Assuming that you have Netflix, open it, scroll to games and open the section. There are tons of great games without any microtransactions or ads. They’re overwhelmingly commercial games licensed by Netflix.
The stick is better for movement, while the pads are better for aiming. And the buttons work fine where they are.
Arguably the left side pad is a bit useless for gaming itself, but its nice to have two pads for desktop navigation and using the on screen keyboard that is build into steam.
Careful now, the swarm of all 11 people who use the left touchpad for movement might hear you and eat you alive while they chant, “just try setting movement to the left touchpad. You’ll never go back… You’ll never go back …”
I’ve tried it a number of times and just can’t get it to work for me. Far too much travel distance for me, and the lack of tactile feedback makes it difficult. In some ways, I like the floatiness feeling that that the travel distance creates, but ultimately it wasn’t worth the precision adjustments.
I tried it for some 2D side scrollers, FPS, and 3rd person games. I liked it most for 3rd person but couldn’t get a hang of the other two.
Plus, I really like using the left touch pad as a floating menu, which the joystick can’t do haha.
Oh, I forgot to say – the Steam Decks smaller track pad is actually nice for this reason because the shorter travel distance solves the floatiness issue for me in a lot of cases. I actually play Revita 50/50 between touchpad and joystick, just based on how I’m feeling.
The 8Bitdo Pro+ has been great - works really well with my Steam Deck and Switch. Sounds like the Pro 2 is the superior version with hall effect sticks.
The Switch Pro controller has always been good too. And the DualSense is really neat with the haptics and adaptive triggers - expensive, but not that much more than a Pro controller surprisingly.
To be fair I’ve had the pro controller for several years and it has held up really well. Really ergonomic and the vibration’s good, plus it has gyro. Perfect for my needs on Switch. I think it was worth what I paid.
No the pro controller doesn’t have hall effect sticks, but I’ve not experienced any drift. I did take it apart once to clean the insides however.
I had no end of problems with the joy cons, and have replaced those sticks with hall effect ones. Since doing that I’ve not had any problems, touch wood!
Admittedly I don’t use the D-pad all that much - does it not register inputs well? I guess it’s pretty important if you’re playing a fighting or retro game that require precise inputs. For the games I’ve played, it hasn’t been an issue.
The contacts inside are too big and sensitive and it results in phantom inputs. The DIY fix is to open up the controller and literally cover parts of the input contacts with tape.
I’m still using an old PS4 Dual Shock, as I prefer its ergonomics to the Microsoft one… But I have to say the rechargeable AA’s of Microsoft are a big plus.
The directional pad is four separate buttons. Up down left right. I want them to be like the c buttons on the Nintendo 64 controller. Separate.
What ends up happening with me is that I’ll press down but not squarely down. There is a good chance I’ll press partially to the left or right while using smaller d pads. This causes extra inputs I didn’t intend to do happen. The ds made playing tetris much harder on me than it should have for me.
My favourite controllers are still the official Xbox controllers because of Xbox Design Labs. I like to have my controller look the way I want. And also they seem to be the only controllers that can still be powered by 2 plain rechargable AA batteries.
I don’t care about colours or AA batteries, I’d rather have a cable personally, I do agree on the choice though.
Anything from the 360 onwards are my preferred controllers. A permanently wired 360 controller that does away with the massive battery compartment it my favourite but these days I use an “Xbox one” version with the USB C cable.
Yeah, as I said, I use an Xbox one controller with a USB C cable. My PC has a USB C port so I just use C to C. I just wish there was a permanently wired official version of the controller that did away with the huge battery compartment on the back :)
Can’t believe I had to scroll this far for this. To my mind, the modern Xbox controller is the perfect controller for PC. Like you said, this the AA batteries and colorways are great, unique features. On top of this, it’s well-laid out, feels good in the hand, and every button, stick, and trigger feels great to use. And most importantly, it has the broadest compatibility. Every game recognizes the Xbox controller, and almost every game has Xbox button prompts built in.
The only thing missing is hall-effect sticks, but I’ve never experienced stick drift on an Xbox controller so it’s not like I would notice a difference.
The Xbox controllers are too big for my small hands. For people like me the dualshock 4 is more adapted + it has better build quality and feels sturdier all around
DS4? As in the one for the PS4? It’s a bit of an unfair comparison bc they are different gens, but i would definitely argue that the current Xbox Series controllers are higher build-quality than the DS4. My Xbox One controller had creaky, rattly shoulders and an okay but not great d-pad. The newer ones fix that, fortunately.
All that said, I will not dispute that it’s probably less ideal for smaller hands. Sony has always gotten that part right.
