SCDG: Same Controls, Different Game

25 years ago, Nintendo ruled the electronic world with a simple control: A four-way directional pad, and four buttons: Start, Select, "A" and "B." With it came Mario, where "A" made him jump, "B" made him launch fireballs, and Start paused the game. Very few games deviated from that scheme, sometimes switching it up. Never once was a game called a "Mario Clone."

Today, you have a game with a free moving camera, is in the "Action" genre, and you use two buttons for two different attacks, light and hard, the game is instantly labeled a "God of War" clone. A first person shooter uses the two bumpers for firing a weapon, it's a "CoD" ("Call of Duty") clone. Frankly, people, this needs to stop, and for a very good reason: it's not at all true.

Take a look at the controllers for the "Top Tier" current generation systems (XBox 360 and Playstation 3). Two bumpers and two triggers are on top. Two analogue sticks by the bottom, four face buttons, Select and Start, and a D-Pad. The D-pad is used for selecting different weapons now, instead of moving. So you have four face buttons to work with, and four top buttons. A total of eight, buttons, and it seems that people think that just because they aren't mixed up, they must be stealing the controls from another game. What about the atmosphere of the game? The graphic and sound style? How do those compare?

The main reason a lot of games have the same controls are because those controls work. They feel comfortable, and in some cases, natural (Borderlands had some amazing console controls). If a team has perfected how they work, and it shows, changing it up will show some individuality, but at the expense of comfort, and potentially just covering up how much the game isn't different at all. I know what I just said a paragraph ago, so let me explain this.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow has been getting flack for being a God of War clone due to its controls. This couldn't be further from the truth. The layout is close, but the style is different. While Gabriel Belmont only has one main weapon and four secondary weapons, Kratos has, essentially, three main weapons that he can freely switch to, and four secondary weapons in the form of spells. At the same time, the atmosphere of the two games are starkly different. LoS has a fantasy atmosphere in contrast to GoW's more brutal, ancient war atmosphere. Unfortunately for another game, Dante's Inferno seemed to have copied that a little too closely, as well as the control scheme.

But, here's where it gets tricky: Dante's Inferno was a good game. Call me crazy, but I didn't care that the controls were the same, nor that the graphics were close. The environment and the story made it work. It was so new, and frightening, to see Hell come alive with such vivid detail, that I didn't care that it was GoW in Hell. Does that mean that every game that does the same control scheme is a GoW clone, if it's in the same genre, but has its own identity away from that? Well, consider this: God of War was once known as the Devil May Cry clone while in development, but after release, due to its identity, was absolved of that title. Why can't we do that now?

Ultimately, who cares if the control layout is the same? Is the game fun? Do you enjoy playing it? That's the important part. Why should we feel the need to compare games, and take away any original identity that they have? Are we that critical that we have to say something is like something else so we don't enjoy it as much? What it comes down to is this: If you like the game, stop trying to say that its like another game. Trust me, I've played a lot of games with the same control layouts, and they still played differently, for better and worse.