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Blastfrog

Joysticks vs. Gamepads

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EDIT: I'm talking about digital joysticks, not analogue. Also moreso talking about stuff more like Atari STs and Amigas, not PCs as much.

It seems like during the late 80's to mid-90's, gamepads were standard for consoles, and joysticks were still the standard on computers (not necessarily PC). Why did computers take a while for joysticks to be replaced with gamepads?

Anyway, what do you think is superior? I personally prefer gamepads, because it's what I grew up with, joysticks just feel like an awkward and archaic way of playing a game to me. Gamepads just feel more natural to me.

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Though beat em' up puritans would always argue the case for joysticks, modern gamepads with their analogue thumbsticks are more versatile than joysticks, so they get my vote.

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Joysticks were indeed very popular in the '90s.

According to Wikipedia, they were considered a prerequisite for flight simulators such as F-16 Fighting Falcon and LHX Attack Chopper, along with the mainstream success of Space flight simulator games like X-Wing and Wing Commander, as well as the "Six degrees of freedom" 3D shooter Descent. However, since the beginning of the 21st century, these types of games have waned in popularity and are now considered a "dead" genre. And with that, gaming joysticks have been reduced to niche products.

As for which PC controller I prefer, I'd go with a gamepad. But, since I don't have one, I'm forced to use the keyboard. :|

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Depends what kind of joystick we're talking about. If you mean arcade-style digital joysticks, those were really popular on home computers but not so much on PCs.

If you mean the nasty analog wobblers, those were almost a PC prerogative due to their use with more "serious" apps like flight simulators (and also because the IBM PC had an "analog" joystick input with just two buttons, or four if you used the two-on-one joystick configuration).

Of course there were gamepads and "arcade style" joysticks for PCs too but the vast majority of "IBM PC & 100% Compatibles" joysticks were the nasty analog sticks.

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Maes said:

Depends what kind of joystick we're talking about.

To clarify, I'm talking about digital joysticks, not analogue. Also moreso talking about stuff more like Atari STs and Amigas, not PCs as much.

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It depends entirely on the game and the kind of precision required. If movement precision and the speed of pressing action buttons is critical, joystick beats gamepad without a question (=fighting games). If you need both movement and camera manipulation, well, a pad with two sticks is the only choice. Pads are also good if you only need a few buttons that need to be used with precision, because then shoulder buttons are enough.

However, d-pads are the only right way to play platformers.

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Jodwin said:

However, d-pads are the only right way to play platformers.

Depending on the platformer ;)

Try playing a quasi-platformer like Mirror's Edge or Tomb Raider with a d-pad.

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Jodwin said:

However, d-pads are the only right way to play platformers.


That's debatable. As someone who spent a good deal of his youth playing in the arcades, a joystick combined with a decent button layout (in terms of proper left/right handed position, button profile, action mapping etc.) is pretty much the only way you can play certain platformers (e.g. you can't pull the 68 gold coin trick in Wonder Boy II if you don't have a proper lever, you simply can't react fast enough in Bubble Bobble when doing "close kisses", and aiming with a gamepad in Metal Slug games fucking sucks).

Then again arcade joysticks were far superior in precision, quality, durability and, most importantly, foundation sturdiness compared to nearly anything you can buy for home use (except if you have an entire cabinet).

Otherwise, even if you somehow build a perfect replica of an arcade joystick, unless you find a way to pin it down sturdily and positioning it at just the correct height, it will probably be outperformed by a gamepad.

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I play doom pretty regularly on a gamepad now. I couldn't imagine playing it on a joystick.

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Maes said:

Then again arcade joysticks were far superior in precision, quality, durability and, most importantly, foundation sturdiness compared to nearly anything you can buy for home use (except if you have an entire cabinet).

Otherwise, even if you somehow build a perfect replica of an arcade joystick, unless you find a way to pin it down sturdily and positioning it at just the correct height, it will probably be outperformed by a gamepad.


