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[Lottel]

With the camera comes a problem when leaving shops as you have to go completely straight a couple feet out the door. Pressing another direction too soon will either make you not move at all or reenter the door.
I'm pretty sure this is you are actually standing in the doorway with the camera making you look farther out and the door's hitbox is just so big but it  makes quickly going through shops a pain.

[Thad]

I think we're due for another round of me pointing out just how COMPLETELY FUCKING UNACCEPTABLE* it is that we are into the second decade of the twenty-first century and people are still releasing games where you can't remap your buttons.



* Ooh!  We need a Lemongrab emote.

[François]

All the PC games I played that expect a x360 controller swap at least the right stick axes for other controllers, even those that allow button remapping. This has been the case for a PS2 controller connected through an USB adaptor, and a Nuon+*, though both perform admirably in every other regard. I'm pretty sure whoever was responsible for xinput on the PC intentionally broke compatibility with other controllers. I'd normally assume it was oversight or negligence but this is Microsoft we're talking about.

*: That's the only USB pad with six face buttons I could find at the time so I took a chance on it despite the price and the whole "no-name Korean import off ebay" thing. Fortunately it turned out to be amazing. It feels like whoever designed it rather esteemed the Saturn controller; even the d-pad looks identical.

[Thad]

And it's worth noting that the reason I'm not just using a 360 pad is that the wireless receiver stopped working after one use (but I didn't notice until the warranty had expired).

Though as noted in that post, there are reports of these issues cropping up with authentic 360 controllers, and seriously you guys why can't I just remap my damn buttons?  How many dollars and man-hours did you spend getting the physics of Batman's cape just right, and you can't have somebody spend an hour or two on a frontend to edit the text file that you ALREADY HAVE for mapping the controls?

Even less, if you integrated it into that janky outside-the-game configuration program that you've already got for the keyboard and mouse.

[Thad]

Followup post:

I was in Target earlier this evening. The display 3DS had the new Mario and Luigi in it and I decided to give it a spin.

I got as far as the first screen, which displays a message that says "Use the circle pad to move Mario and Luigi."

FUCK YOU. I'm not going to play a game that starts out by immediately insulting my intelligence.

[Classic]

I think you're being a soft touch here. Isn't there also a D-pad on that machine? And the option to input on a touch screen? This isn't a completely trivial interface question anymore.

This is more akin to being annoyed at Super Mario Bros. telling you to "Press Start" than it is to Twilight Princess's  constant reminders about how much colored rupees are worth.

[Thad]

Isn't there also a D-pad on that machine?

So if you try and use the D-pad and it doesn't work, maybe try the other movement device.

(Does the D-pad do anything else besides move?  If not, why the fuck CAN'T you use it to move?  This brings us to another annoyance, Nintendo's bloody-minded insistence from the N64 era on to force analog controls even in cases where digital buttons would make just as much or more sense.  Lots and lots of games -- and RPG's in particular, which makes sense given their heavy use of menus -- use the left stick and pad interchangeably.)

And the option to input on a touch screen?

But your characters are on the top screen.

This is more akin to being annoyed at Super Mario Bros. telling you to "Press Start" than it is to Twilight Princess's  constant reminders about how much colored rupees are worth.

Well, first of all, if you were firing up Super Mario Bros. for the first time, it is entirely possible that it was actually the very first video game you had ever played.  The odds of this being someone's first video game are a hell of a lot lower.

And secondly, if a game feels the need to explain its absolute most basic and obvious controls, I am totally comfortable in assuming that it's not going to stop overexplaining there.

[Zaratustra]

The odds of this being someone's first video game

Target

display 3DS

 

[A²]

Yeah, you're being way too reactionary here. A mario game of any sorts in this day and age is something that has a high chance of being a kid's first video game. The launch of the 2DS, specifically aimed at young kids who would be damaged by the 3DS, is also here.

And as zara pointed out, it's a fucking display system, at a standard big store retailer.

[Classic]

Well, first of all, if you were firing up Super Mario Bros. for the first time, it is entirely possible that it was actually the very first video game you had ever played.  The odds of this being someone's first video game are a hell of a lot lower.

