Bungie hates me.
Bungie hates me.
Well, not me specifically. They just hate everyone who’s left-handed. I’m assured it’s nothing personal.
I’ve been getting pretty into Halo 2 multiplayer, but the controls are awkward for me. The left thumbstick is movement, and the right thumbstick is aiming. The triggers fire, and the buttons on the right do everything else. Basically, the left hand just makes you run around, and everything else is loaded onto the right hand. You generally don’t need to be both aiming with the stick and pressing the buttons at the same time– either they do things like ‘reload’ or ’switch weapons’ where you can’t fire anyway, or they’re letting you jump, so you just need to be moving.
My aim is much better with my left hand than with my right, so I’d like to be able to swap the sticks. Fine, the game will do that if I pick the ’southpaw’ stick setup. Unfortunately, if I do that I’m stuck trying to move with the right thumbstick while simultaneously pressing the buttons with my right hand. You generally need to move while jumping in order to go anywhere useful, and if you’re reloading or switching weapons you probably want to dodge incoming fire so you can avoid an embarrassing death. If I had two right thumbs, this would be fine. Maybe my parents should have exposed me to more radiation and hopef for mutations.
The game will also helpfully let me switch to a southpaw button layout, but all this does is swap the triggers so that the left trigger fires the right-hand weapon and the right trigger fires the left-hand weapon. Huh? Who wants that? Who does it even make sense to? I was hoping that maybe the A/B/X/Y button functions would be mapped to the four directions of the left-hand-side D-pad, but no such luck.
Did Bungie even have any left-handed people test this? How is it possible that nobody looked at the southpaw button config and said “Wow, this is pretty goddamn stupid. We should change that.”?
I know I’m not the only one irritated by this — there are scattered posts about it in the Bungie forums, all helpfully answered by the foul-mouthed twelve year olds who are the scourge of gaming forums everywhere. They suggest that left-handed people “stop being so gay”, by the way. I’ve tried that, but it doesn’t seem to help. Maybe I’m doing it wrong.
This is all partially Microsoft’s fault — the controller is designed with the assumption that most players are right-handed, so that’s where the buttons go. I’m surprised that nobody makes a left-handed controller, though. Is there really no market for that?