The Stack

I’ve been talking a lot about this game’s features and mechanics, but I haven’t said much yet about the experience of playing it. It’s quite enjoyable! Easily my favorite of the three classic arcade game remakes I’ve played this month. As I once said about another game, the pleasure of a game such as this has a lot to do with the pleasure of just moving around in the environment, of the game’s responsiveness in putting your intentions into action, and it does that part well. Even with a modern dual-joystick controller, designing a good, intuitive system for moving around freely in 3D space is not trivial. Space flight here is fairly streamlined, with very little cognitive friction, letting you devote more of your attention to higher-level goals.

One touch that I really like: Forward movement is the default. You can stop dead if you want, just hold your position and swivel. This is useful in some situations, such as mining space rocks: you want to aim right at the rock for long enough to blast it apart, but you don’t want to ram into it. But such situations are the exception, not the norm, and are treated as such by the controls. Holding down the left trigger button stops you, like it’s a brake pedal, just as holding down the right trigger makes you go faster. (Holding down both makes them cancel out. That’s not part of the game design; it’s an inescapable result of how Xbox-compatible controllers treat the trigger buttons as a single analog axis.) Holding still requires continuously applied intent. That feels good here. It feels right. I kind of wonder how such a scheme would feel in a less appropriate context. Imagine if you had to hold a button down to keep Mario from running forward all the time.

One thing I just discovered while looking at the the control configuration: By default, the D-pad lets you strafe! (That is, move perpendicular to the direction you’re facing.) I had poked at the D-pad a little while trying to figure out how to activate Special Items, but I must not have held it long enough to see any effect. I don’t think I’ll be using that. Strafing just feels weird in this context. It really shouldn’t feel weird, if this is supposed to be space, but it does. My expectation is that my spaceship, despite looking like a veiny butterfly, is basically an airplane. Airplanes don’t strafe.

And anyway, I need to free up the D-pad so I can remap Special Items to it. It turns out that the default controller configuration just kind of falls down there. There isn’t a notion of selecting a Special Item the way you can select a Secondary Weapon; every Special Item needs its own button, and there are only so many buttons available. Playing from mouse and keyboard has no such problem, of course. Were the developers assuming that players would be playing from mouse and keyboard? Well, the game was only released on Windows, so they knew that players would have keyboards available. Looking that up, I also learned that the developers were former employees of LookingGlass Studios, the makers of games such as System Shock and Ultima Underworld¹It’s a shame there aren’t any combination locks in the game., which were absolutely designed around using the keyboard for more complex 3D positioning than we’re used to these days. It just seems kind of backwards when the rest of the game plays from a controller so well.