Kotaku: Why The Apple Trackpad Might Be The Best Video Game Controller Ever MadeThe headline is already facepalm-worthy. Trackpads in general suck, and I hate using them on laptops most of the time just for general navigation, let alone gaming.
But it gets worse, so much worse, once you actually start reading.
One of those things I can tolerate: Apple products. That's not to say I am a devout Apple fan-zombie. It's just that everything else is so . . . ugly, and clunky.
Hey, that's exactly how I feel about trackpads! Maybe not ugly, but really clunky. The last thing I want in a gaming peripheral or any input device at all is clunkiness.
Hell, I'm pretty sure that even the Mac gamers out there wouldn't even dare to game on a trackpad. (And before you mention how oxymoronic the term "Mac gamers" sounds, two words: Macintosh Garden.)
The Macbook is where Apple introduced the two-finger swipe.
No, that honor belongs to the very last generation of PowerBook and iBook G4s. Not that most of the current Apple fanbase would even notice, since they only started to care after the Intel switch, or after the iPhone's release.
That said, two-finger scroll, at least the smooth way Apple did it, is the only good thing I have to say about trackpads in general.
Now I faced the hurdle I knew I'd have to face: every time I ever tweaked around with a newer MacBook Pro or MacBook Air in a Best Buy or Apple Store, my lips inadvertently screwed up as I tried to use the trackpad to manipulate the cursor. It was always too slow. Tap to click was always (inexplicably?) disabled.
That's because tap-to-click sucks. I've lost track of the times where it clicks whenever I accidentally brush my palms against the corners of a laptop trackpad-or, worse, I'm typing a long paragraph and that unintended tap-click highlights a good chunk of what I just typed to be immediately overwritten by my continued typing, forcing me to stop, undo the damage, and start typing again.
That is a horrible user interface failure, and all too common with tap-to-click.
I remembered friends of mine, in Japan, lifelong Windows users, in the age before Wi-Fi was everywhere (like serial killers)
What kind of person makes that kind of simile?
It's not a trackpad-related argument, I know, but something is deeply wrong with the writer's head.
"It's not a mouse with no buttons—it's a mouse with a million buttons."
One thing I've noticed about multi-touch gestures in general is that they're actions that can be easily done with a few extra mouse buttons. And between the second spent to swipe my fingers across a capacitive surface and the microsecond spent pushing a button, I'd take the button. Especially seeing as extra buttons on a mouse can easily be clicked while moving the mouse, which is absolutely critical for gaming. Imagine not being able to aim and shoot at the same time-that would suck.
Except that's exactly what happens on trackpads without discrete physical buttons, as if the old ones didn't suck enough for gaming. The Apple ones may not be so bad, but the Synaptics ClickPads are similar and have found their way onto several HP notebooks at the very least...and you cannot left-click and right-click simultaneously. Given how many games require that exact combination, that is very bad.
"Actually!" I started to say. Then I stopped. I recall all the game designers I'd seen sitting in board rooms in 2011 with brand-new MacBook Pros. Not a single one of them had ever said, between pizza slices or granola bars, "These trackpads sure are sweet."
First off, what game designers own MacBook Pros? I'm pretty sure most game designers I'd encounter in the industry are probably packing some Clevo/Sager/Malibal or Alienware or Asus monstrosity of a gaming notebook.
Second off, do I really need to repeat the reasons I've already stated as to why trackpads suck for gaming, hence why it never occured to them to praise the trackpad in their line of work?
-"So, like—imagine you're using that trackpad to play Super Mario Bros.."
-"I'm imagining."
-"Like I said, about the whipping two fingers up or down. Let's say up makes him run right and down makes him run left."
-"Fair enough."
-"So you whip it hard to run. Whip it in the other direction to skid and turn around. Plant two fingers to slow your guy down. While you're scrolling with two fingers, touch with one finger to jump. Hold to jump longer."
-"How do you duck? How do you throw fireballs?"
