I'm fine with the DPAD on the screen because it works well enough. However when it comes to looking around, you have to use the screen as well and then you have to use the screen to shoot. It becomes really cumbersome, not to mention very very slow. For example playing Quake 3 on the Iphone wouldn't be a fun experience because it isn't fast enough to look around. However when playing a game where you fly like a glider or a plane, you can tilt the phone and the plane will respond. I just don't understand why you can't have that for looking around in an FPS? Like obviously give the option to use the old style of using the screen by just try experimenting a bit with the tilting. All you have to do to compensate for the movement, is have it so the camera changes on screen and play with the sensitivity and speed so you don't have to move the Iphone around too much. You could even try using the Iphones Camera to detect movement or something, so when you move to the right, then you do that in game etc etc.. I dunno I'm just sick of using the screen to do everything, especially look around which is like trying to play an FPS with a laptop mouse pad but worse. At least add a button that lets you do a 180o turn like most console FPS games have now.
Yeah, you can do that in Zombies. Also, in Hill Billy. However, I prefer the joystick controls. Much better.
You can in most FPS's... it's just that most people AFAIK don't prefer playing that way. I know I don't... in fact, you're the first person I've met who prefers this. Which games would you like to see this in?
Doom Classic REALLY annoys me in this regard. They have three control schemes - the first has a d-pad in the bottom-left corner, which lets you go forward, back and turn your view left and right (anyone who knows anything about playing an FPS will tell you this is not a good control scheme), and strafing is controlled by tilting the iPhone. I'd honestly be surprised if anyone could get through Doom using these controls unless they were playing on easy. But that's why there are alternatives, of course. The second control scheme gives you two d-pads, one at the bottom left that lets you move forward, backward and strafe, and one at the bottom-right for turning your view. This would be the best of the three, if it wasn't for the completely idiotic firing controls. Tap to fire, you would guess? WRONG. Instead, you have a fire button in the top-left corner. Unlike a trigger, this isn't in a place easily accessible to your other fingers, so you have to let go of half of the controls whenever you want to fire - imagine playing Halo and having to let go of the right stick whenever you want to fire. Yeah, you probably wouldn't last long. But wait, the fire button is actually movable, so there's a few workarounds that might have worked, if it weren't for yet more stupid design choices in id's part. You might have thought you could just dispense with the second d-pad, place the fire button in the bottom-right corner, and tilt the iPhone to turn your view - only you can't, because for the tilting controls for control scheme B are exactly that same as for A. Tilting still strafes instead of turning your view as you might logically expect. You might also think a solution could be to move it closer to the right d-pad, to simulate a tap-to-fire system. But guess what? That won't work either, because the fire button doesn't work the way you'd expect a button to work - instead of requiring a definite tap/tap-hold to work, like almost all buttons on the iPhone, if you move even the slightest part of your finger over the button (without tapping it or at all removing your finger from the screen), it still acts as if you're holding it down. If you have the button anywhere but at the top of the screen, you're going to end up wasting a lot of ammo from accidentally moving your thumb over the fire button while looking around. So in fact, control scheme B is downright unworkable. Control scheme C is a (failed) attempt to merge scheme B with the old iPod click wheel paradigm - it's exactly the same as B except you turn your view by rotating a wheel in the bottom right corner instead of a d-pad, which doesn't work particularly well and does nothing to remedy the problems with those controls. At the end of the day you're basically either stuck using control scheme A or else you're holding your iPhone in such an uncomfortable way that playing for more than 5 minutes is bound to give you cramp. Someone at id really hasn't got their head screwed on straight.
