Trigger Happy
with the action. But there is no reason why such an arrangement should persist.
Early sports games like Daley Thompson’s Decathlon actually boasted a far more compelling
physical interface with the notorious “joystickwaggling” method: the faster you could waggle your joystick from side to side, the faster your character would sprint or skate. This system has been resurrected for Konami’s brilliant multi-player athletics game International Track and Field 2 (1999), except that the player must now press two buttons alternately at very high speed. But Sony’s present-day controller for the PlayStation, the Dual Shock pad with two thumbcontrolled analogue joysticks, has so far been woefully underused in just the types of game it could revolutionize in a similar way.
An analogue joystick provides far greater sensitivity and range of control. The old-style digital joysticks only recognized “on” or “off” states of any particular direction; the analogue joystick recognizes degrees of change. You can move, for example, slightly right or fully right, with degrees in between, which may correspond to various velocities between a slow walk and a run, or various rotational positions of
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