Your least-favorite control schemes in video games

Pre-WASD schemes in 80s and 90s PC games. Those were truly the dark ages before we got standards. Likewise for most pre-Halo console FPSes(Turok and Rare FPSes being the exception)

Mad Max makes you jump with a shoulder button

It wasn't always this way but I'm soooooooooo over the Ubisoft parkour systems. I tried dusty off Watch Dogs 2 and the "hold trigger to jump over everything" feels like a real cop out for world design. I think this was slightly improved in Origins but the passive controls are still too much of a disconnect between game and player.

Motion controls.

Kid Icarus Uprising was physically painful to play.

Resident Evil style tank controls

- Jeff // D-Up Gaming

Kingdom Hearts 1. These controls are all wrong.

Weiss said:

Kid Icarus Uprising was physically painful to play.

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I didn't want to be the one to say it but yeah, it was a little rough.

The new God of War's control scheme was just not good to me at all. I felt like I was fighting the game my whole playthrough.

Fear Effect. I tried it for 10 minutes and gave up.

Steel Batallion: Heavy Armor straight up didn't function properly half the time. So that.

Phediuk said:

I got some wicked hand cramps from Zelda on the DS, which was entirely stylus-controlled. Having to hold the device with one hand and grip the stylus with the other was like the perfect recipe for pain. Utterly ruined the game for me.

wtf were they thinking with that shit, just give me some normal-ass controls.

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Reason #147 why those games were garbage.

What was the dpad even used for in Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks?

Push left analogue stick all the way forward and only move at walking speed. Hold a face button to jog or run.

It's just the absolute worst. You lose camera control, because you can't use the right stick and hold a face button at the same time, so you either have to claw your controller or drop to walking speed when you want to look around. It baffles me why games are still doing this. Hell, the Yakuza series just started doing this with Yakuza 6.

Dual analog pointing for third- and first- person shooting games, controlling scheme so busted, so inaccurate, so slow, so backwards in every single way it mandated overbearing auto-aim applied to it.

It is baffling to see Stockholm syndrome defenders of such a inferior control scheme.

Old 2-player computer games where player 1 uses WASD and player 2 uses IJKL

Third person action games having attacks mapped to shoulder buttons.

The PSP's deeply fatal flaw was that it lacked an equivalent of the N64's A and B buttons. So core functionality was placed on the d-pad in many games, leading to the horrifying "claw" hand position in several high profile titles. Never again. Never again.

Star Fox Zero

I wanted to love it so hard.

Jumping with R3 (or was it L3?) in Dark Souls 3.

Dying Light put jumping on RB, where every other bumper jumper control scheme in the goddamn universe puts it on LB, so you can jump and attack at the same time.

Similarly, CoD: Advanced Warfare didn't have a bumper jumper option in a game where most gunfights in multiplayer happened while you were airborne. You could jump and you could aim, but you couldn't do both at the same time.

Unspoken90 said:

Third person action games having attacks mapped to shoulder buttons.

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I tried playing Nioh like this, and it was hell. The game is simply too fast-paced for that kind of button mapping (thankfully, it's not the default). Dark Souls and Bloodborne make it work due to the slower pace of the games, and making use of the face buttons in a way that wouldn't make sense for shoulder buttons.

Sega Dreamcast said:

Jumping with R3 (or was it L3?) in Dark Souls 3.

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L3. Better than Dark Souls and Bloodborne's "double-tap the run button when you want to jump". But still not great.

Games that don't allow invert the Y axis.
Also, games that don't allow to customize each button.

Overwatch is an example to follow, you can customize each individual hero how you'd like.

Weiss said:

Kid Icarus Uprising was physically painful to play.

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Yeah. I never get hand cramps playing games, but Uprising made my left hand seize up

Platy said:

Mad Max makes you jump with a shoulder button

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Mad Max rules imo because when you're on foot you still drive Max like a car

This piece of shit control scheme on this masterpiece of a game.

Early DS and3DS games that insisted on making you play with a stylus. It was terrible.

[Confirmation/Interact] and [Jump] are the same button.

