And if Your PS3 has an older firmware you can install Linux on IT and play Nethack, or use QEMU to run a Win95 and play Diablo, or use DOSbox.... all of which I have done.
WASD as a movement controller is a shoddy compromised, based on the fact that you're using a device invented for word processing, as a games controller.
Keyboard control n PC games started back in the 80's. DOS gamers unlike C64 gamers (who could use the same joysticks they had for their Atari 2600's) were less likely to have a joystick (except the flight simmers) so games always offered a keyboard option. And then when Romero and company released Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM it became entrenched.
It's kind of sad, that for all it's faults, the SNES version of DOOM has bette and more comfortable controls than the PC version.
which leads us to an ideal FPS setup of a mouse under the right hand, and an analogue stick under the left thumb.
That works VERY well, if the game supports it, and is, in fact the best way to play Quake II on the PSone (though you use the Dpad and not the stick), Half-Life and Deus Ex on the PS2, and Dust514 on the PS3.
Square Enix is a prime example. Gone are the days when the West get excited over FF and JRPGs in general.
We might still get excited fi they actually treated the American market with respect and stopped trying to fawn off Moe leftovers to us and actually made games we want... like a FF7 remake. It would also be nice to have a FF game without a 16 year old hero. Did you know that Vaan and Penelo were added to FFXII after some S-E executive decied they needed some Moe kids or the game wouldn't sell in Japan... like Vagrant story (which also had an adult hero)
Maybe having those two ex-Bioware guys in charge of FF with shake things up... maybe the Japanese will learn a few things.... but I doubt it.
I was telling someone online, it may have even been slashdot that even the mediocre games of today are better than some of the AAA games of the past in production value and gameplay.
Think of a game like "clash at Demonhead" which is marred by a bad translation, bad manual, some bad game design but is held up as a classic. But we don't put up with crap like that anymore.
A significant portion of the Japanese games industry has already given up (or is in the process of giving up) the ghost and pulling out of any meaningful participation in the international market, in favour of their more forgiving (and heavily kids-and-otaku-driven) domestic market.
Oh yes, that started happening in the PSone days to a limited extent, really kicked in with the PS2 and PS3. I think in part it was because Nintendo and Sega coddled and favoried the Japanese developers over the gaijin in the 16 bit days, but in the 32 bit days it was more of a level playing field. So not only did Square, Enix, Atlus, Nippon Ichi have to compete with each other they now had to compete with hyper competent American developer houses which knew gaijin tastes better. Japanese developers could get away with lookalike Moe games back when they didn't have to compete with Bethesda, Bioware, Firaxis, etc etc. In the 90's if you wanted to play an RPG on a console you had to go JRPGm because American RPG devs were unfriendly...that's not the case now.
There are a couple of developers that still try to be international players (Capcom, Sega, Sony and the publishing, but not the development arm of Square-Enix),
S-E has given up on the gaijin... I don't know why, they've been capable of selling games to gaijin in the past... admittedly as I said times are different now...but I doubt we will see another year like S-E's "summer of adventure" Though those games were average to mediocre... too quirky.
I think S-E's problem is that they have no one to say "No". so they hand off director or producer duties to some hack character designer with a belt fetish or let some crazy ass with an obsession for developing player unfriendly games like Kawazu fuck things up. The man makes ONE game that sells huge because it's the sequel to the Gooch's FF1 and they keep letting him do stuff even though his games are Not Fun and don't sell very well outside of Japan.
Japan's conformist "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down" and slightly xenophobic culture doesn't help much... the gamers don't play games and their developers don't study games made by gaijin so they don't in general understand how things have changed.
but many others have now retreated into the handheld/mobile/moe-game comfort zone that's still profitable in Japan on the basis of low development costs.
Yep and developmen is more similar to doing PSone games that they're more comfortable with. And the few games of those types that make it over here the hardcoare Japan-obsessed American Otaku snap them up even if they're massive badly designed grindfests with big eyed little girls.
Personally I'd love to see a proper Metroidvania from Konami on a REAL console but they seem to have given up on those and only do those for portables.
Or take the Monster Hunter series which seems to be portable only now... because the PS2 release had badly designed controls... and now the Japanese are used to the sucky controls and REFUSE to use anything else in some 3D games.
Or how FFXI was ruined by the stupidly conformist nature of the japanese fanbase which ruined the game and the game's economy for the gaijin who got the game years after we were supposed to get it... thanks a LOT S-E for your incompetence at getting the translation done.
