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The finger controls are streamlined to one button for the index and thumb with another for the rest of the grip, but that doesn’t make it much easier to avoid stabbing yourself with a psychedelic syringe or dropping a buzzsaw into your unfortunate patient’s ribcage. You can control your virtual hand’s position in one of two ways tilting the controller, which feels natural but often leads to inadvertent slips, or the right analog stick, which is a little more precise but less intuitive. While the system is consistent enough that I can imagine someone getting good at the game, that would take a lot more effort than most people are going to put in. This has been simplified a little for the PS4 controller - and the iPad before it - but Surgeon Simulator: Anniversary Edition is still brutally difficult. On PC, Surgeon Simulator takes the precision advantage of mouse and keyboard to a ridiculous level, with deliberately fiddly controls for individual fingers as you muddle your way through complex operations the result is often a gory disaster.
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Many console owners, however, say that titles like Halo are tuned to play better on game controllers, and really who wants to use a mouse on a nice sofa in front of a big TV anyway? But this week the same argument spills from the theater of war to the theater of operation, as bloody PC hit Surgeon Simulator 2013 sees release on PlayStation 4.
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Most PC players swear by the mouse and keyboard method, claiming it offers increased speed and precision for more accurate headshots. Two decades after Marathon popularized mouse controls for first-person shooters, the debate still rages over the best way to kill bad guys.
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