Every genre has its defining moments. Remember the first platformer featuring double jump? Recall the first fighting game that made you block the opponent's hits? Every genre has them, the small inventions that forever change how people play the game. Take Wolfenstein 3D. In your imagination a fuzzy place of retro goodness, but in reality a game that did not even allow the player to sidestep while turning. Only while holding down a button was the player able to strafe, which was useful but stopped him from turning at the same time. Doom introduced the iconic movement that still separates the experienced player from the gaming infant: circle strafing. Quake went one step further  introducing freelook. From this point on, the controls of fps were cast in stone. People were to move with one hand while looking with the other. Punishment for defiance was loosing every single game of deathmatch by a landslide.

The mouse became the weapon of choice. Its properties were perfect for what was asked from the input. Start the freelooking motion at any time in any direction and more importantly stop it at any time. All of this while matching the speed of the turning to the speed of the mouse movement. Inputs became short bursts of motions, the hand was mimicing the eye. Input scheme and games were in perfect harmony. If people died, it was due to their lack of skill. Beyond that point, games were able to grow more complex and introduce tactics, optimized routes and timing to the mix. Quake 3 is still the best example for such fps gameplay. No matter how well you can run and mouseaim, the game will heavily favour the player with the better strategy.

After Quake 3, fps games hit a brick wall. Because the year after Quake 3 another game emerged: Halo. It became iconic as a franchise, however, it was also forced to implement one deadly conceit: joypad controls. The central lie around joypad controls is that the player just needs to train them, the way he trained freelooking before and we all know that took a while to getting used to. Well, wrong! The joypad has a nasty side effect: aftertouch. Stop moving the mouse and the screen will stop. Stop pushing the joypad in one direction and it will snap back to the middle. During the time it takes for the joypad to reach the "no input" position, the joypad will continue to send input signals. In the end those signals are what stands between the pixel perfection of the mouse and the imprecision of the joypad. Any player aiming to dial in the target perfectly, now has to account for that aftertouch, therefore stopping the input early. That is highly counterintuitive to what the mouse player does. No longer is the hand mimicking the eye, it also has to compute the amount of pixel-delay. Especially when people start moving, or move in small invtervalls, this will become very frustrating.

The solution for console games were weapons doing spread damage and gameplay heavily relying on positioning (even more than in Quake3). No longer did people hit a pre-defined single pixel, instead players hit a random location inside a circle around the center of the screen. That random element might excite people believing in "realism" and bullet spread, but for the hardcore believing in "precision through skill" it was absolute horror. It was that random bullet spread which unltimately eliminated the need to perfectly target the opponent, solving the problem of wobbly joypad controls. Even on the PC the Quake pixel perfection hardcore of former times is now dilluted into randomness. Being the best aim in the game no longer provides people with the edge. The single player campaigns of shooters are also watered down. The reaction time demanded from the player takes into account that joypad users need more time to align the perfect shot. Play Lost Planet on the PC and you will experience it yourself. A boss which is hard to aim at and take down on console, is easy as pie when shot at by a mouse player on the PC.

Joypads need to bring the mouse precision experience to console games. Fast, pixel-accurate aiming rewarding the skillful player. To achieve this feature, the aftertouch has to go. The freelook motion has to stop the milisecond in which the joypad starts snapping back. Each time the joypad user changes direction, the position of the directional change will be registered as new relative zero. Stop pushing the pad even further to the right and your look will stop. Pushing the joypad to maximum position will not cause that effect, but move it back to the middle just a bit and the movement will stop. Now the joypad player has regained the control to stop each turn with pefect precision and not be at the mercy of guessing the right aftertouch. Letting the joypad snap back into the middle, will bring relative zero back to the position it originally was. Turning speeds also have to go up; each game needs a sensitivity option. Ultimately that is fair to those who are now only held back by grueling slow freelook speeds.

Of course it would be easier to simply give in to the mouse on consoles. Holding the joypad in one hand, while mouseaiming with the other hand is not half as bad as it sounds. It will work just fine. In an age of plastic guitars one would assume that at least giving the player the option to connect a mouse is on top of the "pleasing the hardcore agenda". Even the first PlayStation had a mouse and playing Command and Conquer with it was great. Sometimes there is no reason to reinvent the wheel for the sake of sticking with joypads. Simply use the wheel that worked before. People got it anyway.