Do you remember how big of a deal the arcades/Atari/Coleco were (I am slightly too young to)? I'm not sure the numbers run as "hell of a lot lower" than you might think. Let's not forget that most gateway games today are employing point-and-click interfaces over stick controls. This could very well be the first game with that interface style that someone has ever played. Less likely, sure, than the phenomenon that was the Wii, but I don't see it as being any more of a gateway to games than the NES.

There's no point in speculating on data we're probably not going to find. The point of this whole argument was that you're letting your frustrations elsewhere let you be angry at a game for what a less sour Thad would probably call a generally benign decision.

[Bongo Bill]

I also hate it when kids' games indicate the most basic element of their controls.

[Bongo Bill]

As an advanced gamer, I say that if they don't already know to use the analog slider to control the character, then they should find a more casual game to start with, such as

[Brentai]

This insinuation isn't fair because the game in question is rather text and puzzle heavy and probably isn't the best choice for children who've never held a controller before.  Maybe children who've held one or two.

The real issue here is that we're demanding an unrealistic level of intelligence from adults.

[Bongo Bill]

Reading the indication of which of the device's several input methods was being demonstrated took up seconds of the valuable time that I was spending voluntarily looking at an informational advertisement!

[Bongo Bill]

For real though, if you're talking about a Mario game, the message in question is probably one of about a dozen in the entire game, and the question of "which button do I use" is one of the few remaining things that science has not discovered how to indicate in pantomime.

[Brentai]

I can't tell if that last statement is a final hanging droplet of your diarrhetic outburst of sarcasm or if you're insinuating that there's no way to teach players through subtle visual cues.  Please refer to Egoraptor's knob-gobbling video on Mega Man X's intro level for reference as to how these things used to be done quite successfully.

I wasn't being completely facetious when I said the problem is adults, though.  Games like MMX existed in a time when video games were, rightly or wrongly, still marketed primarily to children - children who can be reasonably expected to just try things until something produces the result they expect.  There's an unfortunate tendency for people, right around the age of 15-16 (when one first learns to operate a 3-ton speeding death machine), to adopt the idea that maybe they should stop fucking around with machines that they don't fully understand, no matter how innocuous they seem.  So while someone who either is of learning age or was of learning age when they first started playing video games either knows fucking well or can fucking well figure out that, yeah, the usual standards apply in this game too, the mothers and other grown-ups that Nintendo is reaching out to will usually stand there looking dumbstruck and go "What do I do I don't know what to do tell me what to do" without even trying anything.

The only solutions here are to close off the gaming medium like we've closed off so many others, have some sort of system-level or game-level setting which assesses your skill level (which will still be set to "moron" on any store display), or just accept that modern video games actually make fewer assumptions about your intelligence than before and stop taking it personally.

[Bongo Bill]

The Wii U has an extremely large number of inputs, and indeed a significant portion of the advertisement has focused on the touchscreen, which the game in question does not use. On-screen text or iconography indicating which one is the main one (the analog stick, not the D-pad or the touchscreen) is a different kind of problem than teaching the player the effects of their basic actions (which is still widely exhibited in Mario games regardless).

A relevant comparison might be to the Wario Ware game on Wii, in which the transition screen between each microgame included a diagram of how the remote is supposed to be held for that particular game.

[Thad]

This insinuation isn't fair because the game in question is rather text and puzzle heavy and probably isn't the best choice for children who've never held a controller before.

Right, this.

You guys are trying to sell me on the notion that a child born in twenty-first-century America is going to learn how to read the phrase "Use the circle pad to control Mario and Luigi" before he learns how to interact with video games.

Do any of you actually know any children?

[Bongo Bill]

Kids these days learn to play on touchscreens. Mario games still have pretty much the highest likelihood of being somebody's first exposure to games that use analog sticks, whether they're a kid or not.

More to the point, it's not like it locked you into an unskippable tutorial, right? The most basic possible indication of how to hold the controller isn't something that should compel you to defend your honor against a display cabinet.

[Royal☭]

I remember when I was a kid and my day care bought a bunch of NES consoles, which were my introductions to video games. We loaded up the game, then just sat there staring at Mario, who was unable to move because we, a bunch of damn ass kids playing a video game for the first time, couldn't figure out how to make him move without some onscreen text.