Sure the enthusiast PC magazines go gaga over SSD's, but I consider to be a "splurge" item. I'd take more capacity over speed any day of the week and twice on Sundays. The money one spends on an SSD could be used for a bigger mechanical drive AND a faster CPU, AND a nicer GPU AND More RAM.
There is a whole new breed of game on the market. Rapidly developed, community driven indy titles that focus on core gameplay mechanics, fun, and style. These games may be artistic, high concept,creative, or "hard core" skill based titles. (Likely a combination of any of all of these) These games bring back a lot of what you loved from 80s and 90s titles. (Some are even complete remakes)
I would say recent rather than new considering these having been showing up for the past half decade or so.
These games are inexpensive, are updated frequently, and often start as incomplete projects that are developed with close input from the gaming community. They often eschew lots of high end 3d graphics as that stuff takes a lot of time and money to develop.
True, but that often leads to a lack of polish and the inability of the developers to actually "finish" the game.
These games are POPULAR (just look at minecraft) >/quote>
Yes, lets look at nerd favorite Minecraft...which I do own and I have enjoyed playing it, but it's one of the worst "enjoyable" games I've ever played and I don't consider it worth the money I paid... maybe 10 bucks...but it's not worth $25
1. Mojang combines the worst aspects of a Euro-dev and open source traditions in one developer.
2. Minecraft isn't finished! Rather than saying "Okay we're done adding new features it's time to polish up what we do have... they keep adding even more complexity and stuff to a game that's already to complex for most people. Sure perhaps your grandma plays minecraft...but "How" does she play it? Is she only using creative? I bet the vast majority of players other than a few EE trained nerds don't even mess with redstone circuitry and just use creative mode as an infinite lego set.
3. The main developer has, rather than actually finishing what he started, gone on to the "next thing" and handed the game off to someone else. Which is a serious problem in the open source community.
4. The game has major discoverability and UI issues...information that SHOULD be presented in the game itself isn't... you actually have to use the Wiki to learn how to play because the game tells you NOTHING! That's bad and lazy design right there. The only version of Minecraft that even tries to deal with this issue is the Xbox 360 version! Why the heck hasn't the 360 version's tutorial become standard in the PC version?
and the large console makers have completely, utterly failed to serve this market.
They have? News to me since I can just go into PSN and buy a ton of "little games" from smaller development houses like you've been talking about there.
Closed platforms, high development prices, difficult development tools, restrictive policies, and a very high cost of publishing updates all make the above development model impossible.
It's not impossible since smaller developers can and do get published on consoles.
What strikes me the most about the Xbox infinity and the PlayStation 4 is how very similar they are. It's almost like they've been taking notes from each other!
The CPU core in the 360 is based on the PPU in the Cell. What a way for Microsoft to stick it to Sony by taking advantage of Sony's expenditures on R&D with IBM.
That's one of things that has always surprised me about the PS3 (and PSP and Vita) no Ogg or FLAC support. I figured they would eventually get around to throwing support in an update.
What's so special about GoG? It's just a download service. Some of the exact same games are on PSN! Stacking, the Tales of Monkey Island Bundle, the Back to the Future game, etc etc.
I got Saints Row 3 in a Humble Bundle deal along with a bunch of other games for about $15 (I can't remember exactly what I spent, by SR3 was the bonus game at the time that you got if you paid more than the average donation which is usually about $10).
You want to know why some developers treat the PC as an afterthought? Cheap-ass guys li9ke you who basically let the console gamers subsidize game development. Maybe if you didn't spend so much on your "gaming rig", you'd have money to, you know, actually buy games.
You are not stuck with a system where the games cost you $60.
Neither are console gamers there ARE inexpensive games on PSN and the other two console download services.
If by "portable" you mean Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita, first timers still need to prove themselves to gain access to those platforms. If by "portable" you mean smartphones, what's the best practice for emulating a gamepad on a flat sheet of glass?
In this case I mean Android and iOS. And enough with the "best case" crap, figure it out, it's not that hard.
The best case for emulating a gamepad on a touchscreen is to NOT do it and do a game designed for touch controls. But yes I know you want to do gamepad-console style games, but thems the breaks.
Do a couple of phone/tablet games and maybe you can do a game designed for a gamepad on a REAL portable or living room console.
