Chasing the Forever Game

Since this is my first week back for the New Year when I am not in “holiday mode” I am starting to think about all of the assorted topics that one does at the beginning of a new year. I’ve never been very big into making New Years Resolutions, but from time to time the construct seems interesting to me. Given this is also the beginning of a new decade it seems as though it maybe has some greater importance. What I do this year may or may not set the tone for what the rest of the decade is going to look like. As such this morning I am going to share some tweaks that I would like to make in my life for the coming year.

Give Up the Chase

In the year 2000, I got indoctrinated by one of my friends into a little game called Everquest. From that point it feels like I have been chasing the one game to rule them all, or at least the one true game to devote all of my love and attention to. This has been Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, Horizon, World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Rift, Star Wars the Old Republic and countless other titles that I have placed upon the burden of being my prime source of entertainment. For the last two decades, the majority of my gaming time has been spent pouring resources and hours into a seemingly endless game hoping it would capture my attentions and hold them in perpetuity.

The problem here is that it never really works out and I have had a lot of amazing “honeymoon periods” with new games, in which I will pour my heart and soul for three months before wandering off disillusioned and jaded. In the Post-MMORPG world these have been games like Destiny or Anthem or even Monster Hunter World where I kept trying to make them into something that they were not necessarily intended to be. So in this coming year and decade I hope to stop looking for this magical thing that doesn’t exist. I want to allow myself to enjoy the games while they are enjoyable and fade away without guilt when they stop being that.

Stop Leading the Masses

I have this natural instinct and desire to collect awesome people and drag them along with me in whatever I happen to be doing. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it has been the source of my “gaming community” for the last two decades. However going hand in hand with the first statement, I need to stop trying to make magic happen again. Everquest and World of Warcraft were moments in history that may not ever be able to be repeated. I need to stop trying to enter each new online gaming experience and try and make it into something more than it actually is. I have this bad habit of trying to “unite the clans” and get them rallied under a single banner, and then feeling super distraught and guilty when this amalgam of all of these people that I think are awesome never quite mesh together into a larger resilient community.

When we launched House Stalwart in Elder Scrolls Online we had something silly like 150 people on opening day and this was absolutely unsustainable in both just the case of human interaction or trying to make that many people exist in the same space. Then when a month later that it is down to 50 people… which is still a reasonable sized group I end up getting disappointed and frustrated that I could not somehow make everyone stick around. The binge and purge nature of new games and the guilds/clans I have built around them ends up leading to a spiral of depression and guilt that I just don’t need in my life. As a result my hope is that I can somehow stop myself from picking up that mantle of leadership in the future, because it only ends up leading to heartbreak when I can’t live up to the standards I have built up in my brain.

Play More Single Player Games

It was extremely evident when I was pulling together the list of my top games of the decade… that there are a ton of critically acclaimed games that I have never touched. Last of Us for example is by all accounts a phenomenal and game changing experience, and I have never actually played it. The reasons are many but at the end of the day I wind up getting caught up in chasing the forever game and spend all of my time in those sort of experiences rather than knocking out anything single player. I really want to somehow reverse that trend and start playing more of the games that are sitting collecting dust in my backlog that I picked up on sale at some point but never really gave the time of day.

Similarly I would also like to start finishing some of the things that I started but bounced for some reason or another. Jedi Fallen Order for example is a phenomenal game experience and I have no clue at all why I stopped playing it. I need to get back in and figure out where I left off and continue the adventure. In no particular order here are some of the games that I would like to play and or finish this calendar year.

  • Last of Us
  • Jedi Fallen Order
  • Wolfenstein II: New Colossus
  • The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
  • Darksiders
  • God of War
  • Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
  • Cyberpunk
  • Dragon Age Inquisition
  • Red Dead Redemption 2
  • Sleeping Dogs
  • Uncharted (collection)

I realize that is a lot of things on that list and it doesn’t account for my whims but it is a goal. These are some things that I would love to spend more time playing.

