There’s a game on Xbox Live Indie (nee Community) Games called Onslaught – it’s not to be confused with the WiiWare FPS Onslaught, made by Hudson, which is an interesting game in it’s own right; this Onslaught, by Hewson (no relation) is a port of an 1989 Amiga/ST game, a weird hybrid melange of a game from when Western developers (esp. in Coninental Europe, which is where Onslaught hails) were being brushed against creatively by Japan but hadn’t yet began the full on aping that would eventually melt the life out of the Japanese games industry (see Tokyo Game Show 2009) as the Western industry refined into the myopic knife-sharpening murderist it currently is. To give you a brief picture, somewhere in the vast digital wilderness between this Onslaught and Koei’s Dynasty Warriors series is the game I’m looking for, and that game might be called Peter Jackson’s JRR Tolkien’s Aragorn at Helm’s Deep The Game, the sequel of which, Peter Jackson’s JRR Tolkien’s Gandalf at Minas Tirith will have a really broken magic system and generally not be quite as good.

Hudson’s Onslaught, before I forget it, is an interesting little game. Mainly because it’s a Japanese first person shooter, and it’s weird seeing the Japanese influences that burst through the cracks in the pavement of this quintessentially Western genre (pattern based enemy encounters, aliens not army men to be slaughtered, squad mates who are more like Options, in the Gradius sense, than like Tom Clancy squadies), but also since it’s interesting to see whether the Wii audience will bite given the bare bones of a hardcore genre for five quid or so, kind of a test to see whether the Core Game can still talk politely to girls after a 48 hour Warhammer 40k marathon. The game’s spiritual successor, Water Warfare, which asks the same questions but voiced by Stephen Fry rather than Noel Gallagher (and about multiplayer FPS, which I can’t find an appropriate metaphor for) is a funny little thing too, it’s also better, if you don’t mind me saying.

But back to the other Onslaught. So, ignoring (in an abstract way since I am going to write about it, right now) the fact that this is a decades old European platform/shootemup/wargame available for a couple of Euro to a massive audience who largely don’t give a shit, from a staggeringly deep library of games just like it that could theoretically follow in it’s bloody and muddy footsteps (I’ll take Metal Mutant, Tanglewood and Pandora to start, thanks), what got me thinking about this game is just how massively more appealing it is to me to play it with a Xbox 360 pad.

Shigeru Miyamoto recently said that he thought the key problem of Natal (and I guess that means EyeToy before it) is that the gamer needs something in his or her hands to experience any meaningful tactile feedback from a game. I agree (to an extent), and wonder out loud just how much this kind of thinking was effecting me as I played Onslaught again for the first time in nearly twenty years (Christ). Anyway, I was never really a home computer boy – I was a console kid. Sure, there’d been an Apple II in my house since I was born, but it was the Master System that made me a gamer. Spectrums, C64s and Amstrad CPC464s were all thinks I played at friends houses, and generally thought were alright. When later on I got an Atari ST, it never really eclipsed the Master System for me, and the Megadrive and SNES came swiftly to kick it out of the limelight. The main reason I didn’t play many games, certainly many arcade games on the ST that is that the various joysticks for the system just never felt right. Control was always a little sluggish, a little simplistic, leaving you with the feeling you were imposing on the computer, asking it to do something which it just didn’t feel comfortable with. Pads (which back then were one of the things that distinguished console play from home computer play) were the default and propper way to control the Master System, and in comparison felt responsive and empowering. I still feel the same way about PC games, and I play emulated games largely on a modded Xox, which despite not being their native platform, makes them feel better – on a console – with pads.

Somewhere in all this is the idea that there is some kind of distance between the player and the console (be it digital, physical or cognitive) when playing with a non-native controller – EyeToy always felt so clunky navigating the menus. My ST always seemed to want to tell me that though it loved me, it just wasn’t into joypads in the same way as I was. Try playing SFII on a keyboard and, if there’s any justice in the world, a flock of screaming robot harpies will rend your heretical flesh. Don’t worry, there’s no justice and as such no harpies, but I wonder aloud to myself whether Natal games, or Sony Wand games, will ever really feel right on there non-dedicated hardware. Maybe in the future they’ll be some kind of CamToyBox (don’t google that if you’re not looking for porn) that we’ll download old Natal games onto and say “man, this is more like it, this is how it’s meant to be played”. Or maybe I’m wrong.