I really liked the Steam Controller, but the lack of a right stick was sometimes an issue. Being able to switch between mouse-like and joystick-like input in certain games on the fly was important and not always easy to set up. No issues with the stick itself going bad, but the rubber cap on the stick for both the ones I bought was worn smooth pretty fast. In shooters, I generally had a harder time tracking targets with the touch pad, but an easier time snapping to targets. Quick headshots were easier than with a stick, but sustained full auto fire was oddly tricky. Touch pad makes it shockingly good for N64 emulation since you can put A and B on the ABXY buttons and then the C buttons on the pad without the weirdness of having ‘buttons’ on a stick that you have to resort to with other controllers. The touch pad is also useful for DS emulation. Dual stage triggers also came in handy way more than I expected them to. Really neat, and I’ll definitely try a v2 if they ever make one, but it’s a pretty divisive device and there’s a steep learning curve to using the pad to aim.
Tried a Razer Wolverine Pro Ultimate, and I loved the extra buttons, but stick drift was a serious problem. Four back buttons and two extra shoulder buttons meant my thumbs almost never left the sticks. The controller was basically unusable after a point, though, and I really didn’t feel like spending that much on another one. Steam also wouldn’t recognize the extra buttons, so I had to use Razer’s proprietary app to configure it, which wasn’t great.
Was gifted a Dualsense Edge and it’s so far been really nice. Haven’t had much use for the touchpad yet, but that’s mostly because of the games I’ve been playing. Sticks are pretty cheaply replaceable, but I haven’t had any issues with them after about a year of heavy use. Steam also recognizes all the extra buttons and lets me map them all I want, unlike the Wolverine. Battery life is much worse than a standard Dualsense, though. Apparently they cut into the battery area to make room for the removable stick units. That battery life issue is my only problem so far, however. Well, that, and I doubt I would have paid $200 for it. Again, it was a gift.
What I would really like to see is a controller with six face buttons, similar to how the original Xbox controllers or even the N64 controller have them. I wouldn’t always use the extra buttons, but there are times when they’d really come in handy.
Why not just expand on the winning formula for the original Arkham games? Do a forty year time skip and have the player as Terry instead of Bruce. Call it Beyond Arkham. It would probably print money if it’s as good as Knight or Origins, to say nothing of how much they would get if it was as good as Asylum or City.
First off, that’s not Nintendo. That’s a third party controller manufacturer. Secondly, they’re basing that entirely off the specs they got for new controllers and docks. All that’s really confirmed by the article is that the next system will have a similar form factor with iteratively improved controllers and docks. Which is in the ‘fucking obvious’ category. Their speculation about the actual internal hardware specs was pulled straight from their ass.
Keeps support for poorly coded programs working. In the old days, a quick and hacky way to determine which Windows version the system was on was to have the program check the OS name. If the name started with the characters “Windows 9” you knew it was either Win95 or Win98 and ran in one mode, but if it was something else it ran in the other mode. If the new OS was named Windows 9, then certain old programs would break when run on it. Yes, the people who would have coded that way are idiots, and sure, the number of people running those programs may be in the single digits, but Microsoft has been pretty serious about maintaining backwards compatibility, even if that means ever more cruft and jank.
The other reason is marketing. “See? It’s not anything like that awful Windows 8! We skipped all the way to 10 to demonstrate how different it is! Please come back!”
I’ll probably get the Switch 2 when they do their mid-gen refresh model, but I think I’ll skip the PS6. Sony ports their stuff to PC after a few years now and I’m a patient gamer type anyway.
The only thing I will concede is that being able to shorten Xbox One X to XbOX was clever. Naming it the Xbox One in the first place was mind numbingly stupid, though.
I have seen people very confused about which games will run on their system, though. Most are still cross compatible with XB1 and Series X, but some are Series X only now and the boxes aren’t marked clearly enough for some people to tell the difference.
It also scaled unique items. That cool glass sword with the frost damage enchantment and unique blue glass texture? Its strength entirely depends on what level you were when you finished the quest that rewards it. Unenchanted standard weapons would usually outclass it in maybe two hours.
I tried 13 multiple times. Steam says I have more than fifty hours in it. I know the last time I got all the way to the open world segment. But I just can’t get into it and was mostly making myself play because I bought the entire trilogy on a sale. The game’s insistence on putting all the plot in a menu made it much more difficult to follow along or to get attached to any of the characters. I know I read everything as it became available and I honestly have no memory of the vast majority of it. I’m not even sure I could name the fully party.
On top of that, the gameplay itself just wasn’t great. Party composition was almost always dictated by the plot and character growth was completely linear, so there was very little opportunity to experiment with the game’s systems. And when I did get to experiment with it, encounters were so rigidly structured and my characters’ levels being capped by plot progression meant there was no wiggle room to actually experiment. Throw in traditional FF problems like debuffs being useless and new ones like AOE attacks being heavily luck based and it didn’t even have fun combat to fall back on.
You can play online and there are tons of free apps, but it used to be that someone had to purchase a set to be able to share it with their friends. Though since making copies would have been difficult I guess it would have been more like Mario Party than the first nine levels of Doom.