Read More Books

Over the last two decades I have allowed myself to get out of the habit of reading for personal enjoyment. There are series that I am well hooked on that I will snatch up a new title for and read when it comes out like the Dresden novels, but the total volume of my reading is pretty limited. It is a weird sequence of circumstances and as I have moved away from consuming physical content as a whole… I never quite transitioned books in this direction. For awhile it was because I lacked what I considered a comfortable tablet to read on, and then when I did get that thing I wound up just playing mobile games on it before bed. With my recent obsession about the Witcher universe and trying to consume those novels I am almost rediscovering how enjoyable and relaxing knocking out a few chapters before sleep can be.

My wife is a voracious reader and over the Christmas break she consumed over twenty novels. I am nowhere near as quick or consistent as I will always prefer game time to time with a book. That is not to say that I don’t also enjoy time with a book, and it is my goal this coming year to just keep something queued and progressing. I realize I have a lot of Witcher novels in front of me, but I would also really like to read some Brandon Sanderson because it is something I have never done. I feel like I have a hefty backlog of things I know I “should” read but never got around to. I may actually start using Good Reads as a way of tracking this, just for the sake of having something easily attached to the blog.

Take Better Care of Myself

I am a fat man and will likely always be a fat man. This is just who I am as a person and I lack the desire to change that. However I need to do something because I am currently the largest I have ever been. In many ways it is keeping me from living the sort of life that I want to live. I am not entirely sure what this is going to entail but I want to make some effort to change this. I need to sit down with my wife and make some lifestyle changes in order to support this, and as a result I am being vague for the moment because I am not entirely certain what that is going to look like. I always skimp on exercise in part because I keep trying to play forever games and keep trying to make myself available to lots of different time zones worth of friends when they are available. I need to stop this and spend more time on improving me.

Go To BlizzCon

I am not sure if this is realistic this year or not, but I would like to go to a BlizzCon. I would like to experience it in person and meet up with my various long time friends who are Blizzard devotees. This coming year seems like it is going to factor heavily into Diablo 4… the Blizzard franchise that I care the most about and as a result I think I would really like to be there. Factoring into the previous statement, I need to get to a size where air travel will not be horrible for me in order to make this even a viable option. Anaheim is a really far distance away and as a result there is no reasonable option that sees me taking a road trip to get there. So contingent on the previous statement, I would love to figure out a way to make this work in November or whenever it happens to be occurring this year.

Revive Bel Folks Stuff

Several years back I had a monthly podcast where I sat down with various friends and had a dialog about things and stuff. I greatly enjoyed this process but found the scheduling to be madness and the fact that it felt like no one was actually listening ultimately caused me to stop doing this. It never really seemed to gain any sort of traction, I guess in part because it was super niche and you either new these people I cared about or you didn’t. So one of the things I have been kicking around for awhile is trying to figure out a way to revive this. Maybe record an entire season of episodes before releasing them, making it less of a stretch of trying to figure out how to schedule them. I also think I might want to shift the format to where I ask a fixed set of questions that are of course open ended enough to allow for random discussions to happen. I am not even sure this is going to happen but I figure it is worth trying to make happen. For those curious the original run can still be found on the AggroChat site, and there are seven total episodes.

GOG Galaxy 2.0

Over the last few days I have been using a thing and I thought I would sit down and talk about it this morning. I’ve known about Good Ole Games or GOG as they refer to themselves these days for years. They were a handy shop for buying old games that came with dosbox pre-configured to launch without horrible side effects. At some point they launched the Galaxy Client an it was “fine”. It did the job and presented any games I happened to own on that platform in a pleasant manner. The only game I really owned through GoG was Witcher 3, and only then because a download code came with a video card I had purchased. Since GoG is now owned by CD Project Red it makes sense that they would be handing out OEM codes through their official storefront. To be truthful I had the client installed but I never spent much time with it… that is until I was made aware of some significant changes.

Once upon a time there was a thing called Raptr and I loved the way it kept track of my games played. In part a bit of the reason why I started manually tracking games played in each month was because I was no longer using Raptr. The client reached a point where they integrated way too much stuff into it and it seemed to be a bit of a drag on my system. Over the last several days I have seen a bunch of these cross-platform gaming stats showing up on social media, but I think the first one I remember seeing was my friend Maeka. This lead me down a path of trying to see what had changed with GoG and being pleasantly surprised. The challenge with the client is the fact that I am already heavily bough into the Steam store and the inertia tying me there is strong and mostly keeps me from ever wanting to buy a game elsewhere as steam has served as a single launchpad for all of my games.

