing I Wanna Be The Guy or Super Meat Boy or VVVVVV with this sort of interface...actually, no, don't. That would just make already-notoriously-difficult games downright impossible.
Only in your horribly deluded dreams with serial killers roaming around every place with a Wi-Fi hotspot. Constantly swiping all over the place with a trackpad is needlessly tedious and tiresome compared to working a D-Pad and buttons with my thumbs, not to mention more imprecise.
Pinches and rotations and spreads that can't be done simultaneously, that's for sure. It's quite telling that this guy can't even think of a suitable interface on the spot, and admits that it wouldn't be suitable for games that make maximum use of 3D space. You know, like Descent and its famous full 6-degrees-of-freedom movement. Does he really think a goddamn multi-touch trackpad can outdo an old Spacetec or 3Dconnexion controller, or a flight stick + keyboard like I use these days (stick for rotation, keyboard for translation/movement, some weapon switching, and other item usage)? The first two games are open-source, even, which should make it easier for him to implement this trackpad-only dream input scheme of his. Then I'll challenge him to some 1-on-1 deathmatch and see who wins.
Now this I can agree with to an extent, but finding a new control scheme that works even equivalently as well as the old one, let alone better, won't be easy. Even this guy can't really figure it out, realizing that he's basically working around limitations on an input device that isn't designed for gaming at all.
And this is why the computer mouse as we know it is still preferred. It's easy to click on exactly what we want with a twitch of the wrist, under a second. Using any other alternative sort of mouse feels more like clumsily pushing the mouse cursor around, taking extra time to get it exactly where we want it. Time in which people die.
Oh, but you still haven't talked about the more critical problem of CLICKING ON THE MONSTER THAT YOU NEED TO KILL BEFORE IT KILLS YOU. There's still a few more paragraphs of craptastic article to go, but I'd just be repeating many of the same points already, so why bother? This post is already TL;DR as is. Edited by NamelessFragger, Monday Jan 23 2012, 09:35 PM.
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| ronaldmonster | Monday Jan 23 2012, 09:16 PM Post #2 |
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I wish Kotaku would shoot this guy in the face. |
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| SuperDouxSanaCanThree | Monday Jan 23 2012, 09:16 PM Post #3 |
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de Geso
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Those words are gibberish when combined. Please define that. |
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| NamelessFragger | Monday Jan 23 2012, 09:25 PM Post #4 |
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Those guys who hang out at the Macintosh Garden? ...Or did, before the site went offline. Now I can't even prove their existence. |
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