Listereo: The controls for RE never really bothered me. Sure, it was overly clumsy, but the games were designed in such a manner that you could develop strategies to combat the clumsiness, to compensate. Then we have the Silent Hill games. I've heard people complain about the controls for those games. But, but... what people fail to realize is that unlike Resident Evil, the control mechanics were intentionally heavy because we're playing as ordinary, clumsy, scared people. It's a tool used to leverage authorial control in an interactive experience without being so obvious.
I'm not sure I'm following your 2d control scheme argument for SM64. I agree that without the intuitive and precise controls that it would hurt the game no matter what. But it could have had just the controls and not been interested in exploiting all three dimensions to such an extent as it ended up doing. Would it then have been as awesome? I would think not. The coolest thing to me about SM64 is the fact that you can invent your own ways in many instances to get the stars. If you have the imagination and spatial thinking, you'll find that many of the stars can be retrieved in a way that wasn't intended. To me, that is not bad game design, because most of the time, it requires a novel approach. I don't know if this was intended by Miyamoto, but I believe it is a testament to the underlying philosophy of the game's design.
I'm not sure I'm following your 2d control scheme argument for SM64. I agree that without the intuitive and precise controls that it would hurt the game no matter what. But it could have had just the controls and not been interested in exploiting all three dimensions to such an extent as it ended up doing. Would it then have been as awesome? I would think not. The coolest thing to me about SM64 is the fact that you can invent your own ways in many instances to get the stars. If you have the imagination and spatial thinking, you'll find that many of the stars can be retrieved in a way that wasn't intended. To me, that is not bad game design, because most of the time, it requires a novel approach. I don't know if this was intended by Miyamoto, but I believe it is a testament to the underlying philosophy of the game's design.