Total Control

[metal_mutley]

Yeah, does sound better. I may give it a go... .

[Chief H]

Two from me:

Halo - everything just felt so natural, ulike any other fps I played with a pad. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark almost felt sluggish due to the grating nature of ageing N64 sticks. The friction of older, more used sticks reminded you of your interface with the console. You'd feel that you could push harder to run faster at times or that slight adjustments were finicky with large dead-zones. Difficult to compare that with Xbox pads that have yet to age, but when compared to the PS2 sticks (which are too light, imo), the Xbox interface feels the most antural. The weighting is perfect too. The 'Chief moves as quickly as you feel he ought to and looks as you expect him to given your thumb movements on the pad. I forget I'm holding a pad at all and simply think of pure control: I don't shift my thumb right. I LOOK to my right.

PGR - controls balanced on a knifedge. an edge you're asked to test. the cars perform with reassuring consistency that you can quite simply throw your vehicle into a corner sideways and know pretty much where its going to end up....as long as you measure the throttle and counter-steer the way you want to. and then there's the mid-corner decisions you have to make given the circumstances: you pick up kudos by sliding on a corner you don't usually get kudos for. Do you leave the counter-steer later and get a few more points or go for speed by taking the fastest exit? Have you left enough time spare to make such diversions from the racing line? Are you good enough to keep the car balanced in a slide long enough to chain the kudos? You wouldn't be able to do such things if you were wrestling with the car and trying to second-guess where it's going next. Half the beauty is the simplicity of it all. Once again, the peripheral is forgotten. Brake, steering, handbrake, accelerator, more steering. All this happens in the speed of a thought process. Feedback is also excellent - underteer or oversteer is something you begin to feel more than you see. The moment your car doesn't turn as far as it usually ought to, you know that you've just overcooked it and left the brakes too late. Sublime

[rjpageuk]

I must have played Mario Circuit 1 with Koopa Troopa roughly 1000 times on time trial

You should have been using Bowser/Donkey Kong .

But yeah, the control in Super Mario Kart is amazingly good - powersliding round corners was so perfectly realised.

I put literally hundreds of hours of practise into this game, and managed a time of around 1:02 (PAL) on Mario Circuit 1, which was nothing compared to some people!

[evilmatt]

I'm with Popo and Chief, for me Halo ceased to be playing a game with a joypad, I was Master Chief. The only game for a long time that I have felt so in tune with the interface. And that's even with the original pad!

[chosen_one666]

I'm going back sometime for mine. Sonic Chaos on the Sega Master System. I could get through that game without losing a single ring or life. I could get all of the Chaos Emeralds without thinking, and if I did miss one it was because I miss-timed something and overshot where I needed to be. By the end of the game I would usually have around 30 lives and 12 continues.

Sad thing is though, I've never been able to do similar with games I've had recently. Not sure why. Maybe it's because I don't spend as much time on a game as I used to.

[Papercut]

Mercenary on the good old C64.

Mercenary III on the Amiga.

maybe Alternate Reality on the 800XL (more freedom of identity than freedom of movement, if that makes sense).

I don't like the collision detection in most modern fps games, it never feels like the view is actually attached to a body, so I would say none of them.

Descent is probably an exception, I do feel like I'm controlling a craft in that game.

Super Monkey Ball is a good one.

Pilot Wings and particularly Pilot Wings 64 give a good sense of freedom and involvement.

I thought the controls in Mario 64 were over-sensitive and the inertia bugged me, so no to that too.