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I’ve been going through a little bit of a fighting game renaissance lately, especially playing them on the PC with the release of Mortal Kombat 11 and diving into some Street Fighter V on the PS4.  I cut my teeth on the 90s arcade scene playing a lot of Street Fighter, Samurai Showdown, Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct.  However as time went on I faded away from that and dug more and more into PC gaming…  eventually joining the cult of gamers tied to our MMORPGs.  In that time fighting games have evolved and changed, and while I no longer have the reflexes that I once did I have wanted to regain a little bit of my youth.  One thing that I noticed while playing these fighting games on my Xbox One controller that I use with my PC…  is that my hand would get really tired really fast after trying to do the combos.  This lead me down the path of looking into getting a proper fight stick.

For the uninitiated… fight sticks vary wildly in price and quality and it is entirely possible to drop $500 on a custom made stick with the best arcade components.  After a bit of research I started to notice that many of the custom builds I was seeing centered around using a Mayflash fight stick as a base and then adding additional components to it.  Mayflash is a chinese made budget fight stick that accepts universal arcade components and ships with its own Sanwa-knock-off buttons and joystick that I figured would serve fine for my purposes…  but give me the ability to upgrade later if I saw fit to do so.  Ultimately there are two models available… the F300 which seems to be more compact and probably ideal for smaller hands…  and then the F500 which I ended up getting which has a more spread out design ideal for my stupidly large hands.

The best part about these is the fact that they are wired to support pretty much every console I would ever want to play on.  Officially it supports… PS3, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC, Android, Switch and the NeoGeo Mini.  There are probably some others that it actually works fine on as well.  The support for PS4 is a little janky because it requires you to connect an official PS4 controller to the fight stick that then uses it for pass through authentication with the machine.  All told however it has been amazingly simple to get it up and running with the platforms I have tried it on.  The F300 tends to go for around $60 on Amazon and the F500 for around $80…  however I managed to find an Ebay Buy It Now F500 listing with free shipping for only $55 so your mileage may vary.  The weird thing about that… is it shipped from Amazon so I am guessing it came from Mayflash directly that was running some sort of an Ebay Special that I legitimately got the last listed copy of.

One of the nice things about this particular stick is the fact that it came with both a Square Gate and an Octagonal Gate.  I’ve swiped the above image of two Sanwa gates from the Shoryuken forums to use as a reference… because I am not sure it will make sense entirely without seeing them.  Essentially joysticks that came from the west and those that came from Japan evolved differently during the arcade boom.  While our 8 way joysticks got a distinct 8 point restrictor plate with a tactile divot for the shaft of the stick to bump into denoting which direction it was currently facing…  the Japanese sticks simply took what was previously a 4 way diamond shaped restrictor and rotated it to create what would eventually serve as their 8 way square restrictor.  Almost all of the mass produced Fight Sticks on the market come with a square gate, as the hotbed of fight stick production is still Japan.  However these feel really awkward for those of us who grew up with the octagonal gate design and the very first thing I did to my stick was pop open the back and change these out.

After having done that…  and seeing how easy it was to swap parts out…  it has made me daydreaming on Focus Attack about other modifications I could make to tweak it…  and then being sad at how much additional cash it would ultimately wind up adding to the price of the stick.  This is how you take a $55 stick and turn it into something closer to $200 if you are not careful.  There is however one mod that I do plan on making soon.  One of the features that Focus Attack has is the ability to download a template for any of the common fight sticks and have them print a high quality laser cut artwork overlay to place under the clear Plexiglas cover that most of these sticks have.  So I took all of the awesome Ammo artwork that I have in the masthead of this blog and arranged them around the template.  Now the question is… do I order this or do I go ahead and swap the buttons and joystick while I am having to crack open and pull it apart anyway.  I feel like I have traveled down a very slippery path.

I did not do much in the gaming front last night as I spent the evening watching Shazam.  Firstly this movie is pure joy, and I really wish we had more super hero movies that could tell a good story while also maybe not pushing the envelope quite so far into Warhammer 40k Grim Dark future timeline.  I realize this maybe only works for a movie like Shazam where you have childhood wonder mixed with instant super hero powers.  Basically I loved it and want more of it, however I am not sure if you can bottle the same sort of lightning twice with a sequel.  So far however this is probably my favorite DC movie?  For reference the other two that I really love are Aquaman and Wonder Woman…  so your mileage may vary if those were not your movies.  I never really thought the Heath Ledger Joker was that amazing even though he delivered a pretty great performance…  I loved the first movie in that series and they sorta went downhill from there for my personal tastes.