It's way easier than you think. This is my arcade stick. Modified with original japanese sanwa parts. I have it in my lap while playing street fighter, battle bakraid or don pachi. It works 1000 times better than any d-pad :)

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That's cool tool you got there, bro ;-)

Although personally I'd prefer an ambidextrous layout (I prefer the stick on the good right hand, while buttons which require no precision are happy with the clumsy left one ;-)

Situation is kinda reversed with fighting games though, where button precision (usually) takes priority.

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I used to use gamepads all the time back in the 90s. I played most games with them, at least platformers and the like. I had a couple joysticks as well, but I only ever used them for flight sims, so not that often.

I also remember having a couple joysticks for my C64, but they wore down really easily.

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I think one really needs to make the distinction between a flight stick and an arcade pad. The third joystick variant would be one of the crummy Atari joysticks, but by the late 80s to 90s those were pretty much useless. Those were much closer to flight sticks, but also much more primitive than what was around once Dos flight games came around.

Anywho, it's still possible to get either, and I would say overall the arcade pad is a bigger staple for hardcore fighting game fans. I'm sure there are still sales of flight sticks for simulation games such as IL2 Sturmovik, but the popularity of the genre has definitely waned, especially with little to no activity from the once powerhouse brands of Wing Commander and X-Wing.

I think the indie game Dogfighter didn't even ship with support for flight sticks. A flying game... that disallows flight sticks. Generally there's been a move away from complex space sims, with the only major releases in the genre being the X series and Eve Online, and Eve Online doesn't support Joysticks at all.

I think the success of flight sims, and space flight sims in particular, are largely a product of their era and the technology at the time. Remember, these were full 3D games at a time when that was far from the norm, and there were even trashy ports of Wing Commander to the very low spec'd SNES. The use of a simple star field allowed for the illusion of high end graphics, when really very little had to be rendered. 3D space games allowed for lower resource usage when video cards weren't the norm and ram was still in the single and double digits in MB.

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Shaikoten said:

The third joystick variant would be one of the crummy Atari joysticks, but by the late 80s to 90s those were pretty much useless.


Fuck gamepads.

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Belial said:

picture of nasty analog wobbler


Ugh. I can't imagine playing an arcade game with that. On the PC, there was also the nightmare of calibration, and some games/joystick/port combinations had just too much noise and movement play to be usable: you couldn't even 'zero in' the stick to keep your character from moving, no matter the amount of trim potting and calibration you did.

Perhaps a realist-icky behavior for a flight sim, a nightmare to play even Pac Man with.

And I think Shaikoten was referring to one of there:



Had my fair share of those (very popular even on Amigas, Amstrads etc.) but this particular design, no matter how classic, was uncomparable with a same-era arcade stick. For one, it was way too stiff, imprecise, and often only had 1-2 buttons. At most you could play Pac Man or Space Invaders on it.

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THIS is a joystick :-)

But yeah, I agree with you Maes, using joysticks was a royal PITA back in the day. And those one button joysticks sucked ass. Mouse/kb FTW

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Maes said:

picture of nasty analog wobbler

The extent of your fail is overwhelming considering you're a self-proclaimed expert in vintage tech.

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Haha! I've had two or three of these so-called "nasty analog wobblers". Or maybe they were clones. Very cheap stuff, but, did I say I've had two or three of them? Yeah, not very robust.

Then we bought a Thrustmaster. It was a lot more expensive, and it ended up kicking the bucket too, but it lasted long enough to make it a better investment on a cost-over-time viewpoint. Plus it had more buttons and axes and stuff. After that we've had some Microsoft stuff.

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Belial said:

The extent of your fail is overwhelming considering you're a self-proclaimed expert in vintage tech.


Care to explain? The design is clearly that of an analog joystick, though I see no trim pots (but that could mean they are elsewhere, e.g. under the base). Analog = utter rubbish for arcade games, period. Even if it was digital it would be just about the most impractical design for arcade gaming (too long and slow stick, awkward button placement).

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Maes said:

Analog = utter rubbish for arcade games, period.

