MudMan

The nunchuck was super comfortable. I think the boxy stick idea for the remote itself made sense conceptually but you probably would want to smooth it out a bit otherwise.

But yeah, agreed, it was surprisingly functional, all things considered. And cheaply made in the right ways. Everything I said about joycon would still apply if the thing was wired. Razer, I think, did a wired split controller for PC. I never got to buy one before they were discontinued, and they’re a bit of a collectible these days.

I love them and if PC connectivity with them wasn’t so terrible and laggy they’d be my go-to.

Since they don’t play nice with PC I’d take a literal carbon copy. Love the button d-pad, love the size, love the layout.

I get most people don’t, and that makes sense, but for my particular set of appendages they are pretty much ideal. I’d pay good money for that exact thing just better built and for other platforms.

Instead whenever somebody tries they either make them even smaller for phones or they try to make them as big as a console controller, which doesn’t work at all. For a split controller you need to be able to wrap your hand all the way around the thing and there is no need for a handle-like bump (those are so you can leverage both hands on the controller at once using your palm).

The only other form factor I’d consider for a split controller is… the Wii-mote.

The Wii-mote was cool and did the thing I need it to do. Unfortunately it doesn’t work with a symmetrical dual stick config, so it’s not very practical. The Joycon are more plausible as a modern controller replacement.

In the meantime I just use the least offensive PS3-layout controllers I can find for 3D games (with lots of braces and frequent pauses) and a leverless controller for 2D games.

Ergonomics. It adds the option of my broken old wrists to not have to hold themselves at whatever arbitrary angle the probably younger and certainly healthier designer decided wasn’t causing immediate pain to them.

So yeah, having specific accessibility needs can suck and for my specific brand of those the joycon are an amazing option.

Also, playing a game with your hands by your sides or under a blanket or whatever adds a TON to the sense of immersion.

If the split controller works screw waiting for the Steam Controller, I’ve been waiting for a good PC joycon set.

This has some of the same issues as the Legion Go, in that it’s too chunky to play split. Also the superfluous touchpads that make it be too large (I’ll be taking no questions on this issue at this point).

But I do really want something like this for PC commercially.

Well, the huge brand helps.

Which is probably why what was even at launch ultimately a somewhat outdated Farmville-like got so much attention.

Downloads have always been a weird metric for mobile games. I’ve downloaded this game on maybe five or six devices during this decade, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t played it al tall in the past nine years and six months.

Incidentally, The Alters is out now and available on GoG.

I don’t know that cloud gaming moves shovelware in either direction, but it really sucks to see the percentage of people that don’t factor ownership into the process at all, at least on paper.

That’s the problem with surveys, isn’t it? What’s “latency being eliminated”? On principle it’d be your streamed game responds as quickly as a local game, which is entirely achievable if your target is running a 30fps client on a handheld device versus streaming 60 fps gameplay from a much more powerful server. We can do that now.

But is that “latency free” if you’re comparing it to running something at 240Hz in your gaming PC? With our without frame generation and upscaling? 120 Hz raw? 60Hz on console?

The question isn’t can you get latency free, the question is at what point in that chain does the average survey-anwering gamer start believing the hype about “latency free streaming”?

Which is irrelevant to me, because the real problem with cloud gaming has zero to do with latency.

I mean, as written the headline statement is always true.

I am horrified by some of the other takeaways, though:

Nearly 3 in 4 gamers (73%) would choose NVIDIA if all GPU brands performed equally.

57% of gamers have been blocked from buying a GPU due to price hikes or scalping, and 43% have delayed or canceled purchases due to other life expenses like rent and bills.

Over 1 in 4 gamers (25%) say $500 is their maximum budget for a GPU today.

Nearly 2 in 3 gamers (62%) would switch to cloud gaming full-time if latency were eliminated, and 42% would skip future GPU upgrades entirely if AI upscaling or cloud services met their performance needs.

I’m more than ok with that. At some point the entire point of GoG is necessarily the curation, and this is a good complement to their maintenance work, which before ended up existing alongside community fixes instead of incorporating them.

They’ve also added some features to Galaxy and improved the checkout experience. It’s encouraging to see them roll out new platform features. For a while there it seemed like it was somewhat abandoned and just coasting, which was concerning in a world of effective Steam monopoly on PC gaming.

I got downvoted? I guess that’s just a reminder to not trust anything you see on a federated app other than the text of the post. That’s not what it looks like on my side.