Seeing this as a problem, it appears that GoG has worked hard on trying to come up with the answer. Instead of creating yet another walled garden of exclusive content, they went the opposite direction and have created a client that seemingly integrates with everything else. Now I have this single pleasant interface that delivers up all of the content that exists regardless of the store front. This is the point where you are just about to tell me “but Bel, Nvidia Experience already does this and offers graphical configuration options”, and that is absolutely true. However what GoG does is give me back some of that Raptr functionality of tracking the time played and achievements earned from every single game on the list and allowing me to see what my friends are also playing.

The activity feed has been real awkward over the last several days as folks on-board their way into the platform and it catalogs the past decade worth of gaming. However past that initial set up phase as people find out about GoG Galaxy 2.0, it then becomes a valuable way of seeing what my friends happen to be doing. I would love to see them integrate with something like Player.me or maybe just outright buy them to add some of the missing social features. Like when a friend earns a hard achievement I would love to be able to do something simple like give them a thumbs up. That said what is there has switched me to pretty much keeping it up and running at all times, and has greatly increased my willingness to venture off of Steam and purchase games from another platform.

This all works because they did something somewhat brilliant. Instead of negotiating deals with all of these publishers, they went down the road of allowing for community supported Python integrations to be snapped into the client. Many of these integrations are currently being maintained by GoG, but are being treated as open source projects allowing anyone to look at what the code is doing and figure out how to adapt this to other platforms. As it stands right now these are the following integrations I have found, and you can get to them by typing in the GitHub Search Box in the settings>integrations interface.

  • Battle.net
  • Bethesda.net
  • Epic Games Store
  • GOG.com
  • Guild Wars 2
  • Humble Bundle
  • Minecraft
  • Origin
  • Paradox Plaza
  • Path of Exile
  • PlayStation Network
  • Rockstar
  • Steam
  • Uplay
  • Wargaming.net
  • Xbox Live

As you will notice there are still several that are missing, and the integrations all support different functionalities. The biggest thing that I see missing from various store fronts is the ability to synchronize the friend list. The killer feature for me is being able to integrate and list out everything that I happen to have available through Humble Bundle, since more than once I have re-bought a game that I already had access to through another platform. Humble Bundle is also artificially inflating the numbers since a lot of those games I have already redeemed to Steam and are still showing up in their “non-drm” version available as a zip file download.

I realize that Scopique was joking, but I occasionally do feel like I need to throw this out there. My blog is not sponsored by anyone. Every so often I will latch onto a product like GoG Galaxy 2.0 Client like I am talking about today or my many posts about Parsec streaming client and evangelize about them. This is not because I am getting some kickback from the company, but instead because they are products that I really do find indispensable and want to share them with my friends. I live in this weird space where I consider my readers and the folks I interact with on social media to be friends, and that we are all in this together as some bizarre collaborative experiment. At this point I have turned down what would probably have been thousands of dollars worth of payola that I get offers of through the email accounts associated with this site and my podcast. My opinion is firmly not for sale, but having said that… seriously check out Galaxy 2.0 because I personally find it super cool.

Controllers for Big Hands

The other day I talked a little bit about my eternal struggling with trying to find a comfortable controller. I have large hands and this is a problem in a world that seems to love making tiny controllers. For reference the above photo is me and a knock off Xbox One controller that I happened to have laying around the house. The problem that I encounter is that most controllers are workable but grossly uncomfortable for long play sessions, and either end up causing me to contort my shoulders or hands into weird positions in order to use them. I mentioned the other day that I should really do a post on my favorite “big hand” controllers, and apparently that day is today. This is by no means a complete list, but since I have a large amount of controllers laying around the house in my eternal struggle for the perfect one… I have some examples that work pretty well.

Power A Fusion Pro 1.0

This is what I would consider to be my “daily driver” PC Gaming controller when a controller is needed. It stays hooked up to my gaming rig 24/7 and most recently I have been spending a lot of time with it while playing Jedi Fallen Order. I am not entirely certain how I came across this controller originally, other than maybe it had something to do with the 4 buttons on the backside of the controller that give you Scuf-like functionality of rebinding face button keys to be pressed with your fingers gripping the underside. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it keeps the general shape of an Xbox One controller and at the same time extends it to be a bigger and more chonky device.