8bitdo ultimate. Already lasted more than a couple of months, as opposed to the last two Xbox controllers I had. I just wanted hall effect joysticks and Xbox layout.
I have clocked a lot of hours in Slice & Dice both on mobile and on PC well worth the 8 bucks even though I’ve paid it three times now I think. Honorable mention to Suika(Watermelon game) about 3 bucks on the Play store.
I have not played it yet personally, but they have the turok trilogy bundle on the switch. I’ve heard those games are good. The serious Sam collection is also available and that’s a lot of fun
There are a lot of good suggestions here, that you can take advantage of, so I’ll come at it from another perspective.
With mouse and keyboard, positioning is a snippet of what we use when playing and is more of a tactical spacing. With controller, it is a necessity. This means that as you are playing first person shooters (or third person with controller), your characters movement will be 75% of what you’re actually aiming with.
On a mouse and keyboard, if you’re slightly off center with a sniper, it’s a simple adjustment to move to the left. Move 1cm.
On a controller, if you’re slightly off center, suddenly it isn’t as simple, because the joystick is overly sensitive and so to move 1cm is a lighting fast action input, meaning that you’re almost guaranteed to overshoot it, unless your joystick sensitivity is super low. Or, on the opposite end of it, if you try and move the control stick very gently (more on this later), it’s not necessarily a consistent input. This is where aim assist would come in, as aiming down your sights would center it on the enemy, but I think it’s a bunch of bullshit and so we’ll ignore that. Instead of moving the joystick a micron of a second to properly position yourself, moving your characters body (WASD/left analog) is almost always much slower and fine tuned.
What this means is that as you’re playing games, instead of holding W and maneuvering with A, S, D for counter balance or strafing or whatever, the joystick instead is 60% of the time holding forward, 20% of the time slowly moving in a direction to position yourself better for aiming, and 10% staying still (letting go).
Another element here is the concept of analog itself. When you’re holding W, it’s always 100%. When you push forward, (game depending) it ramps up from 0% towards 100%, which means that if you turn left or right, chances are that your character might slow down too, because you may be pulling down as you move. What you can take advantage of here is utilizing slow movement to always keep your character moving, which will help prevent being hit and will get you more used to fine-tuning your aim through your movements.
When I play games on controller, I always try and use gyro, I always keep the gameplay focused on the movement first and foremost, and the analog stick at that point almost purely becomes a look/view stick over a “this is my main form of getting headshots”, where your look inputs are based on getting into the center of the general area you want to aim at as quickly as possible, while letting the gyro and the characters body finish it off.
Finally – PLAY. Not the game, PLAY with it. Feeling weird? Move your character in circles while bunny hopping to get the feeling of the mechanics for the game, then be silly with the aiming and wiggle the joystick around to familiarize yourself with aiming with the movement wobble. Whether it’s Max Payne, Smash Bros, Doom, Vanquish, Fortnite, all of these games can be manipulated by playing with the weird quirks of their engine.
Finally finally – I also have a harder time with FPS games on the Steam Deck compared to other methods. Doom 2016 on my Switch was fine to get used to, but on the Steam Deck some did feel odd about it. I don’t have the other modern consoles and their joysticks aren’t super familiar to me, but I think it may be that the Steam Deck’s analog sticks feel like they have a larger travel distance (particularly compared to the Switch of course). Something you might consider trying is the Flick Stick input for the Trackpads, although I personally really, really enjoy low-friction trackball mouse input. Swipe+Tap to aim is just so good and being able to move the view, let go and have it keep moving based on the intertia I input is just perfect.
On a controller, if you’re slightly off center, suddenly it isn’t as simple, because the joystick is overly sensitive and so to move 1cm is a lighting fast action input, meaning that you’re almost guaranteed to overshoot it, unless your joystick sensitivity is super low.
This has been the biggest problem for me. I can’t aim at the enemies when are very far (small hitbox). I have been trying to strafe and put them on my crosshair but it needs a very different skill. I have been hearing a lot of people talking about FlickStick. I have to look it up.
Honestly, I would recommend just giving it a go. You can always save your current controller config and then go right back to it. I only say try it cause when I looked up videos I didn’t quite understand, like I got the idea but it seemed weird. Actually trying it makes a lot more sense.
Its major issue though is I felt like I was tweaking it more than I was playing, and I have found myself a very good set of controls with the Steam Controller which translated to the Deck, so I know exactly what to set for each game even on the first time. For the Flick Stick setting, I feel like one game would be fine standard settings and another game would need to change, sometimes not even getting it working. So YMMV there.
P.S. set a binding for toggling an auto-sprint on the back paddle. Auto walking is a default for any game I play!
bin.pol.social
Gorące