Swarms of enemies approach, intent on relieving me of my life. Missiles arc in from the distance, taking out half the advance squad I’d sent ahead in a beautifully rendered explosion that turns everything on my screen a searing burnt orange.

I hold the controller tightly in sweaty palms, feeling the shoulder buttons under my itchy fingers, and the rubberized sticks under my thumbs.

It’s go time.

Crysis? Sure. I’m having a crisis.

I push one stick forward and my aim drops to the ground. Oops. That’s the wrong one. I push the other stick forward and finally move into the field of battle, taking fire from somewhere. Ouch. I can’t see which enemy is shooting me, because I’m still looking down. If I was playing co-op, my friends would think that I’m a noob looking for loose change. My face flushes. I pull back on the stick… too high, and now I’m spinning around, too. I manage to stop the rotation, and tap the aiming stick back down, and at last I have an enemy in my sights. I pull the trigger. Got one!, I think, and then I’m swarmed under by aliens. Or soldiers. Or alien zombie soldiers. It matters little, since I couldn’t do anything. I was not the master of my own destiny.

Dual-stick controls are terrible.

I think that deep down, we all know this. But it’s the control scheme we’ve been given, based on the tech that was available, so we muddle on with it as best we can. To be fair – and friendly -some of us are very, very good with dual sticks. I am not one of those people.

It’s so… steampunk.

To me, dual-stick is very much like the keyboard layout that I’m using to type these words. But the Qwerty keyboard was designed to manipulate keystrokes in order to keep the old typing machines from jamming. There are any number of keyboard layouts that are faster, the Dvorak layout to name the most prominent alternative. I’ve thought about using a Dvorak layout, but the thought of relearning how to type makes me cringe. Just like most dual-stickers aren’t going to embrace anything else either.

The first traditional FPS I played and liked was the original Goldeneye on N64. That controller has one stick and the yellow camera buttons. It was a bad control scheme, but we all made due because the game was so fun, both in single player campaign and the ground-breaking four-player local multi-player that kept us all up to the wee hours of the morning. PS1 had the dual sticks, but I never had that console. PS2 and Xbox retained dual-stick, sold 800 bajillion units and dual stick became entrenched as the standard, if it hadn’t been already. I played those Sony consoles a bit and Xbox and 360, but never got the hang of it.

I couldn’t play first person shooters until the Wii. Metroid Prime Three: Corruption may not be the best of the Prime Trilogy, but the controls were a revelation to me. Aim with the Wii remote and move with the stick. Fire button, jump button. I was a pro in about 10 minutes. It’s so easy. No more fighting the controls, just playing a game.

Is the control fine-grained? It’s not keyboard-and-mouse tight, but it’s not bad. Not bad at all. It works because it’s so… intuitive. I muddled through the original Prime game on Gamecube. I enjoyed it pretty well,but it was often a pain in the butt because of the controls. When they did the Prime Trilogy box set with the Wii controls, I was so happy I almost bought two copies.

I clearly remember traditional FPS players – dual stick and mouse-and-keyboard fans alike – trashing Prime 3 because there weren’t any options for dual stick. I get that. We all want to use what we’re used to using.

Just because you’re used to something doesn’t mean it’s better, though. But hey, it doesn’t really matter, as long we’re all having fun.

What is your preferred FPS/First Person Adventure control scheme? And do you think that your preferred scheme is the actually the best, or are you just used to it?

In a way, all games are broken. In order to create gameplay, a designer has to set up parameters that may not necessarily make sense in order to create a playground in which gamers can get satisfying gameplay. It’s the way that obstacles and their solutions are created in games.

Super Mario Brothers is ‘broken’ by its control limitations: jump, run, run faster, sometimes fireball. But we don’t consider this game broken, we consider it one of the best games of all time. Why? Because the designers broke it in a way that created great gameplay. And it helps that it takes place in a fantastical place like the Mushroom Kingdom. The further designers get from reality, the easier it is to ‘break’ games in an acceptable way.

The Resident Evil franchise, however, is broken, both from a control standpoint and character motion standpoint. And that’s not good. At least not for me.

First, the control choices. I bought the Gamecube remake of the original Resident Evil, pretty pumped that I was finally getting a chance to play the game that started a genre. I was new to the world of actual voice acting and motion-capture and was really excited by the intro. It’s creepy, intriguing and cinematic, hinting at so much. So far so good.