-"You duck by slipping two fingers to the right. You throw fireballs by tapping three fingers anywhere on the pad."
This all sounds needlessly convoluted and mostly workarounds to shoehorn a game genre into an interface it wasn't meant for. I mean, Super Mario Bros. can be hard enough with the tried-and-true NES pad, especially the true SMB2/The Lost Levels.
Now imagine playing I Wanna Be The Guy or Super Meat Boy or VVVVVV with this sort of interface...actually, no, don't. That would just make already-notoriously-difficult games downright impossible.
-"That might work."
-I played through 1-1 in my head.
-"It does work."
-"How well does it work?"
-I played through 8-3 in my head.
-"It works better than a Nintendo controller."
-"How much better?"
-I played through 8-2 in my head. Then I played through 2-3.
-"Way, way better."
-"How much way better?"
-I tried Super Mario Bros. 3, world 3-8.
-"Incredibly better."
Only in your horribly deluded dreams with serial killers roaming around every place with a Wi-Fi hotspot. Constantly swiping all over the place with a trackpad is needlessly tedious and tiresome compared to working a D-Pad and buttons with my thumbs, not to mention more imprecise.
"I'm still not sold. Like, how would you do a first-person shooter with just a trackpad? How would you do that without buttons, or without a keyboard? What about a 3D action game?"
I opened my mouth. I closed my mouth. "I'm—I'm sure you could do it. 3D action games rarely even use the full versatility a 3D space can afford, anyway. You'd probably use a bunch of pinches and rotates and spreads."
Pinches and rotations and spreads that can't be done simultaneously, that's for sure. It's quite telling that this guy can't even think of a suitable interface on the spot, and admits that it wouldn't be suitable for games that make maximum use of 3D space.
You know, like Descent and its famous full 6-degrees-of-freedom movement. Does he really think that a multi-touch trackpad can outdo an old Spacetec or 3Dconnexion controller, or a flight stick + keyboard like I use these days (stick for rotation, keyboard for translation/movement, some weapon switching, and other item usage)?
The first two games are open-source, even, which should make it easier for him to implement this trackpad-only dream input scheme of his. Then I'll challenge him to some 1-on-1 deathmatch and see who wins.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves: the point is, we shouldn't port exact remakes of Megaman or Contra—we should make new and better games in the same style, one which actually makes use of the potential of an analog device.
Now this I can agree with to an extent, but finding a new control scheme that works even equivalently as well as the old one, let alone better, won't be easy. Even this guy can't really figure it out, realizing that he's basically working around limitations on an input device that isn't designed for gaming at all.
Going deeper: the challenge of Diablo often stems from Clicking The Right Thing Quickly Enough. You don't want to click the wrong monster, for example. You might not want to click on the loot that a monster just dropped—you might want to click on the monster next to him. Or you might want to run away—yes, running away is a very good thing to do, sometimes.
And this is why the computer mouse as we know it is still preferred. It's easy to click on exactly what we want with a twitch of the wrist, under a second. Using any other alternative sort of mouse feels more like clumsily pushing the mouse cursor around, taking extra time to get it exactly where we want it. Time in which people die.
A common method of player movement in Diablo is to click a spot on the ground and hold the mouse button down. The player will now run in the direction of that arrow, and that arrow stays in the same position relative to the center of the screen.
Trackpads "equal Diablo death" because, until the Apple glass trackpads, with their "inertial scrolling", they weren't so deliciously sensitive to movement and finger acceleration.
So let's try this: if you put two fingers on the trackpad, the game will immediately place the cursor on a part of the screen relative to where you put your fingers. Now you can tap to click, and hold it there, and . . . you're running in that direction.
Oh, but you still haven't talked about the more critical problem of CLICKING ON THE MONSTER THAT YOU NEED TO KILL BEFORE IT KILLS YOU.
There's still a few more paragraphs of craptastic article to go, but I'd just be repeating many of the same points already, so why bother? This post is already TL;DR as is.
