[The Game Doctor has been a legend in the electronic gaming industry since he debuted in the world's first video/computer game publication, "Electronic Games" in 1981. He has answered software-related questions in more than a dozen magazines and gaming sites. As a long-time fan of POSTAL, he has made periodic pilgrimages to the gopostal.com site and now returns to answer questions for The Urinal. Doctor, your patients await… The Gimp]

Control Freaks (Part One)

Welcome back for another session of Q&A with the Dok-tah. This time out I'm going to respond to a question I'm asked quite frequently. It's such an important issue, in fact, that I'm breaking it into two parts.

Hopefully you'll see why when we get to the end of this column.

Q: Doc, you're as Old School as they come, so give it to us straight: what do you see as the positives and negatives of today's videogame controllers as opposed to the classic Atari VCS joystick?

( Jim Yates , Blue Diamond, NV)

A: Damned good question! I think most gamers vastly under-rate the importance of controllers in the ongoing evolution of electronic gaming. Even before the joystick, remember, we had the ball-and-paddle controllers. I know it sounds like an S&M toy, but they were essentially volume controllers. Turn up the volume and the paddle moved in one direction; turn it down and it went the other way.

Needless to say, this style of controller greatly limited the type of games that could be played on the hard-wired 70s console systems. Oh sure, you could play certain types of driving games, like the classic Night Driver, but it was mostly balls and paddles – even if the paddle looked like a tank.

It's a 50% chance that this is "the broken one"

The classic Atari VCS joystick was such an ideal control device that even Commodore adopted it for its C64. The Atari VCS-format stick was designed to be held in the left hand (whose thumb controlled the sole action button on the upper left of the base) by right-handed players with their dominant hand controlling the directional joystick. Lefties could simply hold the controller base in their right hands and handle the stick with their left. To this end, many of the VCS-format controllers installed redundant action buttons on the upper right corner of the base.

The games of this era were mostly about direction, about gaining sufficient expertise with the joystick that you could deftly move objects around the screen (see Missile Command, Adventure, Defender, etc.). This was also the era of the tracball (which, when you think about it, is an upside down mouse), which was even MORE about directional control.

The next innovation in the world of controllers came from Japan when Nintendo and Sega gave us the joypad. The joypad simplified the directional movement thing by basically limiting players to north, south, east and west movement. To make up for this simplification, we got extra action buttons, which now became the focus of the games (timing jumps and so on) and were therefore assigned to the right hand while (for most of us) the non-dominant left hand handled any on-screen movement.

Option anxiety for simple-minded 1980's kids

This controller type led to the dominance of platform and 2D fighting games. And unlike the previous generation's platform contests (see Pitfall, Lode Runner, Jumpman, etc.), when you got into trouble with a joypad game, movement was not usually the solution. More often, you activated one of those those command buttons to either fire a weapon or, more commonly, jump either on or over your adversary (see a thousand or so Mario games).

I bet Micheal Jackson still uses his...

Most people didn't think about it, but what a transition had been made in a single generation! And as the joypad evolved, it would eventually add an analog joystick (the N64 being the first system to do this) to the process, thereby expanding the range of games that could be comfortably played on a single controller.

Nintendo CarpalTunnel64

But what next? Once the Nintendo64 not only joined the joystick, the joypad and a whole carnival of action buttons (even going so far as to give us an ultra-cool trigger-style button inside the pistol grip), what possible improvements remained with which hardware designers might astonish us?

Ah, but that's the subject of Part 2, as we examine the XBox, PS2 and Game Cube controllers as well as the next generation (the DS, Wii, PS3 and XBox 360) of game interfaces.

Stay healthy, folks, because I can't cure people.

*

And that's a wrap. Next issue Gimp and I hope to be able to provide LOTS more information on P3. In the meantime, you can find answers to the most Frequently Asked Questions, check out the official GoPostal.com site. But send any new questions regarding RWS, the POSTAL franchise and anything else that occurs to you to: GameDoctorKunkel@gopostal.com.