But it's pretty obvious that you have to pay your dues first, Though if y ou're real lucky you can show of some kind of prootype that's good enough.isn't it?
Say I have a finished PC game that I want to bring to Xbox Live or PSN. What's the best practice for making my company and my game look attractive to Microsoft and Sony?
I don't know..ask the companies that have already done it. Lots of small devleoper games on PSN. It seems to help to be an established development house...first timers should stick with PC and portable to prove themselves...then you can contact Sony
And don't complain about the reality of the situation and how Sony and Nintendo should just let every basement dweller with a puzzle game clone publish on PSN/Wii Shop....thems the limitations and you have to live with them.
But to do so you either have to make it much harder to play by controller, make it much easier to play by keyboard/mouse, or offer two modes.
I've not played many console RTS's, the ones I have are all PSone titles (distinct lack of such for the PS2/PS3) Every single one of them support the PSone mouse. so there is that option, though it doesn't seem to make much difference in playability, For the C&C titles/Dune 2000 it makes some functions easier but some functions harder.
My suspicion is that the two modes thing would have to be sufficiently different as to require quite a bit of "duplicate" engineering.
Probably. The best of the PSone RTS's in my opinion was Warzone 2100 which was developed as a cross-platform title and performs better on the PSone than the C&C based titles do (uses a 3D engine for one reason) It's UI actually changes depending on what controls you have hooked up to your PSone. Hook up a PSone mouse and you get more UI buttons. ( but lose the ability to directly drive your command vehicle.
It's a pretty good game, the company released the source to it.
it already seems like making games multiplatform are causing the PC versions to be "dumbed down" a bit.
I've always considered that statement to be somewhat of an "elistist grognard" attitude. I feel the same way to a certain extent. I'm old enough to remember when a larger proportion of PC gamers played games from companies like SSI, and Origin...before DOOM and other games brought in a load of what I used to call "frat boy gamers", but now just call "dudebros" But...without the masses there wouldn't be enough people to make certain genre's profitable. It's a good thing that games are more "user friendly" and don't require tedious note-taking or graph paper maps.
But you will see the same thing happen as when Unreal had a console release capable of using keyboard/mouse.
Was I not referring to RTS's rather than FPS's? Why bring the old FPS arguments into it.
You have no fine granular input with a controller.
You don't? Could have fooled me. Besides in an RTS it's isn't ZAbout fine control it's about lassoing and general pointing. You don't need to click on some enemies 2 pixel head from a mile away, you just need to point your tanks/APC's at a general target.
You have a very limited number of executions with a controller
Not really all that limited, two analog sticks, 4 shoulder buttons, 4 face buttons, select and start, plust the d-pad can be u sed for more buttons as well as L3 and R3. That's a lot of buttons. Start using them in combinations and that's even more functions.
whereas with a kbd/mouse your actions per second are MUCH higher.
Really? Do you know how fast those buttons can be pressed on that control pad, very very quickly.Though it would depend on the UI.
MOBA's are essentially action RPG's with RTS elements so it would be possible to do a controller centric control scheme... in fact it's already been done. Google "Guardians of Middle Earth"
And it's also possible to do an RTS with a controller, considering it's been done before. The only controls an RTS absolutely needs are a pointer, a way to move a pointer, an ability to select onscreen elements, and an ability to cancel. Everything else is extra. So basically a joypad and two buttons are all you really need. Remember, the first RTS ever was a Sega Genesis game, Herzog Zwei abd Westwoods seminal RTS Dune II was also available on the Genesis. You know that context sensitive cursor in Westwood's C&C? That idea came from the Genesis port of Dune II.
Thunar? Or you can use Nemo or PCmanFM or whatever.
nobody's ever figured out a menu editor for it.
It has one...admittedly in Fedora it requires some workarounds to work (it relies on gnomemenu.so which Gnome3 doesn't use, so you have to manually install an old rpm)
Slashdot Mirror
And if Your PS3 has an older firmware you can install Linux on IT and play Nethack, or use QEMU to run a Win95 and play Diablo, or use DOSbox.... all of which I have done.
WASD as a movement controller is a shoddy compromised, based on the fact that you're using a device invented for word processing, as a games controller.
Keyboard control n PC games started back in the 80's. DOS gamers unlike C64 gamers (who could use the same joysticks they had for their Atari 2600's) were less likely to have a joystick (except the flight simmers) so games always offered a keyboard option. And then when Romero and company released Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM it became entrenched.