Some positives are that it has really high quality buttons and the finish of the controller is matte and hugs your hand without rubbing oddly against it like a rubberized texture might. The share and menu buttons are placed unobtrusively, and the dpad is extremely nice and feels completely reasonable to do “fireball” motions with. It is wired which is either a positive or a negative depending on your religion about such things… but lacks any sort of a break away cable making it a tripping hazard. It runs on XInput like all Microsoft controllers and as a result it just works flawlessly with Windows 10, but required a bit of plugging it in and out to get it to recognize with Windows 8/8.1. The thumb sticks are nice but have a rough ring that is a little heavier “grit” than the stock controller so if you have very sensitive skin this might be an issue.

The biggest negative I have about the controller is that is is no longer being made. I specifically called this out as the 1.0 controller and that is because there are two other versions in the wild and for some reason Power A decided to change the shape each time. I’ve gotten hands on the other two models and they are nowhere near as comfortable as this one. As a result I have taken to ebay in order to get a spare. I paid somewhere in the vicinity of $20 for each of mine, but this morning I looked around ebay and they seem to have gone up in price finding this one for $34. You may be able to find these still in the wild but it largely depends on how fast the stock changes out in whatever store you happen to be shopping.

Hori Pad FPS Plus

This WAS my daily driver Playstation 4 controller for a good long while and I own two of them. I am not a big fan of the stick placement of Playstation controllers and greatly preferred the Xbox style staggered stick design. As such I am always looking for good options that allow me to keep playing with a layout I am more comfortable with on my console platform of choice. I was initially tipped off to this controller by my friend Pam who does an excellent video review of it. It has a lot of positives going for it but also some pretty severe negatives. The layout feels good and the shape of the controller is comfortable in the hand. Unfortunately the angle on the backside lead me to grip it too tightly at times and have the tips of my fingers go numb while playing it. The finish also makes the controller feel slick and hard in the hand and very much like you are holding a chunk of cheap plastic.

The triggers themselves are also odd in that they are basically buttons, which leads to some weirdness anytime you are in a situation where you need the analog functionality like throttling up. However for shooters this works pretty freaking well due to the extremely quick throw time on each and mimics a lot of the functionality that a Scuf or similar “pro” controller would do with adjustable stops. The biggest problem I had with the controller are the thumb sticks are similarly cheap feeling and through excessive play of Destiny, I completely wore out the right stick. Since they are non-standard it isn’t like you can get replacement rubber caps for them. I ultimately modded my controller to replace it with a set of after market xbox pro controller magnetic thumbsticks, which work fine but sorta throw off the balance.

The controller has no rumble support, which is either a positive or a negative depending on your point of view. It ends up making the overall feel in the hand be super light, especially if you have large hands. The other challenge is that the touch pad isn’t a touch pad. It is effectively a button, so you can get any functionality that relied on you clicking it, but nothing that relies on you actually using it as a tactile surface. When I first got mine it required me to import it from Play Asia, but in the meantime it has now been released for the North American market and is readily available on Amazon. Weirdly enough Play Asia appears to be the cheapest source going for $44 and the three color variants on Amazon ranging from $48 to $56 each.

Nacon Revolution Pro

This is my new daily driver Playstation 4 controller, and I have to say… once you get past the really screwed up dpad design… it is an amazingly comfortable controller. The biggest negative that we are going to get out of the way is the price tag. If you were to walk into a store and buy this outright you would be paying somewhere between $150 and $200 retail. I absolutely got mine as a gently used model on Ebay for around $50, and if you can do the same then I say the controller is one hell of a deal. This rode in on the wave of “pro” controllers that released after Microsoft started selling theirs. While the Microsoft Pro Controller has replaceable parts, this one is more or less configured into a static design that includes one scooped left thumb stick, one dome right thumb stick, and a weird “iron cross” for lack of a better thing to call it thumb stick. The face buttons also have some weirdness going on in that they are really big and the O sorta extends off the edge of the controller.