King's Field 1

The combat system and difficulty are not balanced with the controls. This game came out before the dual shock so you had to use a combination of directional buttons and R1 R2/L1 L2 to move the character, move the camera and strafe.

And you could die with two hits by enemies that move much better than you. Game only becomes borderline playable once you've unlocked a few stuff.

Thank God this game slowly evolved to later spawn the Souls series. What rough beginnings these were lol.

Rocketjay8 said:

This piece of shit control scheme on this masterpiece of a game.

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I actually quite liked the control scheme and didn't need the stand.

(well, except for the Exo-Tank controls)

I love the control scheme in smash Bros.

Kid Icarus Uprising. As left handed, this game is impossible to play.
Bummed out too seeing all the praise the game got here.

MGS3 sneak with the D-pad. Analog controls had existed for nearly 10 years at that point. To add insult to injury, they used analog buttons to determine whether or not you shoot someone in the face.

Do tank controls count? Tank Controls + Fixed Camera is the worst possible combination, those games are pretty much unplayable to me. If tank controls don't count then I'll go with motion controls.

Any game that has triangle to jump. Fortunately that seems to be largely a thing of the past, but even in the PS1 era I hated it.

Kid Icarus: Uprising. The controls, especially for the on-ground sections, are literally the only reason I didn't finish that game. Otherwise I loved it. I know that there are defenders of that control scheme but it is bad and clearly not something any game has repeated since for a reason.

I liked the concept of Katamari Damacy, but couldn't stand the controls (or the FOV)

Any Wii game that felt it needed to replace the simplicity of a button press with a damn waggle should be sitting with its face in the corner never to be seen again.

I hated waggle, the Wii was what started to drive me away from Nintendo, and that accelerated with WiiU when I stopped even caring.

- Mario Party 1 joystick rotation games.
- Ouendan/EBA spins

Both were responsible for wrecking hardware (and hands in the case of Maro Party).

I dislike any kind of shooter on console controllers.

I'll play them if they're good games and not available on PC, but some part of my mind will always be screaming "THIS WOULD BE SO MUCH BETTER WITH A MOUSE" as I wrestle the crosshair around the screen with those clumsy fucking thumbsticks.

There's a reason console games had to invent "aim assist".

Triangle to jump in Team Ico games. I just can't

Running on A/X

Just let me freaking move the camera while running.

Tank Controls. Also Kid Icarus 3DS.

Platy said:

Mad Max makes you jump with a shoulder button

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bumper jumper 4 lyf

Running in RDR.

Playing through Devil May Cry 3 currently and enjoying it, but I hate the lock-on toggle being on L3. I keep hitting it by accident and this sometimes really fucks up something I'm trying to do. Other games that do similar things with L3 are also the bane of me, particularly more fast-paced titles.

IIRC, GoldenEye 64 works like:
Analog stick up/down = going forward/backward
Analog stick left/right = rotating left/right
C buttons left and right = strafing left/right
C buttons up and down = aiming up and down

It was essentially a FPS with tank controls. I can say for sure I hated it during the single player portion, but it made multiplayer matches extra hilarious lmao

Kid Icarus uprising is the epitome of hardware holding a game back, control scheme being the huge reason

Roldan said:

IIRC, GoldenEye 64 works like:
Analog stick up/down = going forward/backward
Analog stick left/right = rotating left/right
C buttons left and right = strafing left/right
C buttons up and down = aiming up and down

It was essentially a FPS with tank controls. I can say for sure I hated it during the single player portion, but it made multiplayer matches extra hilarious lmao

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It did have a weird two-controller mode that was basically dual analog, though. It was the secret best way to play.

Zhukov said:

I dislike any kind of shooter on console controllers.

I'll play them if they're good games and not available on PC, but some part of my mind will always be screaming "THIS WOULD BE SO MUCH BETTER WITH A MOUSE" as I wrestle the crosshair around the screen with those clumsy fucking thumbsticks.

There's a reason console games had to invent "aim assist".

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How do you feel about console shooters with gyro aiming?