Playing Inverted

Hours and hours of my early gaming life was spent playing Wing Commander, X-Wing, Tie-Fighter, and Stunt Island. (One of my earliest memories was playing the original Falcon on my XT.) In those games, the Y-axis -- the up/down axis -- was always inverted. Pull down on the joystick and the nose of the craft would incline; push the stick forward and the craft would angle downward.

The control method ingrained itself so deep into my brain that when consoles began to come packed with controllers that featured dual thumb sticks -- and even before that with the N64 controller -- I played with the Y-axis inverted. (Playing with mouse and keyboard, this issue just goes away.)

Gears of War, TimeSplitters, Prototype 2, Halo, LA Noire, Batman: Arkham City, Rainbow Six Vegas, Stranglehold, Max Payne, the list goes on... games and series that I've played inverted. It helps to cement that Y-axis quirk that was established so long ago. So, when I come across a game, especially a modern game, that doesn't feature the option to make that switch (or even makes it the default control preference) it's enough to completely stonewall any enjoyment I might otherwise squeeze out of the game.

Right now I'm thinking specifically of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. The PC version of the game.

Mass Effect 3 - Report 4

I'm definitely zeroing in on the final moments of Mass Effect 3 -- I've finally returned to Earth, which amazingly has not been completely obliterated (for a pretty limp reason) -- and it makes me realize how badly I miss space combat games along the lines of Wing Commander and X-Wing/Tie-Fighter.

There's this great scene between two massive assemblies of ships above Earth that made my gamer heart pang for the days when Hobbes was revealed to be a traitor and when transport #7 was that one that needed to be disabled with ion fire.

And now that I'm zeroing in on the final push, I realize just how hard I pushed through the story of the game rather than meandering around the ship talking to my squad. It wasn't but two missions before that trek home that I figured out where I could upgrade my weapons! And, man, did that ever come in handy. Suddenly enemies were turned into tin cans and even the toughest enemies, the Atlas mech, were hardly any effort with a Claymore shotgun upgraded to level 5. It makes me wonder what else I missed along the way. What other bit of space weaponry did I miss? Extra powers? Side missions?