Old school RuneScape, it has free “demo” version which you can easily put a 100+ hours in. And if you really love there is a subscription model that’s kinda expensive if you bill monthly, but no other micro transactions.
Wuthering Waves is Hella good. Technically it’s an open world gacha game, but I played through all the storyline (the developers will be forever updating the story a la Genshin Impact), and I never spent a dime on it.
Also, I have spent money on Cooking Diary. However, I went about 3 months of daily play before I did, and it was more about me being impatient/telling myself “You got 3 months of daily play, you can drop the devs $4.99”. I’ve played that game just about daily since Memorial Day 2023, and I’ve dropped $5.00 quarterly. There are regularly moments of infinite lives that exceed an hour or two, that it genuinely isn’t necessary. I spend the money more as a “thanks for not making this ducking game contingent on microtransactions, making it good, and maintaining/update it.”
One button, a lot of resistance to push on the stick.
After that, an elderly Logitech gamepad from the 1990s that had a D-pad that rolled diagonal way too easily. IIRC it had a screw-in mini-joystick that could attach to the center of the D-pad. Don’t remember the model. White case, attached directly to a joystick/MIDI port.
After that, I think the NES controller. I have no idea why people like those or actually buy recreations. Yes, nostalgia, but the ergonomics on it were terrible. Hard buttons, sharper corners on the D-pad than is the norm today, and a squared-off controller made the thing downright uncomfortable to use for long periods of time.
The Atari 2600 joysticks were a blight. The base was so small and the stick so unresponsive I remember having to hold the base steady with my feet to use that accursed controller. The breakout dial controller was pretty sweet tho.
Ironically, the Atari -like joystick from the 2000’s from Walmart for $15 that plugs directly into your TV with games stored in the joystick is a better joysticks than the original 2600 joysticks.
However, I would contend that the Intellivision controller was worse.
I had a Colecovision (and Vic 20), and although I will say that was better than the 2600 and Intellivision joystick, I have to emphasize to all these youngsters complaining about the original NES controllers that those were still an improvement over previous default joysticks.
The Steel Battalion Mech controls. The size of a table, it was an appropriate recreation of the control panel for a mech, requiring you to go through all the steps from firing it up to ejecting in case of danger. You had pedals, sticks, knobs, switches galore.
Holy shit I just looked this up and this article says there are forty buttons! Also apparently if you didn’t eject in time, the game would erase your save file?!?
Both games were pretty damn brutal, but memorable, experiences. I wish someone would come up with something like it, because that was the closest I’ve felt to my childhood dream.
You don’t have to tell me to get in the robot, you have to stop me from hijacking it just for a joyride.
I have one. It’s pretty sweet. Wish Capcom made more games that supported it. It is real awkward to use, though. You gotta strap it down so it doesn’t slide around your table. Also trying to steer a match with so much articulation is a challenge. You can aim independently of the mech, whose torso is also independent from the legs. It’s a lot of joystick to keep track of.
It’s got tons of buttons, but you don’t really use most during gameplay. Mostly the triggers, pedals, and a few buttons for some silly stuff , like fire extinguisher for when you take a hit and are on fire, or the windshield wiper.
Back in the early 90s, here in the UK, a company called Cheetah produced licensed joysticks based on Batman, Terminator, Alien³ and The Simpsons. They looked great but they were terrible to use, especially the Alien³ model which I really liked but was incredibly uncomfortable. I never bought one, just tried then on the shops, awful things.
There were some cheap ass weird ones in North America too. I remember for Christmas we’d ask for a Joycon or something like that, and we’d get “the Joycron,” which looked nothing like a controller, had a weird shape, felt like shit and was cheap as hell. The old man would be like, arrrr we saw it at the BiWay and it was 99 cents, why do you need the one thats $60? Then he would play it, and sure enough, by February you had the real one.
Not super weird in the grand scheme of things but I played the shit out of FFXI using this controller and when my friends found out I was using this they were astounded at my typing speed. This was back in the era of texting with a number pad so thumb typing wasn’t as prevalent as it is today.
I unironically wish all controllers were like this. IMO the main way hardware limits game design is the number of buttons on modern controllers; more buttons = more actions that can be performed = more complex and interesting games.
The steam controller was (and still is) fantastic. I once got a comfortable binding for the original System Shock, which already has a pretty untenable control scheme with a keyboard and mouse. Also its haptic feedback can play music.
