May 6
Coke Sign 'Top Skater' Arcade
seen from Thailand
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seen from Sweden
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seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
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seen from United Arab Emirates
seen from Sweden
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Mexico
Coke Sign 'Top Skater' Arcade
From: Top Skater
Top Skater (AM3 - Sega Model 2 - 1997)
Character art from Sega's 1997 skateboarding game, Top Skater.
THE PILE PRESENTS: Game On - Hawaii, Part 4: Splish Splash | 8/25/02
SPOILER: None of the games played in this episode are the water slide level from Virtual Bart.
So there's a Non VR mod for Half Life Alyx and once you change the keyboard bindings from the nonsense russian hacker man set up by default into something that's easier to internalize it's actually pretty playable (You control the hands directly and with macros, so alot of the core gameplay is still there and reloading manually is an interesting challenge when you get used to it). We'll probably get a more dramatic reimagining of the gameplay by someone when Source 2 SDK launches, though.
I think that’s kind of dumb, though. Like, no joke, that game is going to be a lot less fun without motion controls. There is so much physicality to the input that you are going to be losing tons of what defines that game’s feeling.
Like, let’s take reloading weapons for example. In a normal shooter you’d play on PC or console, reloading your weapon is a simple, singular button press. You hit R, or X, or Square, or whatever, and the reload animation plays until you have a full clip again.
In Half-Life Alyx, you have to physically reload the weapon. That means pushing a button to eject the old clip, moving your hands to insert a new clip, and pushing a different button to prime the weapon so that it’s ready to fire. It’s not an animation, it’s a process, and the process is important. A high-stress situation becomes even more tense when you forget to eject the old clip, drop the new clip, or don’t slot it in to the chamber right the first time. You need that tactile feeling of using both your hands at the same time to complete one action for it to matter.
If you convert it to work like a “normal” game, you simply will not have as much fun.
Think of it like an arcade game, right. Back in the late 90′s, Sega put out an arcade game called Top Skater.
If you watch this video and think this game looks great, heads up: it’s not. Emulating Top Skater in something like Mame sucks. Even by arcade game standards, it’s an insanely simple game. But that’s because if you emulate Top Skater, you’re missing 90% of the experience, which was this:
The Top Skater arcade cabinet featured a moving skateboard controller. All input was routed through the board. It’s how you steered, jumped, and did tricks, depending on how you leaned or jerked the board. It was a full body experience.
By emulating Top Skater and converting its inputs in to simple button presses, the game completely ceases to be fun, because the fun is using your legs and your arms. Something similar happens if you’ve ever emulated a lightgun shooter like House of the Dead -- when you have an on-screen crosshair and a simple reload button that you can mash between every shot, it takes away a lot of the point. You need a gun in your hands, you need to blindly estimate your shots, and you need the physicality of breaking your current aim and shooting off screen to reload your weapon. That’s the whole point of the game.
You cannot replicate that with buttons or macros. This is one area where motion controls are actually completely necessary.
Playing Alyx on a keyboard is missing the point.
