It actually is an X52. But I had to tigthen the spring because it felt too sluggish to me.

Honestly, the best joystick I ever used was the Microsoft SideWinder Force Feedback Pro, with or without the feedback. But I don't have a computer with a proper gameport anymore and all the adapters don't work with that joystick.

So, has anyone played the new BR F2P Apex Legends?

Apparently it's all the rage with cool people.

I played it a bit last night, and I'm extremely cool, so story checks out.

It's fun! I played PUBG quite a bit in 2017, and afterward I felt pretty finished with battle royale. Didn't play Fortnite or Call of Duty Blackout, but Apex looked to iterate on those a bit, looked fun, and was free to play so I figured I'd jump in and check it out. My expectation is either that I'll see the whole map, use all the weapons, and then get bored of the actual gameplay loop itself... or that, like other hero shooters or class-based shooters (Overwatch, Rainbow Six: Siege, Team Fortress 2, whatever) they'll add items, weapons, characters steadily enough to keep the experience interesting and varied for occasional play well into the future, provided the foundation is solid enough.

Who knows! I'm not really invested in it, but it's a lark at the moment. The movement is very snappy and responsive, it runs like a dream (compared to PUBG, say), and like many things, with friends it has a lot of potential for a few hours of fun.

This is gonna sound like an ad, but the best joystick I’ve ever owned is the Logitech Extreme 3D Pro. It’s cheap, feels fine, and is built like a rock. It’s more than enough to play X-Wing and/or/vs TIE Fighter. I bought one in 2003 and it’s still working great, and 16 years later if I did need to replace it, I could, because Logitech is still making that exact joystick without changes.

The second best was the Sidewinder 3D Pro. I replaced it with a Force Feedback Pro because it started squeaking real bad.

I hated my Force Feedback Pro. Lots of people loved theirs, so I dunno. Different tastes, or maybe there were multiple hardware revisions and I just got a crap one. Mine didn’t have springs. It used the force feedback motors to recenter. There was a lot of slop around the deadzone, and because the motors weren’t very precise, instead of a linear force there was a distinct kick toward center when the motors turned on. This made precision maneuvering very difficult. You needed a light touch near the deadzone, and then the motors would kick the joystick hard enough that it moved your hand out of the deadzone on the opposite side, then kick back... bounce bounce bounce. And always when you least want it. I had to wrestle that ****in thing to track any target in XWA. Considering this came out around the same time I was going through puberty, I guess I’m lucky I didn’t accidentally rip my dick off.

The worst joystick I’ve ever owned is my current HOTAS, the X56 Rhino. I knew pretty much all of this going in, so I’m not angry about it, just confirming what others have said. It’s a squeaky rattly piece of trash. The throttle sticks and has inconsistent travel, the spring catches somewhere in the stick and sounds awful, and the button layout is just... yikes. It’s impossible to avoid pressing some buttons accidentally while using twist rudder. Unfortunately, those are the buttons you’ll have bound to the most important things, because the rest are too inconvenient to use in combat. Of special note are the bazillion hats with different shapes for cargo culty reasons, which other than one all report themselves as buttons instead of hats. Of extra special note are the analog sticks, the main selling point of the X56 Rhino, which are mounted horizontally and are loose enough that they’ll activate on their own just by moving the stick. Also, they’re in the most inconvenient place possible. They are too reachable, i.e. these loose, delicate analog sticks are where your thumb naturally rests, and therefore becomes the most natural surface to grab when you’re using twist rudder. My advice is to leave em unbound and let em break.

For HOTAS right now, I think you either have to go cheap or go big. That Thrustmaster AIO is definitely fine, more modest but guaranteed to be designed and built better than the X56 for what it is. If you want a ‘real’ HOTAS that isn’t a piece of ****, you’re in river counter territory. HOTAS warthog, maybe.

(fwiw my X56 is the pre-acquisition Saitek model. Logitech has made some improvements to the build quality. But since my complaints are mostly about the basic design of the device, I don’t think it would help.)

I really loved my old Logitech Wingman Extreme Digital (that's a mouthful). It was the blue one with the red buttons. I would still use it, but I could never get the 15-pin-to-USB adapter to work right. I think it's in a box somewhere. I might give it another shot, if I had a game to play. Maybe it's time to hit gog and get TIE Fighter or XWA or something.

Extreme 3D Pro is basically the same joystick and it's like $30 or something. ****ing around with gameport adapters is not worth the effort for an old joystick.

oh my god, I just realized I can use my Extreme 3D Pro with the X56 throttle. Guess what's going straight in the garbage guys.

Too bad the old Xwing/TIE Fighter games can't do MP anymore. I'd get a new joystick today.

XvT and XWA both had multiplayer. What's wrong with them?

The games are fine, but you can't play MP anymore because their MP portal was the MSN gaming zone, and that was discontinued back when Pluto was still a planet.

well yeah there's no game browser anymore, but if you want to play online you can still type in an IP address.

Now that I've thought about it, MP wasn't really that great. Maybe I'll get it anyway.

Also, apparently there are still people discussing, playing, and modding an obscure late 90s star wars video game, how pathetic!

http://xwaupgrade.com/

I remember there being horrible lag in XvT.

XvT’s netcode was quite poorly implemented. There was a postmortem written by one of the developers, the thesis was something like “the internet sucks” which blamed everybody for the problem except themselves for not being experienced with networking. Exhausting read.