When did he say it was for arcade games? Descent, goddamnit! :P

[EDIT] Stop sniping my posts and making my statements questionably truthful. :P

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I can't remember the number of digital sticks I had for the C64 and Amiga that looked similar to the QuickJoy there.

I can remember the number of TAC-2's I had outnumbering all of them combined though. Damned sticks could never withstand a solid Summer/Winter/World Games session.

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Xaser said:

When did he say it was for arcade games? Descent, goddamnit! :P


*looks at thread title*

Unless there's a "gamepad flight sim aficionados" community that I don't know about, I thought that the very context of this thread specifically rules out flight simmers, and thus posting pics of analog joysticks just swerves stuff OT, if not actually borderline trolling.

It's pointless to compare flight-sim type of joysticks with gamepads. It would be like talking of twist grip throttles in a thread about accelerator pedals or ship rudders. Same purpose (control), but on entirely different classes of vehicles.

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Yeah, in this case Maes was just pulling up a photo of the exact crappy joystick I was talking about. Those early Atari jobbers are pretty damn useless for anything. And shortly after that, things split between arcade pads and flight sticks, with most flight sticks being utterly worthless for games in which you didn't fly.

I do recall in the early days of FPSes there was a group that attempted to control Doom with flight joysticks. In retrospect, we can call these people dipshits. I don't know if anyone recalls trying this, but it was a less than effective strategy. But of course, WASD was not yet in vogue.

I was going to search for a video of someone poorly attempting the to control the game in this method, but I found something just about on par.

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Belial said:

black joystick with red buttons


Oh shit I remember we had one of those! I think we used it for Privateer.

Thanks for the memory trip!

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In the early 90's, I would just plug a spare Sega Genesis 3-button gamepad into my Amiga 500 and that worked perfectly.

When I bought my 486, I got one of those colorful Gravis Gamepads. It had a D-pad and four buttons, and was nice but didn't feel as good to me as the old Sega model.

These days I have a cheapass gamepad with all kinds of buttons and several sticks, but that's pretty much all a waste since I only ever use the D-pad and a few buttons. I never use it for Doom (the keyboard works much better for me). I tried it with Quake once (using one of the sticks for mouselook), but it felt awkward.

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Shaikoten said:

I do recall in the early days of FPSes there was a group that attempted to control Doom with flight joysticks.


For a brief while that I was in flight sims (2008-2009) I bought a modern flight stick and seeing that it had a crapton of bindings and analog controls (including throttle and twist rudder), I actually did try it with ZDoom once ;-)

I think I mapped stuff as follows, close to a helicopter flight sim setup with cyclic controls on the stick:

  • Direct stick movements mapped directly to Doomguy's walking directions (Forward, Backwards, Strafe Left/Right)
  • Twist-stick rudder mapped to Doomguy's rotation.
  • Throttle control mapped to freelook.
  • Various buttons fucking-around.
It was controllable, in the sense that you could, eventually get Doomguy where you wanted him to...only that you couldn't react very quickly. It made Doomguy feel exactly like flying a helicopter: sluggish and requiring complex coordination to get it to fly where you want. By increasing the sensitivity you could move faster without requiring a square meter of maneuvering space on your desk, but the slightest mistake and Doomguy went into uncontrollable dashes and spins.

At least he didn't have balance issues and couldn't crash....this could only work maybe only in a very large open map where you didn't have to do a lot of fine maneuvering.

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Joysticks are sweet for flight sims and the like, but otherwise they're kind of useless. I remember playing Star Wars Episode 1: Pod Racer with a joystick when it first came out, and fuck if it wasn't hard as hell but awesomely satisfying and immersive.

Mr. T said:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_KdblSBUlRzA/S_Qc7oLWkAI/AAAAAAAACog/sBNmFfdmHus/s1600/MicrosoftSidewinder.jpg

THIS is a joystick :-)


THAT

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Danarchy said:

I also remember having a couple joysticks for my C64, but they wore down really easily.


Really? I still have both my Epyx joysticks, those things were built like tanks, especially surviving us kids. Later we used one for the Genesis since we only had one controller. Playing Sonic 2 with a joystick worked well.

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