What I find weird is the situation we are in right now where DC is decidedly the more gritty movie series, which seems to be the exact opposite of my experience reading the comics growing up.  Marvel was the one that had more “realism” and DC was filled with a large number of what I would consider hapless Pollyannas.  Movie wise we have the polar opposites going on, where Marvel gives us movies that deliver both crushing sadness but also moments of pure joy and DC has given us “MAAAAARTHAAAAAAA”.  I was never really a follower of Shazam or “DC Captain Marvel” depending on how you choose to refer to the character, and I think in many ways that helps with the joy.  I went into Guardians of the Galaxy knowing only the most basic of information about those characters and was super fine with whatever tweaks they took to get them on the screen.  For Shazam as far as I am aware they represented the character pretty well, but I also don’t know a ton of information and as a result wouldn’t know if they completely butchered something…  or care.

There are definite times where our geek cred gets in the way of our enjoyment of things.  I’m sure you have experienced moments where you are watching some pop culture recreation of something you loved growing up… and they completely failed at some small piece of it.  Then that small piece works at the back of your brain until it starts to color your opinion of the thing as a whole.  You don’t want it to happen but it sort of happens automatically without you meaning to, and the next thing you know you are spitting venom about whatever that thing is.  I still personally find it hard to reconcile the Star Wars prequels for example, even though I realize they aren’t as bad as I originally thought they were.  Also there are moments like when you listen to the actor who played Jar Jar Binks…  and hear what hell he went through all over a bunch of fans galvanizing disappointment into something far more dangerous and militant.

Ultimately us geeks need to reach a point where we are capable of taking our loves not quite as seriously as we do.  That is the core problem with a lot of the toxicity that I see online… is when disappointed love turns to hatred.  Example…  I am trying very hard not to allow myself to become that guy with Anthem even though I have already waded knee deep into those waters on many occasions.  It is hard when your hope turns sour and you start lamenting all of the things that could have been… rather than focusing on the things that exist and are good.  I think the opposite is also bad where you have a sort of toxic positivity that everything is fine and everything is working as intended.  I think we need to reach a point where we can accept the fact that occasionally our heroes will let us down and that a lot of things will never quite live up to our expectations.  I am trying to get to that place myself honestly, but the fact that I realize I am being unreasonable is probably the first step.  The problem is…  it feels good to ruminate on that anger especially when it comes in the form of snarky semi-anonymous posts on some message board or YouTube comment section.

The long story short… I loved Shazam and would love to see more movies like this.  Not necessarily more Shazam movies… but more super hero movies that are capable of embracing joy.  Weirdly one of the other movies that sorta fits these guidelines is Deadpool, which is a fairly joyous movie…  in spite of the body count and ribaldry.  I feel like the Guardians of the Galaxy movies also were very much in this same style as was Thor Ragnarok and the Antman movies.  I want more movies that make me feel like I can ignite the spark of hope inside of me… rather than simply wallowing in the fact that the world is shit and will always be shit.  All I have really seen is some reports that the movie did not live up to expectations…  but then again much like with a video game release I am wondering if those expectations are deeply inflated and unrealistic.  It is a good movie and if you need something that invokes pure joy in your life…  then I highly suggest checking it out…  especially if you loved John Hughes movies.

I’ve spent more time this morning talking on twitter than actually working on a blog post.  I’m still very much in that state where I am fighting something…  be it a cold or something worse.  The hammer has not quite slammed down on me, but I feel like I am on the cusp of really getting sick.  My wife has continued to cough like mad pretty much every night to which I often say “Please don’t die” and she will angrily respond between coughs “I’m Not Dying!”.  She also won’t really go seek assistance either…  which admittedly were the roles reverse I probably wouldn’t either.  Still it is painful to hear her cough like that, and with my own fucked up immune system…  I know that it is just a matter of time until I will be doing the same.  As a precaution I have been trying to push fluids hard and get extra sleep…  but the second point doesn’t exactly make for interesting topics to talk about in the morning when you barely played any games the night before.

One of the things about yesterdays luke warm take on not really caring about Epic Games exclusives that I did not fully estimate…  was just how much hatred folks in general seem to have about a game like Borderlands 3 going exclusive on that platform.  The latest is a rumor that Epic Games is now doing something to block launching under steam as a “non-steam game”.  One of the arguments by supporters of Epic Games has been that you can still launch the games under Steam if you really just wanted to put them all in one location.  Were this rumor true it would seem that someone on one side or the other was actively taking moves to ward against this.  As someone who has three titles installed through the launcher I figured I would do some detective work.  For reference those titles are Fortnite which I picked up prior to the Battle Royale version because it was a game that I had been following in development.  The next is Ashen which is a platform exclusive and a game I very much wanted to try out.  The last is Hades which was ultimately the game that made me have that “whelp I guess I am installing this launcher” moment because I absolutely love Super Giant Games.

