An open letter to Jeff Minter fans
Hi, Minter lovers! As you’ll know, Jeff tends to be… well, let’s say “a little prickly” about constructive criticism, and especially the sort that comes from me. So could one of you perhaps be the best friend that tells you when you need to use more deodorant, and point out to him in the nicest possible way that he can’t do controls?
Jeff’s history of often staggeringly fantastic games is regularly blighted by a consistent propensity for terrible, terrible ideas about how to control them. Who could forget, for example, the genius insight that what Defender really needed was mouse control and no Hyperspace? Messed-up controls were the one ugly, hairy wart on the face of iOS Minotron, and now he’s done it again with the ludicrous decision to FORCE players to hold their iPhone diagonally to play his latest release, Caverns Of Minos.
I love every single aspect of the design of the actual game, and I’d love to be able to tell my thousands of beloved WoSland readers to buy it, but actually playing it is like trying to race a Grand Prix in a Reliant Robin with a flat rear tyre – you can DO it, but it’s absolutely no fun and you won’t win. The control choice (steering in the bottom-left corner, thrust in top-right) serves absolutely no purpose other than to make the game awkward and unpleasant to play, forcing the player to constantly be distractedly thinking about the fact that what they’re doing is holding a little electronic device in a contorted and unnatural grip, rather than heroically retrieving stuff from wacky space caverns in a far-off galaxy.
Sure, it means you can see what’s in the bottom-right corner, which is nice sometimes, but it also means you CAN’T see what’s in the TOP-right corner, which is equally vital in the many levels which require you to thrust back up the screen. So you gain nothing in return for your discomfort, except motion sickness as the unstable grip makes your iPhone constantly wobble around, and lost energy as the imbalance makes it needlessly harder to judge your movement and you spend half your time banging into the sides, rather than being killed by the baddies.
Is there ANY good reason why there couldn’t be an option to put Thrust in the place where absolutely all sane people put it, ie the bottom right? Alternatively, is there any reason the entire right-hand side of the screen couldn’t be Thrust, allowing players to choose for themselves which position they found comfortable, or even adjust as the situation demanded? No, there isn’t. So why on Earth would you want to handicap your game so horribly and needlessly just for the sake of being different?
(In fact, come to think of it, why isn’t there a tilt-and-tap option like the one included in the terrific GoatUp, the most playable and enjoyable of Llamasoft’s iOS games to date? The games have identical control requirements – left/right movement and a single action button – and GoatUp offered a variety of methods to suit the player, so why throw most of them away now? Caverns Of Minos has an Info doc that boasts of a “LLAMASOFT POLICY” of “No horrid onscreen joysticks”, but that’s exactly what you’re made to use here – the fixed joystick is still on the screen, it’s just invisible.)
I own almost 5,000 iOS games, many of them portrait-mode thrusty shooters, and there’s a reason that precisely ONE of them (Atari’s first ballsed-up port of Centipede, since deleted) has made players simultaneously hold/move/tap opposing corners of the screen – it’s because it’s a fucking awful idea. There’s no point in me telling him, because the silly old fool will probably take it as a compliment and do every game he ever makes in the future that way, out of sheer petted-lip spite. So please, for the sake of everyone, could one of you have a go instead? Ta.
Whoa there horsie! – Don't you know that NOBODY DOES iOS CONTROLS AS WELL AS MINTER! It must be true, he says so himself!
Look, it's even in the app description – "Caverns of Minos features the exemplary playability and excellent controls that are expected of every llamasoft game."
i think some of his fans tried recently and are now gone….
tried it on iCade?
Nope, my iPad has been eating through battery charges recently since iMAME and the iCade, and it's currently regenerating. Should have a go this afternoon, really looking forward to it.
I suspect this will be a much better experience on the iPad, and stellar with the iCade.
Looks like it allows you to touch anywhere on the right-side of the screen to thrust when playing on the iPad. Why it should enforce the "corners-only" rule on the iPhone, I don't know.
FACT: Minter has programmed face recognition into this game.
In the interests of fairness, I've played it on the iCade now and it IS brilliant.
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