I spent an hour or so playing Guitar Hero II at a friend’s place the other day. It’s a great party game, but there is something that tends to slow things down ever-so-slightly: Left-handed players need to set the “left-flip” option when it’s their turn to play (and right-handed players need to remember to turn it off when they take over!).<\/p>\n
There’s got to be an easier way… then it hit me… and I decided to write an open letter to the hardware and software developers of the Guitar Hero series:<\/p>\n
Dear Red Octane<\/a> and Harmonix<\/a>,<\/p>\n
Please consider integrating automatic handedness<\/a> detection into your guitar controllers<\/a> and guitar games<\/a>.<\/p>\n
A simple mercury switch<\/a> should do the job. It could be mounted such that when the switch is on, the guitar is being held in the left-handed orientation. This could automagically set the in-game handedness option at the start of each song. (Then left-handed people won’t have to worry about manually setting the “lefty-flip” option.)<\/p>\n
You could also consider making your controller more symmetrical, or at least including alternative mount points for the strap. (The guitars sit a little weird when used left-handed.)<\/p>\n
Best regards,<\/p>\n
– Nick Lowe<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The fact that having to set the lefty-flip option slows down gaming must have occured to the developers. They moved the option from the main menu (in Guitar Hero) to the in-game menu (in Guitar Hero 2); this saves a lot of time, but it could be even better!<\/p>\n
Update<\/strong>: I got a cautiously positive response from Harmonix:<\/p>\n
Hey Nick,<\/p>\n
Thanks for writing in with your ideas. I’ll post this to our internal
\nboards and see what people think. We have a few lefties here.<\/p>\nThanks,
\nSean<\/p>\n_______________________________________________________
\nSean Baptiste
\nManager of Community Development
\nHarmonix Music<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I spent an hour or so playing Guitar Hero II at a friend’s place the other day. It’s a great party game, but there is something that tends to slow things down ever-so-slightly: Left-handed players need to set the “left-flip” option when it’s their turn to play (and right-handed players need to remember to turn … Continue reading “Open letter to Red Octane and Harmonix”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paLsRH-4w","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nick.onetwenty.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}