Anyway, Mudrunners is definitely a big time sink, but even there I’m surprised you never considered moving on to Snowruner or any of the spinoffs, or, I don’t know, the Dakar game they made at some point, if you are into WRC. That’s a surprising amount of passion and loyalty, but also of outright satisfaction with getting that version of that thing and never going back to the well.

Which is fine, it’s legitimate, it’s just a bit of an outlier way to go about it. Even the dudebros that only bought Madden/Fifa and Call of Duty bought those every year or every other year. The people who only played WoW or The Sims bought all the expansions or the characters in a fighting game. You are unusually focused, is what I’m saying.

Of their current Warhammer sale Epic 40K Final Liberation is easily my favorite. Such a neat little tactical game. Dawn of War I is also an all-timer.

But that is part of it for me. You do the “get it while it’s cheap” thing long enough you start to run out of things that go cheap. Once you have a library in the thousands a lot of these things that go on sale frequently start getting off the board.

I guess if you keep it as tight as you do and put a cap on either a very high percent discount or a very low total cost you take longer to get to that point.

I was fomoing a bit on the Ground Control series that cheap, but it turns out I do own those on GOG already :D

I remember being astounded when that came out at a 3D RTS where you could see the empty casings pouring out of the units’ guns. Good times.

Still, that shows up for five bucks, so no discount at all. Those key resellers are doing a lot of work in that process.

That’s a pretty big arcade. There were maybe a couple dozen in my go-to, if that.

I wonder if that’s where the generational thing comes from. I definitely sunk a lot of money in machines where I never got that far. Of the assortment I had access to in arcades I saw the end of story mode in maybe a handful. I was quite proud of 1cc-ing Double Dragon once. Otherwise it was considered to be a waste of money to dump money in continues. You’d play the first two stages of Metal Slug a million times and never see past them and everybody thought that was just how gaming was supposed to work.

I genuinely don’t get the patience. You certainly didn’t spend the C64 era with five games on that thing. Nobody who had access to a double deck tape recorder did.

And these days if you like “replay value” to that degree there’s a ton of free to play grind treadmills. In eight years I’d expect you’d have at least tried a dozen of those. That’s less than one new game a year. If you play just two hours a week that’s both a bit of a stretch on “game lover” (more of a “very strict parents heavily monitoring their kid” range) and still hundreds of hours on each of those.

I’m not judging. Games are a thing where habits can be very different, it’s just… a bit of a extreme.

I’m curious, what games are those? What types of games do you find simultaneously engaging and all-consuming enough to spend a decade in just a handful? That’s not a challenge, I’m genuinely asking. Is it fighting games? MOBAs? Definitely not a linear narrative beginning-to-end thing, right? Are you full on speedrunning them at this point or getting really competitive?

Yes, I said that up front. I’m rounding up to not have to say “eighty cents” each time.

Sure, but… a dollar on average? Man, that’s some filter-feeding purchase pattern, hardcore. Even setting the bar on 90% discount keeps the full price fare at five bucks apiece, and that low in the stack it’s really hard to get enough games for fifty cents that you offset that spend. Unless you really don’t mind getting shovelware for that much, and I get the impulse… it’s a lot. Especially since Humble started putting a minimum spend on getting full packages it’s really hard to get there. Their twelve dollar subscription bundle works out at 1.50 per game or so these days.

I’d be curious to see that game list, because I’m guessing it’s quite obscure and unexpected.

Hey, that’s fine. It’s fine to not be into games or anything else.

Weirder to not be into games and hang around a forum called “PC games”, but who am I to judge.

No, no, not an insult. Like, literally are they a very young person and so 200 games is all they had the time to get around to. Like the OP I have thousands of games because it’s been decades of building them up. Even just on Steam I’ve had what, twenty years? Just my Humble Bundle subscription has probably spat out more than 200 games, just because it’s been on for long enough.

If you’re young you have less disposable income and less time, so you don’t have time to build up a library and you have more time to spend with each thing you get.

I mean, I still had what? 30/50 Mega Drive games by the end of that generation, and those were, inflation adjusted, maybe what, 200 bucks each?

For the record, I touched grass yesterday and that movie sucked.

I don’t get this, though. Less than 200 games in your life? How? Are you a baby? Do you play games for thousands of hours on a regular basis?

I own thousands of games and my most played games are in the thousands of hours, but if I boot up a game and play an hour of or two it I’m more than happy with that purchase, especially at a discount price. I spent twenty bucks last time I went to the movies and I didn’t even enjoy any part of what I watched.