Fully Customizable Controls Should be the Standard in Action Games

I downloaded the Iron Man demo yesterday on Xbox Live and was looking forward to smiting evil with the righteous metallic fury of The Golden Avenger. I would love to tell you if it were any good, but unfortunately, I can't! It seems I'm going to be screwed out of yet another anticipated game due to a lack of control options.

Arguably, the control setup I use for first and third person shooters is a bit outlandish. I play with the analog sticks reversed, (which is known as southpaw), but the L and R triggers are not switched, (the R trigger still fires the gun). Then, just to add to the chaos I invert the Y-axis.



The question that I am inevitably asked is why would I use such a control scheme, especially if I am not even left-handed? It comes from being an early adopter of the FPS genre on consoles. I used to play the Turok series on the N64 and Quake 3 on the Dreamcast and you may not recall, but in those games the analog stick on the left side of the controller controlled the look function and the face buttons on the right side of the controller controlled movement. The right trigger was always employed as the gun trigger. Even when I played Goldeneye I customized my controls to play like Turok, (If Goldeneye could get customizable controls right, modern games have no excuse) and I whipped all my friends mercilessly with my super-advanced PC style controls where I could look up and down and move side to side while they were stuck in the Stone Age moving and turning all with just the joystick.

If you ever played the Turok series on the Nintendo 64, this should be very familiar to you.









And if you ever played Half-Life, Quake 3 or Unreal tournament on the Dreamcast...












Some games make an attempt to offer customizable controls but just can't manage to do it competently. I had to pass up GRAW 2 and Turning Point, (not losing sleep over that one), because even though I had read that southpaw was supported, when I loaded the games I found that the option to reverse the analog sticks was not indepentant of the option to reverse the L and R trigger. When I tried switching the analog sticks, I was forced to fire my weapon using the L-trigger. It would have only taken that one last tiny step and the game would have become playable for me.

Other games don't offer ANY customizability; I returned EDF 2017 out of sheer frustration and never bothered purchasing or renting Army of Two or Blacksite: Area 51. I only forced my way through Bioshock and Mass effect with backwards controls because the games were so amazing, (and required a bit less twitchy precision gameplay than the average shooter), that they were worth the aggravation and confusion.

While not including customizable controls is the fault of the game developers, I also take issue with most game reviewers. Part of the job of a game reviewer is to include positive and negative aspects of a game in their reviews. Still, rarely do I ever see mention in any major game publication or website of control options or lack thereof. In a game like Army of two, which does not support any real way of changing up the control scheme, it will, (and has), alienated many gamers and for that reason it should be mentioned in any legitimate, respectable review.

I know that not many people use the particular control style that I use, but there are a lot of people who would like to change the controls from the game developer's personal preference and it takes very little time and effort to implement customizable controls. Fully customizable controls need to become the standard in all shooter and action games and game reviewers need to start including control schemes or customizability in reviews.