A high quality joystick that doesn't FUBAR from regular use?

[Pxtl]

How much is this thing? It honestly sounds pretty good... but I can't even think of any space sims I'd want to pick up these days (well, I never played through either of the FS games so Freespace 2 would probably be something to do).

[Caydr]

It's about $60 and comes with HAWX. Or you can get the non-HAWX bundle for half that price... in the UNITED RIPOFF STATES OF AMERICA WHO WON'T SHIP THE GODDAMN JOYSTICK TO ME FOR LESS THAN $30 MAKING THE WHOLE ENTERPRISE POINTLESS.

HAWX is supposed to be a good game though, it's prolly worth it.

As for what games to play with it, here are some ones you can probably find:
- Tie Fighter (X-Wing, the original, shows its age a lot more)
- X-Wing Alliance
- Freespace 2 (Freespace 1 is nice to have for the story and a great game in its own right, but 2 is by far superior)
- HAWX, conveniently enough
- Mechwarrior series
- Descent series is apparently very good with joystick, I always preferred mouse/keyboard myself
- Crimson Skies was fun but probably looks kinda dated today
- Independence War 2 is an amazing game but a giant mess of bugs and incoherent mission objectives, not to mention the difficult newtonian physics, make this very hard to recommend
- Most any racing game is best played with a joystick

If you enjoyed Babylon 5 at all, there's a free indie game based on it. Fully playable and surprisingly polished as of the last time I looked at it, maybe 3 years ago. They're basically just fleshing out the campaign, last I heard. Here's a link to the part that's playable right now:
http://ifhgame.ru/main/campaigns/what-w ... pportunity

There's a Battlestar Galactica themed mod/game here, based on the open source FS2 engine: http://www.beyondtheredline.net/demospecs.html

This is an upcoming game that looks so good it's criminal: http://naumachia.aureasection.com/

And for some reason I'm posting a link to a video from FS2, always sends chills down my spine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX6bzq3M ... re=related

Finally, if you have a joystick you can be "that guy" on the BF2 server that doesn't instantly crash the helicopter.

[Pxtl]

It's about $60 and comes with HAWX. Or you can get the non-HAWX bundle for half that price... in the UNITED RIPOFF STATES OF AMERICA WHO WON'T SHIP THE GODDAMN JOYSTICK TO ME FOR LESS THAN $30 MAKING THE WHOLE ENTERPRISE POINTLESS.

HAWX is supposed to be a good game though, it's prolly worth it.

That actually sounds like a good bundle - HAWX sounds like a good reason to own one of these. I'm fond of "lite" jetfighter games - I played the hell out of F-29 Retaliator back in the day.

[Caydr]

Not complaining about the value specifically, after all HAWX is probably a $40 purchase on its own with tax, etc. I just get frustrated with the odd product selection we sometimes get here - it's literally impossible to buy this joystick without getting the game included, I've checked. What would someone do if they already had the game?

And of course it's labeled a "free bonus" when in fact it's nothing of the kind, as you can see by the price for the joystick on its own when you look on American sites.

Anyway, back to the joystick, I tried it in Freespace 2 last night and was very satisfied once I worked out the best way to map the buttons.

Basically, the top buttons and trigger manage your offensive capabilities, the hat switch manages your targeting, the left side buttons are all for defense, and the right side buttons are all for power management.

Here's my setup, from what I remember it should be usable with X-Wing series games with only semantic changes:

Trigger: fire primary
Left top button: fire secondary
Center top button: afterburner
Right top button: switch secondary bank

Hat forward: target object in reticle
Hat right: target nearest hostile
Hat left: target the current target's nearest attacker
Hat back: target own attacker

Left side base buttons, front row: Redirect shield to left quad, redirect shield to forward quad, redirect shield to right quad
Left side base buttons, back row: Redirect weapon energy to shield, redirect shield to back quad, fire missile countermeasure

Right side base buttons are energy management, use your imagination.

With this setup you only have to take your hands off the joystick to switch your primary weapon (which you almost never do), or to toggle single-fire or double-fire of missiles, which you usually keep at one setting. You can afterburn, fire primaries, fire secondaries, drop countermeasures, and pick targets - all simultaneously - which describes the sort of situation you frequently find yourself in.

