Have you picked up any habits that are no longer relevant?

I've always thought that modern FPS games just felt a little off when it came to how their character moved. I could never put my finger on it, but no matter how fast the character was, I always felt like they were slow. Even the new DOOM, which was blistering fast felt strange and I could never put my finger on why. Yesterday, I played a game on my Xbox that felt right to me: Perfect Dark. I wondered how that could be, because objectively The Doom Slayer is definitely faster than Joanna Dark. It struck me during a long hallway. During combat, the games feels about the same, but during down time, she seems much faster. That's because when the game was ported to the modern controller (it was original an N64 game) they specifically programmed in "strafe running" where your diagonal motion is significantly faster than axial motion. This is why it felt right to me and everything else felt wrong, I realize that I always run diagonally and my brain is expecting the 45 degree motion to be faster than it is because modern games normalize a vector rather than adding forward and side to side motion like old ones.

I also realize that I twist as I bunny hop no matter what the game. I picked it up a long time ago playing Quake 1, where doing so could me you really really fast.

Do you guys have any weird habits or muscle memory quirks from playing old games that just aren't relevant anymore?

 

I use a custom keybinding for all PC FPS games, that is so different from WASD I can't really play an FPS game if there is a bug in their keybinding system that prevents me from using my control scheme. I created it for Quake, prior to WASD even being "invented" and years before it became the defacto standard.

Having used it for more than two decades, I have no desire to get good with WASD.

 

This one is not from playing games, but rather developing them. I was working on a non-Unity project using Visual Studio where pressing F5 saves, builds and runs the program. Now, using Visual Studio Code with Unity, I often find myself pressing F5 to play my game.

 

Previously (not really long ago), lot of pc games didn't handle well changinc shortcuts. Lot of em use wasd, but as i am french, and have an azerty keyboard, it's kinda not cool. It would be the same for you as using ZQSD, but as i wasn't comfortable with changing my keyboard layout (and have trouble finding which letters is which when i had to use another one for, let's say, interact with an object), i got used to it. I actually find it even more ergonomic (unless i got to use both "up" and "space" at the same time, which doesn't happen a lot), i have more space for my arm, more access to some keys. Even now when game support custom key binding, i often change it to that wierd layout.



I loved perfect dark too, and in general i love "unrealistic" movements (just like going diagonally making you go faster, or making weird jumps in ocarina of times to go faster than by running), you are actually doing something with your hands instead of just pushing in the direction you want to go to, which paradoxically makes it being closer to running in real life, as you're not just saying you want to go in a direction, but actually making it.

 

Does expecting to read the physical manual before I start playing count?

 

Reloading. After. Every. Shot.