Context Sensitive. Not what you think it means.

I get increasingly frustrated nowadays with developers who are trying to do too much with their simplistic control scheme. While they tote keeping things simple and easy to remember as being a selling point, there comes a time when more complex controls give better precision to a player's gaming experience.

When pressing E in a combo does a super move, thats fine... But E also does 50 other damn things, and will basically screw you out of a combo chance if there happens to be a gun or some shit on the ground that you pick up instead.

Let's take Prototype for an example. Very much a console game ported to PC. Here's where E can be used.

E picks up weapons when you are not moving.
E throws away weapons when you are not moving.
E grabs other people.
E grabs other people while moving.
Holding your primary attack key and pressing E will trigger a small AOE attack.
Holding your primary attack key and pressing E will trigger a long range cone super move if you have enough HP.
Holding your primary attack key and pressing E while in the air will cannonball you towards your target.
Holding your primary attack key and pressing E will trigger a long range cone super move if you have enough HP if you are in the air.
Holding your secondary attack key and pressing E will trigger a different small AOE attack.
Holding your secondary attack key and pressing E will trigger a huge AOE super attack if you have enough HP.
Holding your secondary attack key and pressing E will trigger an air AOE attack if you are in the air.
Holding your secondary attack key and pressing E will trigger an air super AOE attack if you are in the air and have enough HP.
Pressing E when you have your whipfist out will hookshot you to your target.
Pressing E when you have your whipfist out will hookshot you to your target while you are in the air.
Pressing E while holding a person will slam them into the ground.
Pressing F and then E will do a stealth consume.
Standing close to a tank or helicopter and pressing E will allow you to enter the vehicle.
Standing or moving close to a vehicle or any object and pressing E will pick up the vehicle provided you have enough strength to do so, and that the vehicle is non enterable. You cannot pick up objects when you already have something picked up, like a weapon.

So fuck that, E isn't even an attack key, and it is already used everywhere as if it was a key you press in a combination string in a Street Fighter game. If I was to compile a list of all the different moves that requires you to press primary attack or secondary attack, it would be basically every move in the game. Press left mouse button, then right, then left again to do one combo. Or left left right. Or left and right at once. Or hold right then left. Or hold right, hold left, release right, tap left. FUCK THAT.

Considering how the game plays, where you're running frantically, and facing not only a horde of infected beings in downtown New York, but also the relentless attacks of military soldiers, tanks, and attack choppers... You don't have time to be precise with controls. Considering how your character does different things when you're in the air than when you're on the ground, sometimes you're really just spending all your concentration on staying rooted to the floor while keeping your health high enough to do a super attack. The second you start running, you'll start auto-hopping over obstacles or running up walls or blasted into the air with an explosive that you'll no longer be on the ground. It gets worse that your character will do different things with the same commands depending on what weapon he has out. Considering that a lot of these moves above require you to hold or click primary or secondary fire at the start, that usually puts you into the animation for a completely different move, and you won't be able to execute the final move you wanted to do.

Consider this:
Holding your secondary attack key and pressing E will trigger a huge AOE super attack if you have enough HP.
I want to hit a boss with this attack in the small window that it is vulnerable.

I hold the right mouse button, but that already puts me into a charge kick attack that I cannot cancel. Pressing E now does fucking nothing. So how do you access this super AOE attack? First, find a target you don't care about that is outside the range of the boss. Hold down right mouse button and you will do a flying kick and kill said target. Then, without ever releasing your mouse button (preventing you from doing any further attacking or defending) you must wait until the window of opportunity shows up, all the while dodging any attacks. Run forward to the boss, and hold down E. If you are EVER knocked down while doing any of this, you must start all over, as your right mouse button is no longer considered to be held down after a knockdown. Unless your window is large enough such that you can do a flying kick animation and still have time left over to pull off the stationary AOE attack without being knocked down... Then this is the tedious method you must repeat.

I don't mean to harp on a single game, as this isn't a Prototype article, but it just so happens to be the most recent example on my mind. Many games on Gamecube have frustrated me to no end by trying to map as many different keys as possible to the same buttons or even the same sort of action. Mario Power Tennis is a prime example, mapping 5-7 different kinds of actions to the same two buttons. Depending on the sequence in which the two are pushed, the number of times they are pressed, the duration for which the button is held down, and the current alignment of the stars, these buttons will execute completely different actions. The Wii version is even worse, mapping all of those swings to movements of the remote. Considering that the Wii is a console based off of a barely functioning gimmick, trying to make the remote understand the difference between your topspin and flatspin is nigh impossible. The Wii has the same interface problem with many of the games in its library where the game tries to map too many different controls to the remote motions. In fact, it is easier to say that the rule is the only good games on the Wii are those that map only a single action to the remote movement, like Twilight Princess.

There are some controller devices that are just weird. But often, they are weird because they try to make a new type of controller that does something different... from pistol-mice, to glove controllers, to Novint Falcons, etc. That's not at all what I'm talking about though. I'm talking about having plenty of buttons to map your actions to... Yet persisting in mapping these controls to only a select few of the buttons available, resulting in an unusable control scheme that fails to translate the gamers' intent to the actions of the character. That's not the fault of the controller, it's the fault of the developers who have tried to put too much in too little. It's like capturing an amazing panoramic picture but cropping it down to a tiny photo frame. That's what these games are doing: taking a potentially great game, but crippling it with terrible controls so that your experience is just confined by frustration and exasperation.