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The negativity toward Z/X controls for PC games
Take Indie Gaming Bingo for example. Why is this one of their squares?
Or, more generally speaking, why is this seen as a (for lack of a better term) "weird indie thing", rather than as a very nice mapping of a multi-button console-controller-style control scheme to a computer keyboard?
Comments
Z/X doesn't work very well for me on my keyboard when it comes to holding them and other buttons simultaneously.
Not that that's particularly relevant.
In any case, to answer your question, I think it's less a matter of it being seen as weird or bad, and more to do with the fact that bigger (i.e. not indie) games just don't tend to use that control scheme. I agree that it's a decent choice if you only need a couple buttons and don't need the mouse.
Perhaps it isn't so much the buttons as well as the fact that it's a staple control scheme of cut-and-paste retro-indie games.
I have "holding lots of buttons" trouble when it comes to WASD too, as well as the normal direction keys on a keyboard. It doesn't matter in the course of normal gameplay because I rarely have to do more than two directions at once. However, when you're talking about smacking arrows in Stepmania stepfiles that are not actually danceable...
That said, I'm very fond of ZXC/ASD control schemes since I'm rather familiar with emulation, and it just makes sense to turn XYBA into SCXZ, and LR into AD. Plus now you can do all those things you would do on a console much easier since you're using different fingers.
I usually have to remap the arrow keys to 8546 on the numpad for any game that requires me to hit keys while also holding directions.
For Stepmania, XCVB works for me though ZXCV does not (for solo I have to use ASD456 though, and I have no idea what keys I'd use if I was going to play 7key).
For SNES games I use XZSAWQ (for ABXYRL), which I guess could be inconvenient, but... I dunno.
For single-player stepmania I actually just use the normal direction keys. If I want a proper challenge, I do it with one hand; if I just want to hit everything, I use two hands.
Curious that you don't mirror-image the four buttons from the SNES controller. I find that I always do that consistently, regardless of the console I'm emulating.
Stepmania files are usually made with the intent that the player is playing with all their keys arranged in a line, and that they're using two hands to play. So... yeah.
And the buttons of a SNES controller are arranged in a diamond, not a... whatever sort of shape WASD is. WASZ or something would be a decent approximation of it, but that also sounds like an awful control scheme.
Well I keep the orientation correct if I use SCXZ for my XYBA diamond (except mirrored). Your arrangement...hmm, actually, if I mirrored that it would put jump (B) on Z and attack (Y) on X. That wouldn't actually be that bad. Though where would I put L and R? W and D I guess...
I still like using "outer" for jump and "inner" for attack.