It's kind of sad, that for all it's faults, the SNES version of DOOM has bette and more comfortable controls than the PC version.
.
which leads us to an ideal FPS setup of a mouse under the right hand, and an analogue stick under the left thumb.
That works VERY well, if the game supports it, and is, in fact the best way to play Quake II on the PSone (though you use the Dpad and not the stick), Half-Life and Deus Ex on the PS2, and Dust514 on the PS3.
Square Enix is a prime example. Gone are the days when the West get excited over FF and JRPGs in general.
We might still get excited fi they actually treated the American market with respect and stopped trying to fawn off Moe leftovers to us and actually made games we want... like a FF7 remake. It would also be nice to have a FF game without a 16 year old hero. Did you know that Vaan and Penelo were added to FFXII after some S-E executive decied they needed some Moe kids or the game wouldn't sell in Japan... like Vagrant story (which also had an adult hero)
Maybe having those two ex-Bioware guys in charge of FF with shake things up... maybe the Japanese will learn a few things.... but I doubt it.
I was telling someone online, it may have even been slashdot that even the mediocre games of today are better than some of the AAA games of the past in production value and gameplay.
Think of a game like "clash at Demonhead" which is marred by a bad translation, bad manual, some bad game design but is held up as a classic. But we don't put up with crap like that anymore.
A significant portion of the Japanese games industry has already given up (or is in the process of giving up) the ghost and pulling out of any meaningful participation in the international market, in favour of their more forgiving (and heavily kids-and-otaku-driven) domestic market.
Oh yes, that started happening in the PSone days to a limited extent, really kicked in with the PS2 and PS3. I think in part it was because Nintendo and Sega coddled and favoried the Japanese developers over the gaijin in the 16 bit days, but in the 32 bit days it was more of a level playing field. So not only did Square, Enix, Atlus, Nippon Ichi have to compete with each other they now had to compete with hyper competent American developer houses which knew gaijin tastes better. Japanese developers could get away with lookalike Moe games back when they didn't have to compete with Bethesda, Bioware, Firaxis, etc etc. In the 90's if you wanted to play an RPG on a console you had to go JRPGm because American RPG devs were unfriendly...that's not the case now.
There are a couple of developers that still try to be international players (Capcom, Sega, Sony and the publishing, but not the development arm of Square-Enix),
S-E has given up on the gaijin... I don't know why, they've been capable of selling games to gaijin in the past... admittedly as I said times are different now...but I doubt we will see another year like S-E's "summer of adventure" Though those games were average to mediocre... too quirky.
I think S-E's problem is that they have no one to say "No". so they hand off director or producer duties to some hack character designer with a belt fetish or let some crazy ass with an obsession for developing player unfriendly games like Kawazu fuck things up. The man makes ONE game that sells huge because it's the sequel to the Gooch's FF1 and they keep letting him do stuff even though his games are Not Fun and don't sell very well outside of Japan.
Japan's conformist "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down" and slightly xenophobic culture doesn't help much... the gamers don't play games and their developers don't study games made by gaijin so they don't in general understand how things have changed.
but many others have now retreated into the handheld/mobile/moe-game comfort zone that's still profitable in Japan on the basis of low development costs.
Yep and developmen is more similar to doing PSone games that they're more comfortable with. And the few games of those types that make it over here the hardcoare Japan-obsessed American Otaku snap them up even if they're massive badly designed grindfests with big eyed little girls.
Personally I'd love to see a proper Metroidvania from Konami on a REAL console but they seem to have given up on those and only do those for portables.
Or take the Monster Hunter series which seems to be portable only now... because the PS2 release had badly designed controls... and now the Japanese are used to the sucky controls and REFUSE to use anything else in some 3D games.
Or how FFXI was ruined by the stupidly conformist nature of the japanese fanbase which ruined the game and the game's economy for the gaijin who got the game years after we were supposed to get it... thanks a LOT S-E for your incompetence at getting the translation done.
Which skrim dlc isn't on PC? Ithought it was us PS3 owners that got the short stick until recently
And Morrowind was on the first xbox
and still have a PC that beats your 8 year old console as it hasn't been/can't be upgraded when it comes to hardware.
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This is something I don't get. Why does the existence of both PC's and console have to be a "competition" that "just one" wins. There's room for both.
SOmetimes I think PC gamers prefer playing benchmarks for bragging rights than actually playing games.
