Personally I thought the control issues and the 'speeding things up by skipping through the pretty stuff by hitting escape key' issues were two separate things - but knowing now that you can use the right mouse button instead of escape has dealt nicely with what I raised before about sitting with one hand on the mouse and the other on ESCape.
As far as the controls go, you're right in that the omission of the 'shot angle' control will make certain relatively 'normal' shots very very difficult indeed, if not impossible. Perhaps the issue I have is less with the amount of clicking that needs doing as much as the amount of clicking that needs doing *before anything happens*. I'm sure I'm sailing perilously close to the "needs a major rewrite" wind, but perhaps if she could start bowling once you set up the 'aiming', and you set the strength and spin whilst she's moving, perhaps that would make things 'flow' a bit better. I'm loathe to compare games to others (the Virtual Tennis/ATB debate is still ringing in my ears), but I keep thinking how other bowling games have managed it, and I keep coming back to 10th Frame on the C64, which had a golf-game-like 3-click system. Now, I'm in no way suggesting that specifically, but in that, you set where your bowler stood and the angle he bowled at, and then strength of shot and the amount of spin were set using the 3-click system whilst the bowler animated his way up to the line.
As far as the controls go, you're right in that the omission of the 'shot angle' control will make certain relatively 'normal' shots very very difficult indeed, if not impossible. Perhaps the issue I have is less with the amount of clicking that needs doing as much as the amount of clicking that needs doing *before anything happens*. I'm sure I'm sailing perilously close to the "needs a major rewrite" wind, but perhaps if she could start bowling once you set up the 'aiming', and you set the strength and spin whilst she's moving, perhaps that would make things 'flow' a bit better. I'm loathe to compare games to others (the Virtual Tennis/ATB debate is still ringing in my ears), but I keep thinking how other bowling games have managed it, and I keep coming back to 10th Frame on the C64, which had a golf-game-like 3-click system. Now, I'm in no way suggesting that specifically, but in that, you set where your bowler stood and the angle he bowled at, and then strength of shot and the amount of spin were set using the 3-click system whilst the bowler animated his way up to the line.