I’ve played lot of slower paced first person games with them. It also feels really nice in games with inventory screens and other mouse-focused ui. I never really tried to get used to them though, they just kind of clicked with me.
Try a strategy title with the pads, in particular something like Civ, where there is no time limit. Right pad works fantastic as a mouse replacement. Left pad is always kind of just there, though it can be useful as a radial menu if you use the configurator (albeit that makes more sense on Steam Controller since the pads are round).
100% a title that would struggle with full controller, for me it was cities skylines and rimworld. Also played a lot of warframe and spec ops:the line with mine, being able to have actions trigger at different points of the trigger pull was interesting, had a profile I grabbed for shooters that’d enable gyro aiming at the last bit of your trigger pull for fine adjustment and seriously, it works extremely well once you get used to it. The pads also supported osd rotary menus for hotkeys which was probably what the left pad got the most use out of, had the ability to set different behaviour too using mod buttons are by touching the rim of the pad. Also the haptic feedback on the pads was interesting, did a lot to make them feel more real, seriously had a really powerful piece of hardware with the og steam controller.
Came here to say this. I use mine almost every day, specifically for titles that don’t have controller support.
While I do prefer a twin-stick like the DualSense for games with support, you cannot at all beat a Steam Controller for strategy gaming from the couch. I’m still on my first, but have two as backup (it was limit 2 when Valve offloaded them for $5 each).
N64, and this is the one I actually grew up with. They took a chance, they fucked up by making an alien spaceship three-pronged dildoesque monstrosity, that wore out at mach speed - especially by normal gameplay in certain (coughMarioParty1cough) games. While I have tons of love and nostalgia for N64 and several games on it, it can't excuse the controller itself.
Joycons. I actually enjoy using them but the fact that their failure rate is basically guaranteed makes them little more than paper weights. I have 4 sets all with drift. I have a friend who’s really into Nintendo and he has a huge collection of joycons because they keep developing drift. At $100 a pop in Canada, I know my friend has spent over $1000 on these things. Myself, I would never buy another pair of joycons from Nintendo.
My experience with joycons has actually made me much more discerning when it comes to buying new controllers, for example why would I buy the xbox elite controller when everyone reports they develop drift? Before joycons I probably would have just bought the xbox elite controller and ended up with a disappointing product.
I had an ASCII Grip for the original Playstation that I really loved. It was a one-handed controller that I mostly used to play RPGs, and although it took a little getting used to, I eventually got so comfortable with it I could menu faster with the Grip than with a normal pad!
It’s not exactly weird, but I loved the giant “duke” controller for the og xbox. A lot of people hated it but I think it’s one of the most comfortable controllers ever made.
I’ve always had long fingers, and The Duke was perfect. I remember getting one of the revamped controller models down the line, and it just never felt quite as good.
Still prefer X-Box style controllers on the overall, these days. Still not quite up there yet, but still better than PlayStations style, and while I think the JoyCons are absolutely adorable and clever, actually using them is just uncomfortable after awhile.
Hot take: Nintendo Switch Joycons. They’re a nice and clever concept but in reality they’re bad.
Too small even for casual games. The Wiimote was much better at it.
Very expensive at 80 € per set. Yes, you get two of them but in most games outside of Mario Kart you also need both. And even then they’re fine at best.
4 out of 4 of my controllers got stick drift. Nintendo had to be sued into repairing them.
It’s a conventional GameSir controller that has a Switch mode among others. The split design of the Joycons rarely plays out, most of the time it makes the controllers unnecessarily complex and thus expensive IMHO.
You mean both hands have to grip one controller opposed to having a Joycon in each hand? That split-design can be an advantage, but IMHO doesn’t cancel out the shortcomings of the Joycons. I find them still too small and not grippy at all.
Single joycon is barely usable, but the Wiimote was terrible for sideways holding.
Its shape was clearly never intended for it, and the d-pad was absolutely awful, one of the worst I’ve used.
The d-pad worked as buttons (which was how most games used it, in vertical mode), but for movement it was very stiff and almost impossible to get diagonals. For a console that featured virtual console heavily and needed a lot of classic controls, that was very bad design.
I hate the Joycons so much. The clicky buttons are terrible, the split dpad sucks for games that use it for movement, the sticks aren’t great either for precision (ignoring the drift issues), and I find them painful to hold.
markdown formatting is weird bruh, sometimes it adds spaces, sometimes it removes them sometimes it just fucking yeets newlines, sometimes it adds them, what a weird “standard”
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