In hindsight, maybe having two hat switches on those CH joysticks wasn't so crazy after all - it might occasionally be useful to take in your surroundings in a broader perspective... but I think keeping all the targeting input on the hat switch is easier to memorize. Sucks to forget what all your buttons do.

[Peet]

HAWX is a pretty terrible game...I found it to be bugridden and horribly repetitive.

[Neddie]

HAWX is a pretty terrible game...

Hence pack-in status.

[CarRepairer]

[KaiserJ]

how about a gamepad?

i've had a 360 pad for about 3 years and although the thumb pad on the left is a bit worn i've never had problems with it

[Caydr]

Gamepads don't work well with games that require you to frequently use keyboard commands, such as x-wing alliance, i-war 2, etc.

It's very awkward to let go of one whole side of the controller, and it's really hard to figure out how to map the buttons so you can always sort of stay in control.

Let's say you let go of the left side, you've lost a joystick, a d-pad, and your left triggers. Or you let go of the right side, which means you lose a joystick, all your face buttons, and your right triggers. With a joystick, you only lose the buttons on the base, which you can usually map to non-vital things, and your throttle, which is probably not something you need to adjust constantly on a flight sim.

To make matters worse, besides the triggers, all your input relies on your thumbs, so the face buttons are the only things you can use more than one of at a time - how do you afterburn, fire missiles, fire guns, change your ship's heading, drop a countermeasure, pick a new target, and roll (because your left-side shields are down), all simultaneously?

They're also a lot less precise and have a large dead zone to make sure they stay usable even after they've been abused for a long time. Great for games with auto-aim, not so much for ones from before skill was removed from the equation.

And that's your lecture for today on why consoles ruined the universe.

[knorke]

To make matters worse, besides the triggers, all your input relies on your thumbs

haha true thats so fail with many controllers. iam glad i got one were you only have 4 "thumb buttons" but lots of other buttons for the other fingers. similiar to the playstation controller i think.

[Caydr]

I keep wondering why they don't put some clicky buttons on the bottom of controllers. Ones with enough resistance you wouldn't push them by accident, but so that games that require complex controls aren't out of the question.

...hmm... Might've just answered my own question. Do we really want to live in a world with developers run amok with 16-button quick time events?

[Pxtl]

@Caydr - all though the PS1 era, i remember very few games that made full use of the "L2/R2" buttons, preferring to use the face-buttons instead. You may like triggers, but your opinion might be rare. Twisted Metal was pretty rare about putting all the weapon stuff on the shoulders and leaving some of the face-buttons rarely used.

Still, I'd settle for a nice adaptor for the Wiimote Nunchuk as a 2-button joystick.

[Caydr]

It's doable, you just need to connect it to a wiimote and then get a bluetooth dongle and... jump through some hoops... something about a program called "glovepie" maybe?... but people play Wii emulators with actual wii controllers already.

[Neddie]

If you can get the textures to load correctly and keep a solid frame rate, playing your Wii games in 1920x1080 is quite fun.

That said, plugging a wired device into a battery powered bluetooth device simply to use it on your computer is somewhat excessive.

[Caydr]

New Super Mario Bros Wii is the only (wii) game I've emulated. It's kinda funny really, I actually bought the game but I haven't even taken it out of its packaging yet because I learned about this emulator on the same day.

For some reason my game performance isn't as smooth as I'd like though. I can't imagine it's that my CPU's too slow - two 45nm Wolfdale cores @ 3.45 ghz and a 5850 not enough to compute all the craaaaazy plumber physics?

At least it's demonstrable proof that in the future Nintendo could put out a console that runs all these (otherwise beautiful) low-resolution games at something that looks good on an HDTV... and hack in some anti-aliasting.

You can have your Master Chief, I'll take my 1080p Samus... mmmm...

[Neddie]

I've played New Super Mario Bros Wii on Dolphin as well, but my problem, rather than performance, is shader/shadow related. There is one whole render pass which isn't performed, so things look odd at times.

Of course, using the Wii-mote is the real problem for me. It does not go well with carpal or the muscles presently pulled on both sides. I usually simply play Wii titles on the Wii itself because it isn't worth the physical stress if I'm playing alone while playing with a group in front of the computer isn't ideal. Every time a Wii-mote loses connection they all need to be reconnected, Glovepie starts to have issues after two, and shoving three or four people in front of a standard computer desk is less than wise.