An Attempt To Solve The iPhone's Joysticklessness, Radically

January 21st, 2010, 19:58 Posted By: wraggster



There's a big problem with video games on Apple's iPod Touch and iPhone. There's no joystick to control them with, no directional pad to press. Just glass to touch and a device to tilt. At last, there's a strange solution.

Prepare to welcome to the world the two-directional virtual joystick, a virtual slider rendered on the bottom left corner of a major upcoming iPhone game, Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed II Discovery. It is used to move the game's hero, the Renaissance Italy assassin Ezio de Auditore through his 2D, side-scrolling world. Under the player's thumb, the slider "moves" left, "moves" right and ... that is all. (We recently previewed the game, slider and all.)

In the logic of technological advancement, the two-directional virtual joystick makes no sense. Since the days of Atari joysticks and arcade machines, people have been able to move gaming characters in four or even eight directions. Pac-Man needed to support movement in four directions. Galaga kept players moving in just two directions, but the stick at least tilted more ways than that. Super Mario Bros supported left, right, up and down on a four-directional "d-pad" on the original Nintendo controller. And in the 90s, gaming consoles began to use analog control sticks that supported leaning and nudging in dozens of directions.

Joysticks and directional pads and analog sticks have proven so essential to video games that, for a year, developers of games on the joystickless, pad-less, stick-less iPhone have been rendering virtual versions of the things in the lower left corners of their game screens. They've been asking gamers to go with it, to pretend and to tolerate the twin aggravations of one's thumb winds up covering part of the screen and the fact that you can't feel virtual control sticks.

So much for the opportunity to admire the big screen of the iPhone in its entirety or to have nuanced directional control of a game on it.

http://kotaku.com/5453718/an-attempt...ness-radically

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