But once the characters stopped talking, and I finally got to play… I was immediately disappointed and angry. The Gamecube version has three different controller setups, all very different and all equally useless. Why? That damned fixed camera. I understand that survival horror relies on a feeling of claustrophobia and an inability to respond quickly due to surprise. Well, putting the camera up in the corner a room in the mansion and having the scene change at unspecified points, certainly enables the latter. When the point of view changes unexpectedly as you move, what constitutes ‘forward’ also changes. So suddenly, through no intention of your own, Jill Valentine is running into a wall, looking super stupid. Ridiculous. How are you supposed to ‘survive’ if you can’t even properly make your intentions known to the game through the controller without playing everything twice? The first zombie encounter in RE was embarrassing for me. I had no idea what to do. No survival. All sense of realism that the (then) excellent graphics had engendered came crashing down. The game quickly became a chore, not a game, even after I got used to the control scheme. Who needs that? It’s a game!

Next point. I think they remade a couple of the other early REs for Gamecube, but I skipped them. Then came Resident Evil 4. Somehow, against all my instincts (and helped along by the dearth of good titles for Gamecube) I bought it.

No fixed camera! Big improvement right? Absolutely. But RE4 revealed another big problem for the franchise (for me): speed of character. In RE4, you play as Leon, an athletic, young male character. But all you can do is either walk very slowly, or run less slowly. The original RE has this issue as well, but inn RE4, we’re not trapped in a mansion anymore. The zombies are pretty fast with better AI. That’s nice too. But why am I stuck controlling a cripple? It’s like Leon is a fat man with bad knees and ankles. It’s distracting in and of itself, because it’s so unnatural. So what happens with slow, crippled Leon? You can’t get away from the crowds of zombies to snipe…. which is what I’d do if I actually found myself in that situation. Not happening here. Slowpoke Leon just gets you swarmed under. I understand that the game would be too easy for most people, but what the heck is wrong with easy? I like easy. I’m a champion of easy. At least give me a chance to actually experience the story! But no, RE is broken. And it just bothers me. Why can’t I run? Why? It’s a break from reality (like in Super Mario Brothers), but a bad one, because the game is trying to be as realistic as possible. So crippled Leon really sticks out to me. And I just can’t get past it from a story-telling perspective.

Perhaps it’s just the genre. It probably is. I’ll just refrain from playing survival horror games anymore. (Or perhaps ZombiU is more my speed. I’ll just need a WiiU to find out. (Somebody help me out with that!)

I know that games have to break reality to be games. They have to. There has to be constraints and parameters to play the game out against. But sometimes, the choices that are made are too distracting for me to get satisfying gaming out of it. Resident Evil is that in spades.

I’m not sure anything can be added to the vast commentary and collective horror we’re all experiencing and sharing as a result of the gut-wrenching tragedy that occurred in Connecticut today. But I’m going to add something anyway. Because frankly, this conversation can’t be big enough. Every time something like this happens, our media and officials cover for the wrong-headed pro-gun lobby. And some of them are doing it still. But that’s over now. It has to be.

We cannot apologize for our gun laws anymore. Why now? Why is this different? In most salient ways it’s not any different than so many of the other tragic shootings that we’ve endured in our country in the last decade. But this is different.

How? Why?

Some sick man shot his mother and brother, and then went to a school and mowed down a classroom full of kindergarteners – among our most precious and vulnerable – with a near-military grade automatic assault weapon. This happened. And things like this will continue to happen until we restrict access to guns in our county.

My god. Why are we putting our 5-year-olds in the position to have to be this brave?

The Second Amendment is an antiquated relic that had no notion of AK-47s and automatic handguns or the way our society is currently built and maintained.

Take the guns away. Now.

But that’s not all.

We have to get the mentally ill the help and security that they need. We have to de-stigmatize mental illness.

People are going to say that gun laws are complex and political, and evaluating the mentally ill is is difficult and unreliable. Bullshit. Guns may not inherently kill people, but they continue to enable the unstable and evil among us to perpetrate massacres. An assault rifle has no purpose other than to massacre. And the mentally ill need to be recast as victims rather than ignored or thrown under the bus.

Look… I don’t have all the answers. None us of could. But, I will say this: if these changes are not things that you want out of your society, then fuck you: you can go join another one.

If we can’t protect the newest of our school-going children from massacre, then just what the fuck are our laws and our moral priorities doing for us?

If we can’t identify and help the people who are most likely to perpetrate these atrocities, then we need to rethink our approach.

I know we can’t stop all atrocities like this – that would be impossible. But can try. We have to try.
And another round of status quo is not going to get it.

It’s over. Give up the guns.