BattleFront on The DS Will be Awesome. And Suck

Whilst idling my little heart out in the Negative Gamer IRC channel earlier today our glorious leader linked me to a video of a game I had no idea existed; Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron. After a quick rummage around the intertubes I found out it was coming to DS and PSP sometime in the next month or so.

Unfortunately I let the Battlefront fanboy in me take over and allowed myself to get excited at the prospect of a portable, multiplayer Battlefront game before taking into account the ‘particulars’ of the platform.

Right off the bat before I even begin to complain about the touchscreen itself, the DS version of the game has a gimped multiplayer mode. Only 4 player skirmishes are present, none of the 16 player all-out wars that PSP owners will enjoy, and none of the stat tracking either. What else would you expect from Nintendo anyway? We all know by now that the last thing they actually want people to do is play games online on their consoles.

This next part is entirely speculation on my part but I’m sure you will agree that past examples are evidence enough for my paranoia. Elite Squadron is being released on the DS, so of course will suffer from what I like to call ‘touchitis’. Touchitis is the superfluous usage of the touch screen mechanic just because it’s there (very similar to the notion that one must include waggle on every Wii game). In my mind I’m envisioning awful controls in the same vein as Metroid DS. Trying to use the stylus to turn the camera whilst moving via the D-pad is nigh on impossible. I’m not going to just sit here and complain though, I believe I have a workable solution:

As you can see from my gorgeous artwork above the touch screen is used as one giant button that cycles through the weapons displayed on the lower screen (I would probably have them on the right hand side, an enter / exit vehicle button on the left and then have the rest of the space be taken up by the control point map). The upper screen would contain all of the actual gameplay, the D-Pad is used as the standard UDLR (up, down, left, right) and the ABXY buttons are utilised as a second D-Pad for camera control (similar to how the right thumbstick should be used in every console game in existence).

All of the necessary inputs are accounted for (I believe) and this would be my vastly preferred method of input rather than having to go anywhere near a stylus. More developers need to realise that just because a feature exists you don’t need to incorporate it into every game in stupid ways.