We put our hands all over the weirdest game controllers of the year

SAN FRANCISCO—For years, we’ve put one particular item on our annual Game Developers Conference itinerary: the most elaborate and inconvenient game controller this side of a Japanese arcade.

Every year, international teams submit their craziest hardwired contraptions to GDC’s Alt.Ctrl Competition, and the winners get massive booth space to let passersby grab, smack, pull, and sit on whatever custom rigs the teams have dreamed up. (We’ve written about these exhibits a few years running.) Some of our favorites from that booth are in the above gallery, and their captions explain what’s going on in each game.

To be clear: most of these will likely never launch either at arcades or for home purchase. That’s not surprising, though I would probably pay for a Hellcouch conversion kit if it existed, just to mess with house guests. (A few creators hinted at releasing their work as downloads to be applied to build-it-yourself kits, but I didn’t find any yet released for the above games in my cursory search.)

  • Welcome to a new era of “couch co-op” with Hellcouch. The white pad on the floor is lined with LEDs, and its changing colors indicate when and where players should either stand (blue) or sit (red) at any given time. Then Rock Band drum pedals underneath do the grunt work of sensing your butt’s state. “Spooky” voices and sound effects round out the game’s “hell” pastiche.
    Sam Machkovech
  • Plunge features a simple input system of repeatedly tapping a button, converted to a table-mounted toilet plunger. You’ll have to exert to get the full suction action on this bad boy while playing through a variety of two-player mini-games, ranging from rhythm games to timed-jump challenges in a sewer.
    Sam Machkovech
  • The brilliance of Octopad is in its custom-built NES controllers, which only have one button each (B, A, Up, Select, etc.). The resulting co-op action was crazier and more fun with platformers like Super Mario 3 than puzzlers like Tetris.
  • Koo-Koo is a three-on-three action game where players control little birds via clock hands (to change aim) and clock levers (to change speed).
  • In Hot Swap, two players plug “controllers” into their limited decks and must repeatedly swap them in and out to survive an open-seas pirate adventure against AI foes.
  • A summary of the six controller plugs, which all have some attached button, dial, or switch.
  • I really enjoyed Hot Swap as a concentrated twist on Sea of Thieves.
  • My personal favorite of this year’s Alt.Ctrl collection was Table44, which supports up to eight players in various color-tapping mini-games.
  • The best of its mini-games assigns a color to each player, then demands that they slap their personal color whenever and wherever it appears on the board. Meaning, you’ll have to reach across the table and over players’ hands to win.
  • At first glance, Cook Your Way looks like a simple, fun twist on children’s kitchen sets, in terms of having players mix “ingredients” with utensils to complete on-screen recipes. But its larger story is about fulfilling crazy demands for an ominous overseer. The result is a surprisingly engaging take on US border security of all things. We look forward to its home version launching in the near future.
  • Guitar Wizards is a two-player rhythm-guitar game, where you and your opponent send each other music-note attacks. I wish this included a more robust system of, say, required chords on each player’s side required to “conjure” spell energy, instead of just dumping notes on each other willy-nilly. But it’s still cute and doesn’t require much more than a $30 Teensy board and some LED strips. (We’d love to see a built-your-own kit for this released.)
  • Roambot asks you to tune a robot’s antennae until you discover a new world, then aim its head and move its legs to wander around in this world. It’s a clever twist on first-person control in a game, though its robot gimmick doesn’t add a ton to the gameplay experience.
  • The Book Ritual includes a story about a robot’s sadness, which you can contribute to by feeding real pieces of paper into a shredder.
  • But most GDC players didn’t bother writing notes or essays onto the papers before feeding them. (The game asks you to do this, but the shredder doesn’t actually detect your words before om-nom-nomming on whatever pages you feed it.)
  • In Ruins Climber, use a rope to climb upward and side buttons to strafe while climbing up.

Additionally, Google and Bandai Namco unveiled a surprise that may look familiar to avid Ars Technica readers: a smartphone version of Pac-in-Town. This augmented reality game launched as a limited Hololens-arcade game in Japan last year, and it turned its players into Pac-People who had to walk around in real space to gobble yellow pellets and avoid ghosts. (Basically, it’s a real-life approximation of the arcade original.) Now, this former Hololens exclusive works by holding up a smartphone, turning on its camera, and calibrating the game by aiming at a floor mat.

The resulting smartphone game plays just like the one we saw last year, only with an easier viewpoint than the original Hololens’ tiny field-of-view. (Instead, you get to hold one of Bandai Namco’s silly, not-really-necessary Pac-Rigs.) As goofy as the game may look in the above gallery, I swear it was more fun in action. That said, I’d love for Bandai Namco and Google to update the game (which has no public release date) to support a larger floor space. I almost ran into my opponents multiple times in our cramped quarters.

In addition to that Pac-in-Town demo, we also took a peek at a retro-minded exhibit and GDC’s annual Experimental Gameplay Workshop. The below gallery includes highlights from both of those.

  • Pac-in-Town looks ridiculous in action. But it’s pretty solid. Seen here: a Kinect sensor, which helps a video feed track the virtual action for onlookers. (Notice the scoreboard and display behind the action.)
    Sam Machkovech
  • A first-person view of what the game looks like in action. The ground tracking mat didn’t have to be seen precisely for the augmented reality action to work smoothly.
  • We wrote about Pac-In-Town last year, which debuted at a single Japanese arcade and required Hololens headsets. This year, Bandai Namco and Google unveiled a new augmented reality version of the game, and it required nothing more than a few Android smartphones.
  • Stand in a confined space and aim your smartphone camera at a floor mat. After a brief initialization, each display shows yellow pellets hovering in mid-air. Race to “eat” the most pellets, which appear not only in rows but also at different altitudes, while occasionally dodging deadly ghosts. I hopped, ducked, and rolled around without breaking my AR system’s tracking. This game is way more fun than the dorky Pac-Man phone holders might suggest.
  • GDC’s “retro play” booth didn’t have nearly as many museum-worthy selection as in previous years…
  • …but this custom-built two-player Steel Battalion rig was an exception. The right-side cabinet is an enclosed version of the same original-Xbox game, and the two players must use a video camera relay to communicate while in battle.
  • This year’s Experimental Game Workshop opened with Jenn Sandercock and her collection of edible game prototypes. The best of these was similar to the card game Werewolf, only it revolved around players figuring out who’d gotten the one “bad-tasting” pastry out of the whole gang.
  • Hidden notes in this baked good revealed secret clues to fuel another game.
  • One of my favorite discoveries at GDC is a new puzzle game titled Lucky Me, in which every enemy in a puzzle instance copies your every move. So you must walk, aim, and shoot accordingly.
  • An example of how this plays out: this puzzle starts with at least one laser pointed at you. If you pull the trigger, so do all the other people, and you’ll die.
  • This angle would also get you killed.
  • But if you turn the aim at just the right angle, they’ll all shoot each other without touching you. No release date has yet been set, but even though this demo at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop lacked a “wacky” controller, I wanted to sneak it into our coverage. I can’t wait for the full game.

Listing image by Sam Machkovech

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1479353