Sure the enthusiast PC magazines go gaga over SSD's, but I consider to be a "splurge" item. I'd take more capacity over speed any day of the week and twice on Sundays. The money one spends on an SSD could be used for a bigger mechanical drive AND a faster CPU, AND a nicer GPU AND More RAM.
All this talk about Lotus Notes and no one references Futurama? I'll have to remedy that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpwofqzuKBc
1/ Head to the magazine section of your local big box discount retialer or large grocery store.
2. Purchase pocket atlas, full size atlas, or other maps for where you will be going.
3. ?????
4. Profit.
There is a whole new breed of game on the market. Rapidly developed, community driven indy titles that focus on core gameplay mechanics, fun, and style. These games may be artistic, high concept,creative, or "hard core" skill based titles. (Likely a combination of any of all of these) These games bring back a lot of what you loved from 80s and 90s titles. (Some are even complete remakes)
I would say recent rather than new considering these having been showing up for the past half decade or so.
These games are inexpensive, are updated frequently, and often start as incomplete projects that are developed with close input from the gaming community. They often eschew lots of high end 3d graphics as that stuff takes a lot of time and money to develop.
True, but that often leads to a lack of polish and the inability of the developers to actually "finish" the game.
These games are POPULAR (just look at minecraft) >/quote>
Yes, lets look at nerd favorite Minecraft...which I do own and I have enjoyed playing it, but it's one of the worst "enjoyable" games I've ever played and I don't consider it worth the money I paid... maybe 10 bucks...but it's not worth $25
1. Mojang combines the worst aspects of a Euro-dev and open source traditions in one developer.
2. Minecraft isn't finished! Rather than saying "Okay we're done adding new features it's time to polish up what we do have... they keep adding even more complexity and stuff to a game that's already to complex for most people. Sure perhaps your grandma plays minecraft...but "How" does she play it? Is she only using creative? I bet the vast majority of players other than a few EE trained nerds don't even mess with redstone circuitry and just use creative mode as an infinite lego set.
3. The main developer has, rather than actually finishing what he started, gone on to the "next thing" and handed the game off to someone else. Which is a serious problem in the open source community.
4. The game has major discoverability and UI issues...information that SHOULD be presented in the game itself isn't... you actually have to use the Wiki to learn how to play because the game tells you NOTHING! That's bad and lazy design right there. The only version of Minecraft that even tries to deal with this issue is the Xbox 360 version! Why the heck hasn't the 360 version's tutorial become standard in the PC version?
and the large console makers have completely, utterly failed to serve this market.
They have? News to me since I can just go into PSN and buy a ton of "little games" from smaller development houses like you've been talking about there.
Closed platforms, high development prices, difficult development tools, restrictive policies, and a very high cost of publishing updates all make the above development model impossible.
It's not impossible since smaller developers can and do get published on consoles.
The default mesaging app on my cheap at&t fusion does do conversation threading
Dont' be so literal. That ivybridge part contains an "integrated" graphics card. on the CPU itself.
What strikes me the most about the Xbox infinity and the PlayStation 4 is how very similar they are. It's almost like they've been taking notes from each other!
The CPU core in the 360 is based on the PPU in the Cell. What a way for Microsoft to stick it to Sony by taking advantage of Sony's expenditures on R&D with IBM.
That's one of things that has always surprised me about the PS3 (and PSP and Vita) no Ogg or FLAC support. I figured they would eventually get around to throwing support in an update.
Not that I use Ogg audio.
What's so special about GoG? It's just a download service. Some of the exact same games are on PSN! Stacking, the Tales of Monkey Island Bundle, the Back to the Future game, etc etc.
I paid $5 for Fallout: New Vegas,
I got Saints Row 3 in a Humble Bundle deal along with a bunch of other games for about $15 (I can't remember exactly what I spent, by SR3 was the bonus game at the time that you got if you paid more than the average donation which is usually about $10).
You want to know why some developers treat the PC as an afterthought? Cheap-ass guys li9ke you who basically let the console gamers subsidize game development. Maybe if you didn't spend so much on your "gaming rig", you'd have money to, you know, actually buy games.
You are not stuck with a system where the games cost you $60.
Neither are console gamers there ARE inexpensive games on PSN and the other two console download services.
If by "portable" you mean Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita, first timers still need to prove themselves to gain access to those platforms. If by "portable" you mean smartphones, what's the best practice for emulating a gamepad on a flat sheet of glass?
