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Comment by threepointone | Hacker News Reader

I hope this kicks off the gaming peripheral market for macs. It would be lovely to have a a handheld controller to play this stuff. Macbook Pro keyboards are not very good for gaming :) The tiny arrow keys are pissing off.

I hear the ps3 controller already hooks up with snow leopard easily, so that's good news.

EDIT: Google search for "ps3 controller snow leopard" shows a bunch of hits, just to confirm what I said. http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS368US368&so...

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I never use the arrow keys when gaming. A friend showed me the setup I use to this day: look with the mouse, right mouse walks, left mouse fires, shift/c strafe left/right, z secondary fire, x duck.

AFAIK the canonical FPS setup is wasd for up/strafe left/down/strafe right, left click for fire, right click for secondary fire, x for duck and z for prone. Or, anyway, it's what I use. I think it allows for more flexibility in movement, but sometimes cheap keyboards don't support strafe+forward+duck together too well without using modifiers (ctrl/shift).

Actually shifting wasd over to the right is a more natural stance if you do any typing. WSAD => EDSF etc. If you're not already used to wasd then definitely consider it.

It is also useful to have an extra set of keys to the left other than tab/caps/shift

Interesting. If only I'd been shown that 15 years ago when I still had some ability to rewire my neuronal pathways.

I can't imagine being too old to get used to a new control scheme. It's like being too old to switch to standard instead of automatic.

It is more like a well established touch typer switching from qwerty to dvorak, it can happen just takes will to change and a good amount of time.

how do you walk backward?

Mouselook around, or whip it around if you're playing an FPS. I can't think of too many times where actually walking backwards would be advantageous since it usually makes you move more slowly.

shooting while retreating would be one scenario I can think of. Someone else said it but the typical fps setup is wsad space jump, ctrl or shift =crouch or run with mouselook.

Alt key, right under my left thumb.

The Wiimote can connect to the Mac as well. I current use one with Remote Buddy (http://www.iospirit.com/products/remotebuddy/) to control a Mac as a media center computer. The buttons work great, but I haven't had good luck with the motion sensor though.

If playing Meteor Blitz is any indication, the iPhone/iPod Touch can make a very nice game controller. (You'd probably want all of the CPU and other resources devoted to just controlling.) It might be worth Apple's while to hire 2 or 3 devs and have them cranking out iPhone interfaces to Steam games.

The Logitech G13 game controller works flawlessly on Mac OS X and is a hell of a lot more comfortable if you want to game on your laptop. It can also store keymap profiles on the device itself so you can use it on any computer.

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