I’m usually more a console than a PC gamer (for non-casual games, at any rate), but since I’ve got a lot of downtime waiting for my little bundle of joy to arrive, I’ve been going through my Steam account and playing some stuff that I haven’t really gotten around to before.
I picked up Psychonauts in the most recent Humble Bundle sale, and so far it’s… almost fun. The storyline is cute and the gameplay is right up my alley, but the controls are killing me. You control the camera with the mouse, which you don’t seem to need to do constantly, but you do need to do occasionally. The default settings have you moving around with the arrow keys, using Q and E and X for some actions, space bar for jumping, and a left click for hitting. That seems like WAY too much moving around on the keyboard to me, and I had a lot of trouble with it. I’ve changed the defaults so that the most common actions so far (I’m only 45 minutes into the game all told, since I keep quitting in frustration) are set to the 1 and 2 key, which is better but still a struggle.
So, for those of you who spend more time playing computer games than I do, any tips for finding a control scheme that works well? Anyone else pick up Psychonauts and have a good setup going? Do I need something other than a mouse and keyboard to play most non-casual computer games (I stumbled a bit with Portal at first, but got the hang of it pretty quickly)?