I picked up Control for a song the other day; I figured I'd be playing it pretty slowly given how few my opportunities to play games without a sidecar[1] are, but I didn't realize just how slowly I'd be starting: this game's controls are my enemy. In general, I try to stay away from using WASD/keyboard movement; my left hand RSI flares up when I do it for too long, plus I've found controllers are rather comfy. The problem with controllers is right stick camera is literally the worst way to aim accurately and I have never understood how people do it competently for shooters. Thankfully, I have a secret weapon: the power of gyros. I picked up an 8bitdo ultimate a few years ago specifically for this problem; it lets me pipe Switch input to Steam, let Steam turn that into steam input, and make my gyro point as a mouse to get the Power of Splatoon on my PC. It takes a little config[2], but I have rocked a good number of hours in Risk of Rain 2 and Deep Rock Galactic this way.
Readers, the problem is RoR2 and DRG both sort of support dual-input. Control does not. at all. In DRG and RoR2, you get some button indicators wobbling between keyboard and controller but it is otherwise fine to point with a mouse at the same time as moving and pointing with joysticks. Control, on the other hand, fully drops all inputs coming from a gamepad joystick when the mouse is engaged. To get Splatoon-like inputs relatively quickly in other games, I've just enabled gyro-as-mouse, tweaked sensitivity, and bound a button to hold to disable gyro[3]. It takes a little bit of time to identify what input I want to lose/rearrange (usually I claim rstickclick/R3 for disable gyro--I'll bind it to a back paddle and it's usually only crouch or ping or rock and stone or whatever that's easy to relocate or put under a chord of two buttons) but I've never really had to explore the full gamut of steam input options.
Gyro-as-joystick is an option, letting me stay in gamepad only mode, but less than a secohd of it told me it was just as bad as I remembered. It's hard to research "gyro controls for control" without mostly getting general gyro control information, but someone out there tried to explore the full gammut of settimgs for this mode and concluded Control is a particularly bad candidate for some reason. I just know it's really slow and wonky and non-intuitive. This means the best solution is to just.... remap all of the controller buttons to keyboard and lose the analog movement speed adjustment a joystick gives, which. While sad is not at all a deal breaker. What is a dealbreaker is what one does with the right stick--pure gyro is not a nice way to navigate, but joystick-as-mouse is nearly as bad as gyro-as-joystick. At some point you'd think I'd just give up and play keyboard and mouse given the frequency and length of play sessions will be few and short but. I love a good rabbit hole to fall down[^4].
There's another method of pointing with a right joystick that only works when you have a way to look up and down--say, with gyro. It's called Flick Stick, and it was invented by Jibb Smart, the guy who made JoyShockMapper (another gyro input option apart from Steam), Fortnite's gyro control scheme, and is a major gyro advocate in gamerspheres (and who is also another former Cohost user!) Flickstick makes your joystick a rotation compass. You wanna turn 90° left? Point the stick left. You wanna make a 180°? Point the stick down. After the initial point (the flick), you can sweep the stick along its gate to operate it as a semi-normal joystick input locked to a single plane to refine your angle/keep turning. It's funky and not how I operate under Splatoon Rules, but it seemed my best option in this scenario so I dug into how to use it with Steam.
Turning it on is dead easy; what is not is calibrating it to actually turn you correctly so the direction you're facing corresponds with the stick. Basically, you have to match a setting's value in pixels with the number of pixels your mouse would run over to make you do a 360°[4]. That way it can do wizardmath to turn you exactly however much rotation you flick to. There's at least one calculator out there that's supposed to find this value for me, but I decided to do the calibration myslef--at least partially due to the fact the way you do it is extremely funny: you map a button to the special Steam Input "Do a 360", choose a nice edge to look at in game, and do a pirouette. If you're not looking at the same point, adjust the number lower or higher based on which way you overshot till a full spin lands you at exactly the same point. Here's where my next pitfall lay: the spin at its default settings is so fast, you don't know how many times you spun around.
I don't really get how the pixels in the setting map to the game/mouse/whatever--is it resolutionbound as well as mouse-sensitivity-settin-in-game? I have no idea. When I turned on flickstick the number was something around 20,000 and so I went "ok, let's just adjust from here" and got a number that made me return to the same point. The number is shared by a gyro setting, and it seemed gyro was surprisingly sensitive, but not so much it was uncomfortable, especially after lowong a sensitivity modifier. The part that seemed vaguely wrong was how flicking left or right didn't seem to be exactly 90° rotation. It also seemed rather wobbly/fast. So I spent a bunch of time fiddling with the sensitivity and deadzones and things and got it to a point where it felt highly sensitive but possibly playable--surely I was just sloppy and not quite accurately pointing left or right. I ran off to the next gun fight to test in action and. It. it was not playable. It was slightly nauseating, inaccurate, and made me not want to touch the right stick at all.
Recall I am doing all of this testing in short bursts, often at night[5]. I had climbed to the two hour mark on Steam and was rather confused at how my flickstick did not seem to be behaving like the gameplay-with-inputs-shown I had seen. I finally found another calibration video where the guy suggested turning on the setting that programatically applies a diamond gate to your stick so you can only flick the cardinal directions and doing quarter turns to verify four lefts make a circle. Even locked to 90° turns I was not getting a neat right angle. That was... Odd. A 360° was dead on, though, what was going on? Somewhere in playing with this I suddenly realized: Jesse was doing multiple turns. My pixel number was tremendously too large and my poor little Director was pulling off olympic level gymnastics in the blink of an eye. No wonder she had a headache.
After dropping the calibration number massively (and then upping sensitivity everywhere since it was suddenly enormously sluggish for some reason we will never know why), I felt an immense sense of calm: I could control control.
Now to get some more time to actually play it
[^4] my brain supplied "worm trail" here and. You know what? I might swap to that
sometimes I wonder how other gamerparents do more mature games and then I remember most people stay up late. How do they do that ↩︎
and almost always some sort of button layering or chording ↩︎
there's actually a "reset camera" input you can bind too, but I've found on a PC game it's generally better to be able to fully stop gyro--for menus especially, but you can also just stop gyro, recente your controller, and keep rolling just fine. I don't really do any advanced 180° look tricks with the recenter button in Splatoon. ↩︎
or. Something? The unit in Steam is pixel, and other than that I don't really get it, which is exactly why I ran into an issue you'll see in just a second ↩︎
and ah. at least one session on the clock. It was eating at me. ↩︎