The controls in Ikari Warriors for NES are sluggish to say the least. It seems like it takes forever just to turn in the direction you want to go. This is quite different from the overhead levels of Super C where you snap to face the direction that was just pressed.
The arcade version of the game used a rotary joystick, and developer Micronics attempted to simulate this on the NES d-pad. The results were… unfortunate.
Check out the latest episode of Behind the Code as we attempt to figure out what went wrong and how we might improve things.
As a bit of a side note – It seems like a lot of Micronics’ work demonstrates overengineering of a programming endeavor. It seems like perhaps they pulled functions from a book or perhaps had more of an academic approach to their code rather than one focused on the result: a video game with good performance.