The game that this rumor is circulating around however is Metro Exodus, that I did not purchase on any platform because quite frankly I don’t have the bandwidth to play it.  I am maybe finally learning my lesson to put of purchases until I am actually going to do something with the damned game.  So this is not necessarily going to be a fair test of the complaint that is circulating, but this should be a test if the launcher itself is blocking access to the games in some manner.  For the uninitiated you can effectively add any game to steam by going up to the “Games” menu at the top and choosing “Add A Non-Steam Game to My Library”.  This ends up bringing up the dialog above and sure enough… none of the three Epic Games Launcher games were showing up in the menu in spite of it seemingly bringing up every other executable on my system.  Curiouser and Curiouser.

I am one of those weirdos that allows every game to drop an icon on my desktop, so I decided to check out what exactly Hades was launching.  When you look into the shortcut you see something that is complete gibberish and that potentially only the Epic Games Launcher has any idea what to do with it.  “com.epicgames.launcher://apps/Min?action=launch&silent=true” is not something that steam can launch seeing as it is looking for some sort of executable.  I remember installing Hades to my bulk storage drive and the “Games” directory and sure enough I quickly found its directory.  Underneath was an X64 and a X86 directory and inside of each was an executable called “Hades.exe”.  So with path in hand I used the browse option to manually add this to steam and sure enough it launched the game as expected.

Now you can do this with games that are purchased through platforms like UbiSoft’s UPlay, but there is almost always the caveat that you need to have the Games Launcher running in the system tray in order for the game to successfully launch.  In the case of UPlay even games you purchased THROUGH Steam itself… have to have the Uplay client running to access.  To test this theory further I decided to hard kill the Epic Games Launcher and make sure nothing remained of it in memory.  Unexpectedly…  Hades still launched fine and even managed to get the Steam Overlay successfully over the top of the game play.  The above screenshot is originally 4K resolution scaled down to 1080p so I could actually upload it to my blog, but you will see the tiny overlay window from steam in the lower right hand corner happily over top of Hades.

Maybe this was a fluke specific to the way Hades was developed, so I decided to try it again and go for a Ashen this time which is another platform exclusive title.  Same process as above, I had to go find the actual game executable but once I knew its location I was able to browse to it through the “Add A Non-Steam Game to My Library” dialog.  Again the game launched fine and again the steam overlay showed up in the lower right hand corner.  So the 25 year plus of experience technologist in me says… that this isn’t a behavior baked into the launcher itself.  I am not saying that something shady isn’t happening, just not necessarily the behavior that folks seem to be indicating.  I do find it weird that Steam seemingly refuses to find the executables for any of the games that I have installed through the Epic Games launcher, but has picked up like all of my Adobe Products…  all of the Asus apps that came with my Motherboard drivers…  Skype…  every single MMO and all of the games that installed through Origin.  Steam literally ONLY excluded the Epic Games titles which was bonkers.

The funny thing is about today’s post…  I have already written more words about the Epic Games store than I ever intended to.  I am not going to defend it because really I don’t care.  I used to have extreme loyalty to Steam as a platform, but originally it was a pretty great place to find new games.  I valued its discovery system to help me find titles that I might be interested in.  Lately however all of the really poor and asset flip titles clogging the platform…  has made it extremely hard to find anything.  So often its discovery system now gives me games “because it is popular” and not actually based on any past purchase or play history that I have had.  Steam isn’t exactly doing a great job…  but the problem is…  nobody else is either.  I admit I like the more curated experience of Epic Games because it has so many orders of magnitude fewer titles than Steam.  Ultimately at the end of the day I will buy the game in whatever digital platform it is available on… and for Ubisoft titles for example I have stopped buying them through steam entirely and just go through the Native launcher since I will have to have it running in the background regardless to play the games.

I didn’t have anything better to talk about this morning, and I spent most of my writing time researching this nonsense…  so you are getting it as the daily post.  Please note… I am not trying to dissuade you from hating Epic Games or video game exclusivity.  You can hate anything you want and there is plenty of ammo on either one of those stances.  However the rumor floating around that Epic Games is actively blocking launching games through steam…  does not appear to have any validity.   I launched two exclusive titles through steam this morning both with and without the Epic Games launcher running in the background.  In both cases it just worked without problems.  Since Metro Exodus is the game in question and I do not own it… I cannot diagnose what is going on there.  It could be that 4A Games or Deep Silver is doing something to block the Steam process from launching their executable, but again I can’t test this.  I can say that in my opinion it isn’t actually the launcher at fault.