Every time a game comes out with survival horror controls, the reviews tend to slag it. I don’t understand this, I’ve always liked this control style. I think it suits the genre well. In fact, I’d almost prefer it to be in some other games as well.
You hate it when up is always “forward, relative to the character” or are you like me?
While I admit it’s entirely possible that I’m hopelessly out of the videogaming loop, I have to ask…
Huh?
I don’t think I have the foggiest idea what “survival horror controls” are. Eradicate my ignorance on this one, please?
Survival horror controls:
Pushing “up” on the stick makes the character on screen move forward, not always up. For instance, if the character is facing to 3 o’clock, and you push at 12 o’clock on the control pad, the character moves straight ahead to 3 o’clock. This control scheme is usually used when the camera view is stationary (usually to keep things moody.) The system was made popular in the Resident Evil franchise.
Personally, I’d rather have regular platformer controls, whereas you push the pad in the direction you want the character onscreen to go. Though I can see how the other system would be fun. Besides, after playing a game after a while, one gets used to even the most screwey of control schemes. (Mortal Kombat Mythologies comes to immediate mind. A 2D platformer that requires a button to turn around? You have to be kidding me!)
Developers should make it so one can switch the options on the fly, so people can play in the style they want. It wouldn’t take that many lines of code, would it?
Actually, I say this with a small caveat. In Resident Evil, (at least the Gamecube RE1 I played,) going through doorwatys sometimes had disastrous consequences. Because the stationary cameras were in different places in the different rooms, “North” in one room didn’t always correspond to “North” in the next room.
Let’s say that, in the first room, the door you want to go through is on the northeast side of the room (relative to the camera.) With platformer controls, one holds the pad to roughly 1:30 to go through the door.
After going through the door, however, let’s say the same door you just came through is on the northeast side of the room, relative to the camera. With a platformer control scheme, you’d still be holding the 1:30 direction, taking you back through the same doorway, and on to infinity. The RE1 scheme I used, a modification on platformer controls, allowed one to continue going in the same direction as long as one held the stick in a direction. Once you let go, however, it defaulted back to regular platformer controls. In Resident Evil, this had the particularly annoying instance of, once coming into a room, having the control scheme change once you let go of the control stick. With the quick crimson zombies in the game, this was my excuse for many a deaths.
Eventually, I reverted to the regular Survival Horror scheme. It may have been clunky, but at least it made sense with the style of camera angles and doorways in different places.
Thus, if Resident Evil continues to hold the moody, stationary camera angles, and I sure hope they do, I’d suggest going with multiple schemes for the gamer, and barring this, have the classic survival horror scheme. It hasn’t ruined the franchise yet.
And if these last two posts don’t make me a nerd, I have no idea what will. 
One last thing.
My favorite treatment of this problem was in Eternal Darkness. It had platform controls, and was a quasi platformer, as it did have stationary cameras that shifted position based upon where you were in a room. For instance, in a square kitchen, the camera was set above a large dining room table in the center of the room (where the character could not tread.) When the character was closest to the north wall, the camera shifted north. When one moved along to the east wall, the camera waited until you were close enough to the east wall to be obvious of your intentions, and then the camera shifted to the east wall, and sat stationary until you did whatever you wanted to do on the east wall.
This did mean that the developers needed to form 3D models of plants, tables, and so on, which takes up memory, so it’s a tradeoff from the 2D, and quite artful, environs of Resident Evil.
That’s all, I promise.
Are talking about games like “Resident Evil” and “Alone int he Dark” that show the game via a series of camera angles and character movement is relative to those camera angles?
If that’s what you are talking about, I dislike it because:
[list=a]
[li]It can be difficult to manuver the character quickly, as two camera angles may be 90 degress from each other[/li][li]It’s unrealistic. I can look offscreen, but I can’t see offscreen. I Can easily be ambushed by something not 5 feet away because I can’t see it despite the fact that is nothing blocking my view. I may be killed because of an arbitruary camera angle that didn’t allow me to see the zombie that was coming up in the direction I was facing. [/li][/list]
If that’s not what you meant, then feel free to ignore it.
Gracias. Now that I know what it is…
I still don’t know what it is. 
That is, I can’t recall any games using this control system to move about. Is it more common in console games, or have I just not been playing the right ones on the PC?
(The last console I bought was a Sega Genesis, supplemented by the piss-poorly supported 32X adapter and the CD drive.)
HPL’s description makes it sound annoying to deal with, I’d have to say.
After a few moments’ thought, I may have run across this once. Going all the way back to my C-64 days, there was a game called… The Last Ninja? That sounds right.
It was supremely frustrating, to me at least. But we’re also not talking about a very high powered gaming environment, either. And as mentioned, you can adjust to just about any screwy control system, if you play the game enough.
I’m not a huge fan of stationary camera angles, no. But I do enjoy the control scheme. I guess it is psychological for me, since up on the pad is always forward, relative to the character, I have to be the character to get the controls to work. I have to think things like, “To the right of me,” “behind me,” and so on.
HPL, your point a is thus something I don’t understand. Since I’m always thinking only in terms of the character, no matter where the camera is I can maneuver just as fast. So long as the game impliments a quick 180 degree turn I’m satisfied. Your point b has to do with stationary cameras, not the control style. Games like Silent Hill or Fatal Frame don’t seem to have this problem as much as the early Resident Evils.