First let me start by saying, that I'm way past making any sort of promises in conjecture with writing here, so there won't be any of those. To continue in the the same theme, I should also add, that there are vast amounts of subjects that I would consider blog worthy in their own right and it is therefore likely and even mostly probable that I just might. But I promised no promises, which I tend to keep true to.
So.
Beyond Good & Evil. A game, first published for consoles and soon followed by a PC version. I have owned the Ps2 version of it for god knows how long, but I did only purchase it after its price dropped to a more...poor-student-homie sort of a level. So lets just say for the sake of argument that I've had it for four years minimum. Should also add as a side note, that this is indeed the method I implore on most of my purchases of the consumable media (excluding music for the most part).
I even played the game and really liked it a lot, according to my guesstimates, I played it up to 2006. Known for some as The year the darkness took over. In other words when I delved deep into the world of world of warcraft. And that's a bloody correct sentence. Slipping off topic here. So I played it then, check. Liked it, check. Didn't play it all the way due to other 'activities', check.
As mentioned before, there is also a PC version of the game, which I had of course managed to ignore in the past. Over the christmas holidays Valve and their mostly ingenious (we'll get to the mostly part later) Steam service were offering Beyond G&E - looks curious like that, doesn't it? - at a very reasonable price (5 euros) among other titles and I figured I'd like to play the game all the way through. So why not play the console game? I'm having a hard time enjoying games on Standard Definition due to the detail limitations and also the limitations of my current TV. LCD scaling = not the most crisp result one could wish for. I admit it's also because I'm too used to having high details due to having been playing on the PC for most of my mind-bogglingly-vast gaming history.
Money goes in, game comes out along with the other bits of information that st(r)eam from the internets. Downloaded, installed, tested and works fine. Nothing major to moan about there. Steam is a great service, though I could think of a couple of dozen things to make it even better.
The Mostly Evil part is, that in my ever clever wittiness, I figured I'd prefer to play Beyond G&E with a pad, as it is "supposed to be played" (shameless Nvidia plug). Add to this that I had a plan of also playing Resident Evil 4 the same way, as it was purchasable dirty cheap and with some extra patching should be a decent experience. No waffle for those who start making a point of how is it possible that I haven't already. Get off my back. Seriously.
So I got a pad (not a Pad_lle, but a gamepad, in case you're some type of a ...anti-gaming-nerd, which, if you are, you should be a lot more shamed about than I am about not having played Res4 yet - and of which you will most likely have no idea what I'm talking about anyway), again a part of a grander scheme of things involving a box-of-gaming by a multinational software corporation of lies and music players that don't have 366 days that cause them to crash - and a product of which can be described with: ><> or a fish if you like. Go figure.
Pad is great, pad is good. The only elfing problem is, and now pay attention as I'm finally getting to the point of it all, Beyond G&E doesn't support gamepads at all on the PC version. *Eyes open, Jaw on the floor* Who the hell came up with this brilliant idea.
The thought process is something like this:
- Lets develop this game for consoles, basing the controlling scheme to expect the use of gamepads.
- Lets make that same game into a PC version, but lets NOT have gamepad or joystick support for it, but keep the same control scheme to keep the playing as unintuitive and silly as possible.
So now I got a game, that is designed to be played on a gamepad with analog controllers, that only works with mouse+keyboard combination - which feels akward - that I want to play with an analog pad. The solution? To use an emulator for the gamepad, that pretends to be a keyboard and mouse. Sigh. The wonders of technology. As for Res4, it supports game controllers.
Luckily there are solutions like that, since otherwise I would've been slightly annoyed at myself for not checking such things in advance to bying a controller. Another lucky part of it is that I'll be able to take advantage of the gamepad later on anyway, so ...yeah.
Oh right, then there's the Steam point I made earlier. The gripe I have with it, in this case, is that I find it odd that Valve have developed such a decent method of distributing, but they still seem to have forgotten that with the ability to distribute they could also take a stand towards making a more unified controlling scheme, since they have the ability to do so.
What I mean by that is that I would have presumed, that in their wisdom of designing Steam, they would've made some sort of an unified method of using other peripherals than the conventional mouse and keyboard combination. To be fair, they have, it's just that the way it is being done is that they don't require the publishers to support it. Which kind of leaves us, the consumers, in a place where we need to put quite a lot of effort into getting that support working on our own.
What this tells to me, is that Steam is still primarily a distributing method and nothing more. I hope in the future they do utilize the ability to make gamers lives easier when it comes to using different gadgets-of-play.
That about sums it up. Lesson learned, tech learned. Now I know how to get over the hurdles of setting up gamepads and other controlling periphelia whether or not it is supported by the software I'm looking to use it with. Hurray.
Good deeds don't go unrewarded and bad deeds are a reward in their own right.
The both of you have a nice weekend! =]
