Lefty Presidents

Both Barack Obama and John McCain are left-handed.

Lefty Gamer: Mario Hoops 3-on-3

Earlier worries that Mario Hoops 3-on-3 would be unplayable for lefties have been put to rest. The game, as with most DS titles, offers an option to flip controls for left-handed players. The default control scheme involves using the stylus in one’s right hand to dribble, shoot, block, etc., and using the D-pad to control your player. Switching to left-handed mode lets you hold the stylus in your left hand and use the A, B, X, and Y buttons to move players around the court. It works pretty well, though not as cleanly as using the D-pad. All stylus-intensive DS games have the same problem, whether you’re left-handed or wrong, which is that you have to support most of the weight of the unit with your offhand. Mario Hoops, unlike Metroid, understands this and doesn’t require too much use of L or R. Also, it’s built that you’ll only use the same shoulder button you use to move your character, so you don’t have to figure out how to hit L while holding the stylus in your left hand, for example.

The game itself is pretty fun so far. I found the tutorial so be a tad overwhelming. You’re quickly taught how to run, shoot, dribble, block, steal, dunk, jump, dash, use items, and so forth all with various taps or flicks of the stylus, and it’s a lot to take in, but once you get playing you realize that they’re all basically the same commands. An upward swish can be a shoot, a dunk, or a jump block, but it in practice the game works out the proper context and provides the appropriate verb pretty well. One review I read expressed frustration that when you try to pass to a teammate who’s too close to the net you’ll often shoot instead. The game designers actually did anticipate this, so if you want to pass into that zone you need hold R (for lefties).

Worry set in when my trio of Mario, Luigi, and Yoshi were able to breeze through the first tournament with little idea of what I was doing. Penny Arcade indicates quite clearly that the game gets harder as it goes along, and as soon as I started the Flower Cup I began to see the other team doing some better block and ball handling. Nothing I couldn’t manage, but I’m guessing things will get trickier from here on out.

Link Only Right-Handed on Wii

Wow, this is strange. Twilight Princess was designed with Link being properly left-handed. Late in the development cycle, they realized that they wanted to make him right-handed to accomodate the poor righties who couldn’t possibly be expected to hold the remote in their left hands, so they mirrored the entire game. If you buy the GameCube version, Link’s a lefty. If you buy the Wii version, he’s a righty, and the entire game is flipped. Right turns are left turns. The map is backwards. Says Shigeru Miyamoto:

Although Link is left-handed, at E3 we noticed people seemed to be using the right Wii controller to swing his sword. That’s why we decided to make Link right-handed. The interesting thing is, on the GameCube Link is still left-handed; because of the mirror mode the game map is reversed.

This almost makes me want to just buy the GameCube version instead, since the Wii is backwards compatible.

Link, Left-Handed Hero No More

Outrage! So I’m, to say the least, excited about the Wii, and there’s little chance I won’t be playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess as soon as I can. However, I read something today that upset me verily.

Quick quiz: in the Legend of Zelda games, is Link left-handed or right-handed?

That’s correct, Link is one of the few characters in video games who’s left-handed. I of course noticed this at a very young age playing the original The Legend of Zelda for the NES.

Some screenshot proof:

The Wikipedia entry on Link presently (2006-09-20) contains the following passage regarding Link’s handedness:

Link is left-handed, although this detail is never particularly stressed in any of the games, save for a Nintendo Gallery figurine description in The Wind Waker, which states that Link favors his left hand, and the Adventure of Link instruction booklet, which describes Link setting off “with a magical sword in his left hand and a magical shield in his right.” He wields his blade accordingly in the 3D games. In the original NES and Super NES Legend of Zelda titles, Link can be seen alternately holding his weapon in the right or the left hand, depending on his orientation, due to sprite mirroring (Nintendo’s originally joking explanation for this is that he always keeps his shield pointed at Death Mountain, which in the 2D games that featured it was always North, towards the top of the screen). Starting with The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, however, the sprites are no longer mirrored and have been updated to reflect that Link holds his sword in his left hand and his shield in his right, no matter what direction he is facing. This occurs in the left and right-looking sprites. In The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, however, Link returns to alternately holding his weapon in the right or the left hand, depending on his orientation. At the beginning of the Four Swords Plus (Four Swords Adventures) manga, Link is referred to as the “left-handed hero” after defeating pirates that were raiding a Hylian town. However, in the animated TV series, Link is right-handed.

So there you have it. Aside from ocasional discrepancies and technical issues, Link has always been a left-handed character.

Today I read this article about the Wii, which contained some disturbing news:

In New York, Nintendo showed only an E3 level of Twilight Princess, refit with updated Wii controls. Shaking the remote-shaped controller in the right hand causes hero Link to swing the sword he holds in his right hand. Shaking the nunchuck controller in the player’s left caused Link to attack with the shield in his left. Those details might hasten the heartbeat of true “Zelda” fans who remember Link being a lefty ever since his 1987 original outing on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Link’s switched sword hands for this Wii version, though Nintendo Head of Localization Bill Trinen pointed out to GameFile that even the original Link sometimes held his sword in his right: When he ran to the right, since the primitive NES simply flipped the drawing it used for Link running to the left, a southpaw grip of his sword mirrored as a clutch in his right.