All of that said… playing with it just feels good. The dpad thing still weirds me out a bit, but it also more or less works fine for playing fighting games. Though if I am playing fighting games on my PS4 I am likely going to be hooking up my fight stick, or the Hori fight commander. For most PS4 games it feels great, and pretty much replicates all of the functionality of a stock controller. You have a working touch pad, rumble, and still has a headphone jack which is missing from a lot of third party controllers. I think this is a worthy competitor, but only if you can find it at a greatly reduced cost.

Nintendo Switch Pro Controller

Now we are starting into a section where I am going to hand out some honorable mentions. First off we have the Switch Pro Controller, which in itself is not that big of a controller but still manages to have an ergonomic shape that feels extremely comfortable to play with. I could have done with it being about 30% larger, but for what is there it feels pretty solid in the hand. Again it has the staggered thumb stick design that I like, but its biggest negative has to come in at the cost of being $70. If you can find one on sale, it does benefit from being pretty much a universal controller with the ability to use it wirelessly on any bluetooth platform and the XInput support means it natively supports Windows. I really like it, and this was my default method to play switch until I got the Split Pad Pro.

Xbox 360 Controller

This is effectively the default windows controller and still is a pretty strong contender for a no frills gaming experience. Everything about this controller essentially screams “its fine”, but there is something reliable about that. It feels fairly good in the hand and has “just worked” since Windows 7, and comes in a wide variety of colors. I still have several of these because you can get them dirt cheap and they are essentially bullet proof. If you want a reasonably comfortable controller for the bare minimum amount of money, get the USB connected 360 controller.

Steam Controller

I am not a huge fan of the steam controller. I feel like Valve did a massive disservice to this controller when they attempted to reinvent the wheel. That said… the ergonomics of the controller are amazing. It feels really great in the hand and works nicely for big hands like mine. The downside however is that it has a really jacked up control scheme that you will have to wade through in order to make it work with the games you want to play. It spent too much time trying to be both controller and mouse replacement when had it simply just been a good controller I think I would have had a new favorite. If you can find it… it was going for $5 over Black Friday, but I believe those have all sold out.

What am I missing?

Are you a big handed gamer too? Is there a controller that is just amazing that I am missing? Drop me a line in the comments, because I am always looking for the next slightly more perfect controller experience.

Hori Split Pad Pro Thoughts

For several months now I have been using the Hori Split Pad Pro product for the Nintendo Switch. When I first got it I was asked by some of my friends to write up a review and it has taken me several months to actually get around to doing that. Since September I have exclusively used these “joycon replacements” with my switch and as a result I have some things to say. This is not a paid product review as I shelled out the same $50 for these that anyone else would have to, and in truth I had to wait a freaking long time for them to finally get back into stock. My pair is an import from Japan and they released in early October here in North America.

My Eternal Problem

I have stupidly huge hands and that fact makes most controllers fairly uncomfortable for extended play sessions. The above image is something that I took this morning and is me gripping a knock off Xbox One controller that I had handy. This has been a subplot in my life for years, trying to find something big enough to be reasonably comfortable and I think in part why I shun controllers so often over keyboard and mouse. One day I will write a post about my favorite big hands controllers, but for now you have to realize that my hand absolutely engulfs the joycon and there is no way in hell that is actually ever going to be comfortable. For awhile I used the Satisfye grip, which does a good job of making the joycons work well enough, but it also makes the entire package extremely heavy and not exactly ideal for playing for example while laying in bed.

Weird Controller to the Rescue

The setup itself looks nonsensical as compared to the original joycons, but in practice it feels pretty good. Imagine if someone took a pro controller and chopped it in half and then put one half of it on either side of the switch’s “tablet” screen. What I did not expect however is how much lighter it makes the overall unit. The joycons themselves have quite a bit of weight to them, and the Split Pad Pro is pretty much just a plastic shell with the necessary PCB and buttons and has removed the rumble motors (which is a positive to me, I hate rumble) and also lacks the ability to use Amiibos (which I only really use when playing Breath of the Wild for free stuff). It also trades the four individual directional buttons for a proper d-pad that while a little squishy feels perfectly fine for fighting games on the go.

