[Coco] I am pleased!

[Mark McDougall]

Marcus Vinicius Garrett Chiado wrote:

> Concerning myself, the major issue for playing certain types of games
>  is the joystick I´ve got: the original RadioShack analog controller.
>  It´s quite difficult to play some games by using it! I´m having a 
> terrible time trying to play Sock´s Donkey Kong with it.

Analogue joysticks are notoriously unsuited to playing games designed
for digital joysticks. The 'dead zone' in the middle of the movement
causes a noticeable lag in the response - absolutely critical for
action/arcade-type games. There's also no feedback on directionality -
you can't 'feel' when you're moving left, or up etc and in the 'heat of
the battle' the lines blur between left and up, for example.

So it's not so much the joystick itself, but the fact that it's analogue.

I've actually found that for certain games, a keyboard is actually
'easier' for me than even a digital joystick - and I've got an X-Arcade
stick at that! Simple left-right-shoot games and Pacman, for example,
immediately spring to mind. 8-way games, like Xevious, however, are much
more playable on a digital joystick.

Of course, this may be because of years of honing my gaming skills on a
TRS-80 Model I, where the only option in most cases was the keyboard.
However, the cluster arrows of the Coco3 and modern PCs still don't
compare to the two-handed layout on the Model I keyboard for me...

And I never could get the hang of console controllers.. especially for
shoot-em-ups... they're useless for those!

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"