We put our hands on the strangest game controllers of the year

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SAN FRANCISCO – For years, we have put a special element in our annual itinerary of video game developers conference: the most elaborate and troublesome game controllers on this side of a Japanese arcade.

Every year, international teams submit their craziest cable gear to the GDC's Alt.Ctrl competition, and the winners have a huge booth to allow passers-by to grab, hit and catch everything the teams have imagined. . (We have written about these shows a few years in a row.) Some of our favorites from this stand are in the gallery above, and their legends explain what happens in each match.

Let's be clear: most of them will probably never start in arcades or buying homes. This is not surprising, although I would probably pay for a Hellcouch conversion kit if it already existed, just to spoil the guests of the house. (Some creators have suggested that their work will be published as downloads for personal development kits, but I have not found any for the above games in my superficial search.)

Welcome to a new era of "sofa in cooperation" with Hellcouch. The white carpet on the floor is lined with light-emitting diodes and its changing colors indicate when and where players should stand (blue) or sit (red) at all times. Then, the Rock Band Drum Pedals underneath do the hard work of detecting the condition of your buttocks. Spooky voices and sound effects complete the pastiche "hell" of the game.

Sam Machkovech
plunge has a simple entry system consisting of repeatedly pressing a button, converted into a toilet diver mounted on a table. You'll have to exercise to get the most out of this bad boy by playing a variety of two-player mini-games, ranging from rhythm games to timed jump challenges in the sewers.

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 cooperative action that resulted was more crazy and more fun with players like Super Mario 3 than puzzlers like Tetris.
Koo-Koo is a three-on-three action game in which players control small birds via clock needles (to change aim) and clock levers (to change gears).
In Hot Swap, two players connect "controllers" to their limited decks and have to swap them over and over to survive in a pirate adventure on the high seas against AI enemies.
A summary of the six controller sockets, all of which have a button, dial, or attached switch.
I really enjoyed Hot Swap like a twist focused on Sea of Thieves.
My personal favorite of this year's Alt.Ctrl collection was Tableau44, which supports up to eight players in various mini-games with captivating colors.
The best of its mini-games gives a color to each player, then asks him to hit his own color at any time and in any place where it appears on the board. Which means that you will have to reach out to the players to win.
At first glance, Cook your way This sounds like a simple and fun variant of children's cooking utensils, as players have to mix "ingredients" with utensils to complete recipes on the screen. But his biggest story is the satisfaction of the insane demands of a threatening supervisor. The result is a surprisingly engaging take on the security of all things at the US border. We look forward to his launch of the home version in the near future.

Guitar assistants is a two-player rhythm guitar game, where you and your opponent send you musical note attacks. I hope this includes a more robust system, for example, the required chords on the side of each player, necessary to "conjure" the energy of spells, instead of just dropping notes on each other. But it is still as cute and does not require much more than a $ 30 Teensy card and LED strips. (We would like to see a kit built by you for this published version.)

Roambot asks you to tune the antennas of a robot until you discover a new world, then aim his head and move his legs to wander through this world. This is a trick on first-person control in a game, although his gimmick robot does not add a ton to the gaming experience.

The ritual of the book includes a story about the sadness of a robot, to which you can contribute by introducing real pieces of paper into a shredder.

But most GDC players did not bother to write notes or essays on newspapers before feeding them. (The game asks you to do this, but the shredder does not actually detect your words before naming om-name on the pages you are feeding.)

In Ruins Climberuse a rope to climb up and side buttons to attach while climbing.

In addition, Google and Bandai Namco have unveiled a surprise that may seem familiar to frequent readers of Ars Technica: a smartphone version of Pac-by-city. This augmented reality game was launched in Japan last year as a limited Hololens arcade game. He turned his players into Pac-People who had to move into real space to swallow yellow pellets and avoid ghosts. (Basically, this is a real approximation of the original arcade.) Now, this former Hololens exclusive works by brandishing a smartphone, turning on its camera and calibrating the game. by aiming at a carpet of soil.

The resulting smartphone game is similar to the one we saw last year, but with a simpler viewpoint than Hololens' tiny field of vision. (Instead, you can hold one of the stupid and not really necessary Pac-Rigs of Bandai Namco.) As weird as the game may seem in the gallery above, I swear it was more fun in action. That said, I would love Bandai Namco and Google to update the game (which has no public release date) to support a larger area. I have almost met my opponents many times in our cramped quarters.

In addition to that Pac-by-city During the demonstration, we also took a look at a retro exhibition and the annual GDC Experimental Gameplay workshop. The gallery below includes the highlights of both events.

Pac-by-city looks ridiculous in action. But it's pretty solid. Seen here: a Kinect sensor, which helps a video stream to track the virtual action of viewers. (Note the dashboard and display behind the action.)

Sam Machkovech
A first-person view of what the game looks like in action. The floor tracking mat did not have to be seen precisely for the augmented reality action to work smoothly.
We wrote about Pac-by-city last year, which debuted in a single Japanese arcade and required a Hololens helmet. Bandai Namco and Google unveiled this year a new version of the augmented reality game, which only required a few Android smartphones.
Stand in a confined space and point the camera of your smartphone at a carpet. After a brief initialization, each screen displays yellow pellets floating in the air. Race to "eat" most pellets, which appear not only in rows but also at different altitudes, while occasionally avoiding deadly ghosts. I jumped, dodged and rolled without breaking the tracking of my AR system. This game is much more fun than the dorky Pac-Man phone owners suggest.
GDC's "retro play" kiosk did not have as many museum-worthy choices as in previous years …
… but this two players built to measure Steel Battalion rig was an exception. The right cabinet is a closed version of the same original game on Xbox. Both players must use a video camera relay to communicate in combat.
Jenn Sandercock and her collection of edible game prototypes have opened this year's Experimental Game Workshop. The best of these was similar to the card game WerewolfOnly, it was only to determine who had obtained the pastry "bad taste" of the whole gang.
Hidden notes in this recipe revealed secret clues to fuel another match.
One of my favorite finds at the GDC is a new puzzle game titled I'm lucky, in which each enemy in a puzzle copies each of your moves. You must therefore walk, aim and shoot accordingly.
An example of how this is played out: this puzzle begins with at least one laser pointed at you. If you pull the trigger, do the same with all other people and you will die.
This angle would also make you kill.
But if you aim the lens exactly at the right angle, they will shoot at each other without touching each other. No release date has yet been set, but even though this experimental gameplay workshop demo lacked a "wacky" controller, I wanted to insert it into our cover. I can not wait for the full game.

Image of Sam Machkovech's inscription

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