The first oddity you encounter however is that the controllers themselves are roughly twice the height of the tablet screen, leaving you with an awkward lip as they opted for the tablet to sit flush against the back of the controllers for better ergonomics than flush with the face. It looks a little odd but once I got used to it never really bothered me. One of the problems I have had with the base joycons is that the clips that attach them to the rails on the side of the tablet portion have never felt amazingly solid. This might just be a side effect of the weird manner in which I have to grip them in order to play, due to the aforementioned stupidly large hands. However it always feels like if I gripped too tightly at the wrong moment that I could snap them off.

The Split Pad Pro connects way more tightly to the sides of the unit and has these little blocks that extend out over the tablet and then out from the back allowing you to set the unit down without placing stress on the joint. The overlap however also has the side effect of making the entire connection feel much stronger than it does on the traditional joycon setup. When holding the unit with a single hand it feels like it is a single fused piece and doesn’t have any of the natural sway that the joycons tend to have when doing the same thing. There are mappable buttons on the backside of the controller, but as there is no wireless connection between the two you are limited to only mapping functions that exist on a single side, making the paddle on the left side a little useless.

The unit still docks perfectly fine with the Split Pad Pro attached, allowing you to flip between playing on screen and in handheld mode easily. The funny thing is that while I have owned these joycon replacements I have spent way more time playing in handheld than I have docked. Previously I had almost exclusively played the Switch through dock with a Pro Controller I would say 99.9% of the time. It is funny how having a comfortable grip that does not add significant weight to the unit has changed the way I actually use it. Whereas I used to use my Tablet exclusive for a little gaming before falling asleep, I am now also using my switch and have taken to charging the unit in the bedroom as opposed to the dock. I really should get one of the Best Buy docks for the bedroom, since they are much cheaper and appear to have solved the issue that bricked so many units previously.

The Negatives

Now that I have gushed about how much I love this controller at length, I guess it is time to talk about the negatives. First off while I personally call these a JoyCon replacement, they are not really that at all because they are not wireless. You cannot use them independent of the tablet unit and in order to keep the price and weight down they sacrifice all of the internals that allow for RFID, Rumble and Gyroscope functionality. This means that in Breath of the Wild for example you will be unable to complete any of the puzzles that focus on rotation things with your JoyCons. Additionally any sort of aim through moving the controller functionality is likely not going to work if they rely on the JoyCon gyro instead of the one build into the tablet (which most games seem to).

The only thing that really bugs me at any point is the fact that because they are not wireless they also do not support the ability to wake the console with a key press. This is a dual edged sword because on the positive this means you won’t be accidentally waking the device up while carrying it around in a bag you will however be required to press the recessed power button any time you want to turn it on. You can also tap the screen, but I seem to never actually do this because I more or less forget that the Switch is touch compatible. Another negative is that they have used cheap rubber buttons for +, -, Home and Capture and they feel awful to push. They function fine but they just dont have a satisfying click to them. Similarly most of the buttons feel a little mushy and are not as satisfying as I would like them to feel, but personally this has not bothered me too much because I got used to the Hori FPS Plus controller on the Playstation 4 which has very similar buttons.

The Rundown

If you have large hands and struggle with the size of the switch Joycons… then I would highly suggest you check this controller out. If not this then at least check out the Satisfye grip, which will give you some of the same benefits but also make the unit significantly heavier. If your preferred method of play is to detach the joycons and set the tablet somewhere, then this is squarely not a product for you. If you prefer the Playstation style controller pattern of having the thumb sticks in line with each other, then it is also probably not a product for you as this is the Xbox style staggered stick design. If you are on the fence, this makes it feel like you have an actual controller attached to your switch, and with that the sticks give you a much better range of movement making almost all games i have played with it more comfortable to control. Skyrim for example felt awful to play with the limited range of movement that the default joycon thumb sticks have, but is rather enjoyable with the Split Pad Pro.

I would love to see Hori release a version of this product will full joycon replacement support, adding in all of the missing features. However I think I would probably still be using the ones I have currently as the reduced weight of the total unit makes a big deal to me since I am playing it while laying on my side in bed so often. Holding the default configuration in that manner always ends up with one of my hands getting tired, and with the Split Pad Pros I don’t even notice the weight of the unit. I am super happy this product exists, and after roughly 3 months of play I am not sure I could go back to the default joycons at this point.