Hey,
I can't tell you much but it's not like the one in W&G, thanks God. Actually that one was my "how not to do it" reference during the project... But I clearly wouldn't say that it's idiotically designed neither as it works for some gamers.
One thing is for sure the philosophy for designing the control scheme for Gray Matter on the Xbox360 was never "console gamers are stupid so let's give them a BS control scheme", and I think that no one in the industry thinks like that. It's just that what Halo did for the FPS genre on console (among other things the clever and now standard "dead zone autolock"), no game has done it for the P&C genre yet.
But back to our case, the idea was more that PC gamers tend to "direct" their avatars in games, while console gamers are more used to "control" them. It's of course not a general rule, no need to bring up exceptions. So we went for direct control which is not only way more intuitive for console gamers, but also more immersive in my humble opinion. I'm not saying that a cursor couldn't have done it: it was a choice, not a necessity.
We took some console AG with direct control trying to identify the shortcomings. The main game used as reference was Syberia 2 for the Xbox with it's simple relative control (as opposed to the absolute one in Grim Fandango or Alone in the Dark) and "press A to interact".
The Radial interface that we came up with is a proposal for solving the problem of the selection of one of two very close-by hotspots to interact with, which often made necessary to make your character dance the tango in order to have him select the door instead of the light switch!
There was also the issue of far objects like the sky or a roof (some hotspots were missing in the console version of Syberia because of this IIRC).
I'm not saying that we came up with the perfect solution, especially because, as has been mentionned by Jannik above, the bulk of the game wasn't designed for anything but mouse and keyboard in the begining, and production had already been started without consoles in mind by the former company. The scheme needed to adapt to the already existing engine, gameplay, interfaces and other mechanics, which is to be expected considering the game's (long) history.
But at least I'm pretty confident that people will like it better than the one in Wallace and Gromit, which isn't a big achievement...
Sorry, this message is not super informative, and I can't answer your question about the presence of a pointer control scheme for the console version.
Whish I could tell more but I hope it at least reasured you that console gamers weren't dissed or anything during the production of Gray Matter... I for starters have mainly been a console gamer in the recent years anyway, so it would be a bit like
Excuse my french, and I hope you'll love playing Gray Matter as much as we did love working on the thing.
Cheers,
Dinga.