Here’ a photo from the upcoming game:

So it seems that in the upcoming Twilight Princess for the Wii, Link will be right-handed. Players will be able to wave the Wii controller around and have Link mirror their movements. Apparently so that all you weak righties don’t have to hold the controller in your off-hands, Nintendo has decided to change this important aspect of Link’s character, and destroy one of the few great icons in the left-handed world.

Lefties have to live every single day dealing with things that are designed for right hands, and now we’re losing Link. I am outraged.

International Lefthanders Day

It fell on a Sunday so naturally I never checked my calendar and didn’t realize it, but yesterday was International Lefthanders Day. How did I (unknowlingly) celebrate? I bought a copy of Metroid Prime: Hunters for the Nintendo DS, and got frustrated enough learning the controls that I almost returned it. In fairness, this isn’t a left-handed/right-handed issue, as the game designers included control setups for both, but if you’ve played this game and been frustrated by the controls, it’s similar to the clumsiness lefties experience elsewhere in life.

The controls of Metroid DS are similar to a PC first-person game, except that you use the stylus to look around where you’d use a mouse on a computer. The problem is that means you have to support the entire DS with your other hand, and you have to hold it on the edge, which is not its center of gravity. In doing so it makes it hard to support the weight of the unit and be able to read the L/R buttons to fire your weapon while also moving. Eventually I figured out how to support the other side with the pinkie of my stylus hand, but it’s not quite strong enough for the job.

Miyamoto Is Left-Handed

From an interview with IGN about the Wii:

The dialogue turned at one point to, of all things, left-handed and right-handed gaming. Miyamoto is left-handed, and he said that he’s recently been trying to get used to using the remote/nunchuck pair in the “reverse” way — that is, the remote in the left and the nunchuck in the right hand. While he’s been getting used to playing like this, he feels lefties who’ve grown accustomed to playing games the current way will have an easier time of playing Wii games like everyone else.

In practice, regardless of game, you’ll be able to play with either device in either hand. Miyamoto actually expects kids who’ve never played a game before to hold the remote in their left hand and the nunchuck in their right hand.

So I guess that’s good news, which allays some of my fears about lefty gaming in the next generation.

Sinistrals

Brain Age, for the Nintendo DS, has two remarkable features that don’t get a lot of press:

1. Before any puzzle that requies voice recognition, the game first asks if you’re in an environment where it’s appropriate to be talking to your handheld video game system, lest you look like a crazy person on the bus.
2. When you set up your profile, it asks if you’re left- or right-handed. If you’re left-handed, whenever you log in it flips the screens for you so that you can write with the touchscreen on the left and not have to cross your hand over the other screen, which is awkward.

On the first, point, I’ll just say that it amazes me how fast Bluetooth headsets have caught on in DC. Do none of those people walking around and talking on them not see other people doing the same thing and notice how crazy they look? It’s not uncommon for me to actually pass by a person talking on a headset who’s standing right next to a real crazy person talking to himself. Oh, wait, the people with those headsets are the same staffers with their Blackberries who walk around looking as uncool as one can look, thumb-typing away emails that certainly could have waited until they were back at their keyboards.

Fact (well, a Wikipedia fact): 8-15% of the world’s population is left-handed. The Brain Age people were smart enough (heh) to realize that if 1/10 of their customers were going to be inconvenienced when trying to play their game, it was worth the time to engineer something to make it more pleasant for them.

At least a few DS games require you to control your character with the directional pad, which is on the left of the console, and use the stylus to interact with the game’s environment. This is very difficult for a lefty to do. You can either try to figure out a way to use the D-pad with your right hand (and not drop the DS while you’re doing that), or learn how to hold a pencil in your right hand, like a 19th century child being forced to act against his nature.

I like that the DS has a cool user interface, and I like that game designers are having fun and experimenting with new ways to interact with their games. The Wii will take this even further, and I’m very excited by the idea. Still, I don’t like the idea that these new ideas, which are, as stated by Nintendo itself, intended to make games more accessible to more people, are creating an accessibility problem for able-bodied left-handed gamers.

(I’m using a bit more hyperbole here than maybe is necessary, but seriously, if I got a game that I couldn’t play well because it made me hold the stylus in my right hand, I’d have to return it. The level of precision required is relevant here of course.)

Left

I’m a little worried about being at a strong disadvantage on the Nintendo Revolution, being left-handed. Picture a high tech Duck Hunt, where you use the main controller as a gun and the nunchaku attachment containing ancillary controls needed to move your character. We’re all used to using control sticks in our left hands from twenty years of muscle memory. Presumably you’ll want to main hand the “gun”, which works great if you’re a rightie and can still use the other piece with your left hand, but if you want your “gun” in your left hand, you’ll have to retrain your hands. To me, the idea of holding a control stick in my right hand just seems dirty.