A Case of the Mondays

I'm hungry.

It's my own damn fault, really. I neglected to eat breakfast this morning and now it's almost lunch time and I'm hungry.

Anyway.

I had a pretty interesting weekend. My wife and I helped chaperone an all night shindig with the youth group at our church. Basicially that meant spending from 8pm on Friday to 8am on Saturday with a bunch of 11 - 13 year olds. We had a pretty good time, so I can't complain much. We went to Bullwinkles, then bowled, then played video games at a place in Lake Oswego called "Versis". I played Halo 2 on the X-Box 360. I've decided that first person shooters (FPS) suck on a console. I'm used to using a mouse and keyboard configuration and that stupid little double joystick thing they had going sucked. I just couldn't stay on target and ended up getting my ass handed to me because I just wasn't effective at strafing (a tactic that is REQUIRED for any FPS style game) and found myself alternating between shooting at the sky and shooting at the ground due to over compensation. The good part is that it gave me an idea.

Here's my idea... why not create a mouse/keyboard combination for the XBox 360 specifically for FPS games? The "keyboard" wouldn't be a standard QWERTY keyboard, instead it would have directional keys in the standard WASD configuration for moving forward, backward, and strafing left and right. In addition to that, it would have keys that would correspond to things like reloading, activating night vision, or whatever else the game has. The mouse would just be a standard two or three button optical or laser mouse. Both the keyboard and mouse would be wireless and the various buttons would be mapped to the same controls on the regular controller for backward compatibility. I'm pretty sure it can be done (if it hasn't already been), it's just a matter of having the resources to make it happen (which I don't). Come to think of it, I'd be pretty surprised to find that no one thought of this before... especially since there have to be a number of people who've made the cross over from PC to console gaming.

Anyway, just a thought. :)