For some reason I really loved the first few moments of dogfighting that were basically just shoot - dodge - shoot - dodge - shoot - dodge until it devolved into just circling around each other in the hopes of getting a good shot in.

Yeah, dropping to 33% throttle for maximum maneuverability into the turn and switching to linked fire was how most of my MP dogfights ended up.

Well, that was how you won them anyway....

X-Wing's game design was never any good for furball. The game was designed for large-scale missions, and the challenge was never individual dogfighting, it was always resource management and target prioritization. The true soul of the game was in the mission design, which revolved around presenting the player with a changing scenario that forced the player to adapt. And a part of that scenario was always the fighter. Sometimes you got a good one, sometimes you got a bad one. The fact that there even were good ones and bad ones was a core part of the game design.

Unfortunately, while this makes for an excellent singleplayer game, it's pretty lousy for multiplayer. There isn't even any room for good co-op. A large part of this is due to the source material; e.g. in the Star Wars universe interceptors are faster [/i]and[/i] more maneuverable than space superiority fighters, usually better armed, sometimes even better armored. There's no design trade-off here, the trade-off has always been narrative only. I'm not pointing this out as a prescriptive, like "you should always fly the TIE Advanced", I'm pointing it out as objective, like "if you're playing a coop mission, and it's possible for a human to fly the TIE Advanced, the rest of the players are irrelevant to the outcome of the mission", and if the point of your game is to be fun, well, that's a pretty huge fail as far as the majority of the players are concerned. Other coop space combat games suffered from this problem too, like Starlancer. So, um, maybe the genre as a whole just isn't that great for a multiplayer game.

I've had this idea for a space combat MOBA tho. I think it might be ok. Players are all in control of TIE Defender like Super Starfighters, you spend points to build capital ships and regular fighters that the AI sends in waves against each other. It makes the game symmetrical, and the puzzle aspect from the original design is brought forward into multiplayer thanks to the AI controlled fleets.

I'm aware I just described most of Allegiance, but it looks different in my head. I'm not going to make that game anyway so feel free to blast the idea

What I hated the most about the campaign were the "blow up this space station" missions. You'd clear the fighters, then go and shoot the turrets so you don't get blasted to pieces while you shoot it with your lasers for TWO HOURS to work down the shield and hull, because you only had two torpedoes.

[Or when you respawned super far away and spent half of your time flying back to the action. Seriously, it was like ten minutes sometimes. I would set the throttle to 100 then go make a sandwich or something.]

I used to keep a rubber band on my joystick for those missions. Once I could park safely, band the trigger and walk away.

Best thing was when all your wingmen and other squadrons hyperspaced out because all the enemy fighters were destroyed so of course there was nothing more for them to do...

OPINION: The "B-Wing" is the worst playable starfighter.

Discuss.

The TIE bomber is worse

INCORRECT.

The B-Wing is worse because it is sold as a powerful, awesome, shield-equipped, hardcore attack craft, but really it's a slow-ass piece of crap. It gives you a false sense of security. IT'S A LIE.
You go in knowing the Bobmer is crappy.

Licking an ice cream cone and discovering it's actually two scoops of rich nutty dog **** isn't worse than being told you have terminal cancer.

It's been a literal few decades since I played TIE Fighter. I need to plug in the joystick and play it.

Over twenty years ago I was pretty deep into both X-Wing and TIE Fighter but never continued after my progress was slowed on some long (distance and time) missions. I used to play with a Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro I believe. I have an old X45 now I think. I had to clean all the grippy stuff off of it last year because it had become sticky and not just grippy. I want to get back into sim games but I need to build something to better hold the equipment. I have a playseat (I think) office chair but they dropped support for the joystick stuff that can attach to it but even when you do attach things to it it gets difficult to use. One of these days...

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/336358/Report_Activision_Blizzard_to_make_significant_layoffs_this_week.php

bliz ded

by 'ded', i don't mean dead, i mean this year was pretty much the death knell for blizzard as a producer of quality content.

Oh man those missions were stressful. That thing was a deathtrap.

That's the reason why I hate the A-Wing and prefer the TIE Interceptor. The shields on the A-Wing are so weak they might as well take them away. At least the Interceptor has more firepower with the quad lasers to balance out the missing shield.

But I absolutely loathe the Y-Wing. The B-Wing is miles better than that piece of crap.

Was it X-Wing Alliance that added simultaneous laser and ion cannon shots? Or am I only imagining this? I remember that being total overkill.

Yeah, some of the ships in XWA (Y-Wing for sure, maybe B-Wing) can shoot the red lasers and the blue lasers at the same time, but it drains your battery pretty quick.

And the S-Wing (Santa Class) can fire red and green lasers at the same time!

Weird things in 2019: hearing college students say Minecraft was scary as a kid.

w.r.t. new Star Wars shooters



Also, don't forget the source code to the main page of https://www.massassi.net

And now it's time for some hyper-useful graphs.

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From these graphs we can come to the conclusion that - as far as 95% spambot-originating downloads of FGR projects are concerned - Deus Ex has twice the cult game power of JK.

Of course, comparing DX's most popular gameplay mod with JK's maybe the most popular gameplay mod in the same regard shows that JK doesn't even come close.

A fitting punishment.

thank you for posting that #massassi chatlog. It's nice to see what you've been talking about for the last few months.