I can finally bop Da Man
May 14, 2007
I am of the opinion that the Xbox 360 controller is the finest video game input device ever built by man. It is not perfect, mind you: the Start and Back buttons are too close to the Guide button, the D-pad is sometimes finicky, and I'd like to see the triggers "click" like the Wavebird. But I think the placement of the analog sticks, triggers and face buttons are peerless. The Dualshock/SIXAXIS pays homage to the past and aggravates the future; their analog sticks are at the bottom of the device, making first person shooters intolerable so that you might enjoy your 2D games better on the digital pad. Foolish. The Wii remote is exempted from this criticism because it will likely forever hold the title of Most Innovative controller, enabling the world to experience games unlike anything they've ever seen before at the expense of every game they've seen before. Seriously: this thing was not designed to accommodate Need for Speed.
Thus I was overjoyed to buy an Xbox 360 controller and have it work with my Windows games. Or rather, game. Even though it shows up perfectly as a 10 button controller in Windows, I haven't found many titles aside from flight simulators and SNES emulators that support the damn thing (or any PC controller, period).
It turns out the solution is to write your own universal gamepad profiler. But since I don't have 120 hours to throw away learning the Windows input stack, I bought one. Pinnacle Game Profiler should have been bought out by Microsoft by now. That their excellent software has not been integrated into Vista is why Microsoft's "Wow" campaign is a bunch of rubbish. With PGP (um, the other one) you can have your gamepad emulate a full keyboard and mouse with proper joystick acceleration. It even comes with an updating mechanism that loads the profiles for you. I've gotten FEAR, Quake 4, Far Cry and even STALKER and World of Warcraft fully controllable from my gamepad. As you might imagine, running WoW from an Xbox 360 pad is fairly challenging because I'm not an octopus. But it works, damn you!
After six levels of Lord of the Rings Online I'm calling it quits. The luscious graphics and interesting settings don't make the tiny UI or hideous animation any more bearable. And then there's just the fact that it feels like something's missing. It's undeniable that you can't ask for a better fantasy setting than Middle-Earth, more compelling characters than Gandalf or Aragorn, or more interesting enemies than the Nazgul or Saruman himself. But I step into this world and feel like an instant Level One Loser.
Spending a heartbeat thinking about why that is reveals the answer immediately. In the Lord of the Rings Online, everyone has the same glass ceiling. You can look up even from level 50 and see the soles of Frodo's hairy hobbit feet. Who gets stabbed on Weathertop? Not you. Who gets to lasso the lovable Gollum and drag his malnourished ass around? Not you. Who has the freaking One Ring and gets to journey to Mount Doom and drop it in? Oh, you'd better believe it's not you.
Instead, you can look forward to delivering the smack down to the Witch-King of Angmar (who?), fighting other players in the endless player vs. monster arenas (why?) and helping Aragorn repair Narsil, the sword that shows up in the third film (zuh?). No, you don't get to wield the sword, you just search for the jewel for the hilt of the sword. Are you pumped yet?
Compare this to World of Warcraft, where you can introduce your character's boot to the face of every single hero character from the novels and RTS games. Go to Theramore and demonstrate your two-handed sword ability to Jania Proudmoore. Or try to roast Thrall over a spit. With a large enough group, you have a shot. Heck, even the huge guy with the horns in the Burning Crusade introductory video is asking for a beat down. You feel like you could be somebody, that "the man" (with two middle initials) isn't telling you that "you can't do it."
And having said that, I think I've come several steps closer to understanding the emotional basis of the civil rights movement. Sorry, Turbine, but Homey don't play dat.
