Assisted Living Godzilla
Prophet
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2017
- Messages
- 4,635
I'd say it might have been western developer's weird ideas about what will and won't work on a console more than the controller itself. It's the same kind of thinking you'll see from people saying you'd have to dumb shit down for a console audience or whatever. Not to say a controller works equally well, or that it doesn't bring about issues, but nothing about turn based combat where you've got all the time in the world to make decisions takes a mouse. There's no reason western developers couldn't have been making games with Fallout 1 & 2 like combat on consoles back in the late '90s or early 2000s, it's not like consoles didn't have turned based games with action points before; Front Mission 3 seemed to work out a really nice way of showing the player how much AP it takes to do things. I don't see why any number of systems for turn-based CRPGs couldn't have worked on consoles. Even non-RPGs, I'm always kind of surprised how New World Computing never tried doing either Might & Magic or Heroes of Might and Magic on a console after 3DO bought them up, especially given how 3DO had tried their hand at a console right before that. It ain't like either of those couldn't work on a console, especially Heroes which has very simple combat mechanics. Even the RTS, which is probably the genre that's hardest to get working on consoles had at least one example on PC that would probably worked fantastically on consoles; that being Majesty, the RTS where you don't have to deal with directly controlling your guys.
Even Infinity Engine style RPGs with their kind of RTS style combat shouldn't be hard on a controller, (especially when you can pause combat) they probably could have been simple to work out once the DuelShock came around and you got to joysticks. One joysticks for your cursor, one to scroll the screen, put every character on a button, tap a button to tell them to move somewhere or do a basic attack (when in combat) or interact with something, hold the button down to bring up a radian circle menu for more complicated actions with that corresponding character, use the d-pad for stuff like bring up the inventory and map screen and modifiers to put your group into different formations, press start or whatever to pause combat. Since the PS3 & 360, unless some developers was wanting to do a RTwP system with more than eight characters they should probably be ok with mapping that on a controller.
The book analogy seems like a weird one to make given the market isn't as successful as the past. Even the way you start that book analogy off is strange, books haven't been only for the privileged for something like over 300 years now; there's been some good stuff in that time.
Airplane simulators always seemed like super casual "games" to me. They were like the thing Walmarts had set up for everyone to fuck around on alongside Doom when PC's were really taking off, and one of the games your school library had. Flight Simulator was something people that don't even play games would play around with from time to time. What killed those is the biggest game in town when it come to that, Microsoft, stopped making them. The yearly releases for that kind of game probably didn't help either. Flight Simulator and SimCopter were about the only ones
was also about the only normal sim game