In this case I mean Android and iOS. And enough with the "best case" crap, figure it out, it's not that hard.
The best case for emulating a gamepad on a touchscreen is to NOT do it and do a game designed for touch controls. But yes I know you want to do gamepad-console style games, but thems the breaks.
Do a couple of phone/tablet games and maybe you can do a game designed for a gamepad on a REAL portable or living room console.
But it's pretty obvious that you have to pay your dues first, Though if y ou're real lucky you can show of some kind of prootype that's good enough.isn't it?
Say I have a finished PC game that I want to bring to Xbox Live or PSN. What's the best practice for making my company and my game look attractive to Microsoft and Sony?
I don't know..ask the companies that have already done it. Lots of small devleoper games on PSN. It seems to help to be an established development house...first timers should stick with PC and portable to prove themselves...then you can contact Sony
And don't complain about the reality of the situation and how Sony and Nintendo should just let every basement dweller with a puzzle game clone publish on PSN/Wii Shop....thems the limitations and you have to live with them.
But to do so you either have to make it much harder to play by controller, make it much easier to play by keyboard/mouse, or offer two modes.
I've not played many console RTS's, the ones I have are all PSone titles (distinct lack of such for the PS2/PS3) Every single one of them support the PSone mouse. so there is that option, though it doesn't seem to make much difference in playability, For the C&C titles/Dune 2000 it makes some functions easier but some functions harder.
My suspicion is that the two modes thing would have to be sufficiently different as to require quite a bit of "duplicate" engineering.
Probably. The best of the PSone RTS's in my opinion was Warzone 2100 which was developed as a cross-platform title and performs better on the PSone than the C&C based titles do (uses a 3D engine for one reason) It's UI actually changes depending on what controls you have hooked up to your PSone.
Hook up a PSone mouse and you get more UI buttons. ( but lose the ability to directly drive your command vehicle.
It's a pretty good game, the company released the source to it.
it already seems like making games multiplatform are causing the PC versions to be "dumbed down" a bit.
I've always considered that statement to be somewhat of an "elistist grognard" attitude. I feel the same way to a certain extent. I'm old enough to remember when a larger proportion of PC gamers played games from companies like SSI, and Origin...before DOOM and other games brought in a load of what I used to call "frat boy gamers", but now just call "dudebros" But...without the masses there wouldn't be enough people to make certain genre's profitable. It's a good thing that games are more "user friendly" and don't require tedious note-taking or graph paper maps.
But you will see the same thing happen as when Unreal had a console release capable of using keyboard/mouse.
Was I not referring to RTS's rather than FPS's? Why bring the old FPS arguments into it.
You have no fine granular input with a controller.
You don't? Could have fooled me. Besides in an RTS it's isn't ZAbout fine control it's about lassoing and general pointing. You don't need to click on some enemies 2 pixel head from a mile away, you just need to point your tanks/APC's at a general target.
You have a very limited number of executions with a controller
Not really all that limited, two analog sticks, 4 shoulder buttons, 4 face buttons, select and start, plust the d-pad can be u sed for more buttons as well as L3 and R3. That's a lot of buttons. Start using them in combinations and that's even more functions.
whereas with a kbd/mouse your actions per second are MUCH higher.
Really? Do you know how fast those buttons can be pressed on that control pad, very very quickly.Though it would depend on the UI.
MOBA's are essentially action RPG's with RTS elements so it would be possible to do a controller centric control scheme... in fact it's already been done. Google "Guardians of Middle Earth"
And it's also possible to do an RTS with a controller, considering it's been done before. The only controls an RTS absolutely needs are a pointer, a way to move a pointer, an ability to select onscreen elements, and an ability to cancel. Everything else is extra. So basically a joypad and two buttons are all you really need. Remember, the first RTS ever was a Sega Genesis game, Herzog Zwei abd Westwoods seminal RTS Dune II was also available on the Genesis. You know that context sensitive cursor in Westwood's C&C? That idea came from the Genesis port of Dune II.
No file manager worth a crap
Thunar? Or you can use Nemo or PCmanFM or whatever.
nobody's ever figured out a menu editor for it.
It has one...admittedly in Fedora it requires some workarounds to work (it relies on gnomemenu.so which Gnome3 doesn't use, so you have to manually install an old rpm)
I think EVERY single button is analog on a DualShock 2 except start and select, including the D-Pad.