I’m surprised nobody’s come up with a keyboard replacement specifically for gaming – something that’d allow analogue control if you wanted it, easier access to all the buttons with a single hand, better-shaped and less-clicky keys, blah de blah.

Using WASD on a keyboard means your hand rests fairly naturally on the corner of it, it’s only when you have a stupid complicated game that requires more than 5 keys (i.e. not Quake) that it starts to fall down.

I have to keep my middle finger for forward, back, 2 and 3. My index for right, reload, 4, 5 and a few others. My third finger for left and some more keys. My little finger for Shift and CTRL. My thumb for space and ALT, then I have to remember other keys like when I want to type an in-game message (after I’ve decided if it’s a message to my team, or a message to all players). Plus I have to keep re-adjusting my elbow to keep it resting comfortably on the desk etc, etc, etc…

You can go on about accuracy and speed of mouse movement all day, but when it comes to the keyboard, you’re limited to linear movement.

One speed for walk, one speed for run.

On a joypad, you have so many degrees of movement that can make up for the mouse aiming accuracy if you’re any good. So the only real advantage that the PC has over consoles for FPS’s is speed of turning, which it wins with hands down.

Anyway, at the end of the day I’d much rather pull a trigger to shoot a gun than click a mouse button.

That’s got to be one of the most stupid things I’ve ever read.

Scenario – I want to access all my weapons.

Keyboard: At a touch, instantly.

Gamepad #1: You’ll have to cycle through them slowly.

Gamepad #2: You’ll have to bind them to the D-pad, and heaven forbid if you have to bind more than four weapons. Don’t even try using diagonals on the shitty D-pads of today, either.

Scenario – I want to access special abilities/items.

Keyboard: At a touch, instantly.

Gamepad #1: Pause game, navigate through a fiddly inventory, use, unpause game.

Gamepad #2: Cycle through the items.

Gamepad #3: Items are bound to buttons, and sometimes even button-combinations that require Catlike reflexes to utilise.

Fair mention should also be given to the fact that unless one is fool enough to use a wireless keyboard, the keyboard transmits at a much faster rate than a wireless gamepad could ever hope to. This is why if one were to pair off a gamepad-user and a keyboard-user of [i]equal skill[/i], the keyboard-user would probably come out on top due to the edge offered by better response times. This is how it usually plays out online too.

So overall, for FPS games, the keyboard does seem to be the better choice. Unless you’re using some kind of pseudo-gamepad that’s both wired and has a hell of a lot of buttons, similar to the Nostromo n52.

On a side note, playing on the couch using k/m is impractical, so you end up tied to your desk for that.

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