Good morning friends. I still mostly feel horrible, but less horrible enough that I am going to attempt doing work and such. Yesterday late in the day I did in fact make a blog post happen, in part because I wanted to get the review of something new out there as soon as possible. On the gaming front I am still very much living my life in the world of Horizon Zero Dawn. Right now I have paused the main story a bit to catch up on side quests, and figured it was a reasonable time to do the expansion content, or at least the bulk of it.
When I first played HZD on the PlayStation 4, I beat the game at level 39. As of last night I dinged 45 and have so much more content left to go. The game in theory caps out level wise at 60, but supposedly progression keeps on trucking after that if things I have read are to be believed. It will be interesting to see exactly where I wind up upon finishing the story. The key difference is I seem to be killing a lot more random stuff in the world just because I can and it is fun to watch dinobots explode.
I am pretty sure my favorite part of Horizon Zero Dawn though is finding and mounting the Tallneck in a given region. In the frigid north you have an interesting side quest related to saving one, and it might be my new favorite part of the game. These tall friends are the best and I want them to live happy lives. Also the north is absolutely visually stunning… which causes me to stop and take photos of this sweet sweet friend lumbering around happily. I am probably weird to be personifying the robots so hard but whatever… this one has never tried to kill me.
Another weird thing that I apparently like doing… is dressing appropriately for whatever climate I am in? I mean the armor has no impact on your surroundings, but I find myself wearing Banuk armor when I am in the north and Carja armor when I am in the south because apparently I don’t want Aloy to get hot/cold. It legitimately makes next to no difference what type of armor I am wearing, because I can move the mods around at will, but for some reason it makes a significant difference to me as the player. The weird part is that I have never worried about dressing appropriate to the climate before in a game, but for whatever reason I just do so instinctively here.
The only problem with playing a single player game is that more or less I don’t have a lot that is terribly interesting to talk about, that is also not deeply spoilerific. Yes this game is now three years old at this point, but for the PC crew it is brand new and I don’t want to do anything that would heavily damage the impact of the story beats. So instead you are probably going to get a continued sequence of content with me posting pretty pictures and talking about largely unimportant things until I get Horizon Zero Dawn out of my system again. I think I might be entering another sequence of single player titles, because I believe more than likely I will be playing Ghosts of Tsushima after this.
The post Saving TallFrens appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hai Friends! I apparently lied this morning when I said I probably was not going to sit down and write a blog post. Some events transpired between then and now, and quite frankly I would rather write a long post today than try and do it tomorrow morning when I am hopefully returning to work. I slept in until around 8 am, which is massive considering I normally get up at 5:30 am on the dot. I still feel horrible but I am feeling like a better version of horrible. Hopefully tomorrow morning I will feel significantly better. Today we are going to talk about the Nintendo Switch and alternate “joycon” options.
I love the Nintendo Switch. It has rapidly become my system of choice over the last few years, especially when it comes to any sort of RPG or Platformer. I love the use case of being able to dock the device and play it on my 43 inch 4k display, and then picking it up out of the dock and taking it to bed with me to play until I fall asleep. As idyllic as this sounds, there are some significant problems. Most of the images you are seeing in today’s post are pulled from Amazon product listings. This is a picture of someone playing the Nintendo Switch with very small hands.
This friends is what the exact same joycon looks like in my hand. I’ve written before about the plight of a large handed gamer, but the Nintendo Switch is probably the worst case scenario for a controller failing to function in my giant paws. I CAN play a switch in handheld mode with joycons attached like it was intended to be used, but it is not comfortable and the fact that the joycons are more or less flush with the back of the unit just feels awful. Any time I was called upon to hit the shoulder buttons, it was just a level of frustration beyond explaination. As a result, until december of last year I spent most of my time with the Nintendo Switch in docked mode, with a pro controller connected to it.
The Hori Split Pad Pro
With the release of the Nintendo Switch game Daemon X Machina, Hori also released a custom set of “Joycons”. I use Joycons in quotes because there are some issues with them that I will get into shortly. Essentially the Hori Split Pad Pro feels like you took a Xbox One controller, sawed it in half, and then attached them to the Switch rails. As a result you get full sized Analog sticks, DPad, Buttons and proper controller feeling triggers and shoulder buttons.
The original Daemon X Machina version that I got is starting to get a little hard to find in stock. However today I found out that they are releasing a Blue, Red and Black version, with the last one looking fairly similar to the model I have minus red thumb sticks. Though now that I look at it… the original one looks more dark grey than black. If you are really curious you can check out my original review as I talk about the positives and negatives, but for the sake of today’s post I am going to do an abbreviated rundown.
Hori Positives
Much larger controller that feels physically better in the hand. It has a more standard controller grip and as a result your hand isn’t trying to double back on a flat plane.
Rocker style D-Pad which feels significantly more true to the controller experience than having four disconnected micro switches.
Traditionally springy buttons which have a decent amount of travel and a tactile feel when pushed.
The controller has two back buttons that can have actions mapped to them.
It ends up making the switch lighter, because while large and chunky the controllers don’t really weigh much of anything and wind up reducing the total weight of the unit.
Hori Negatives
Remember how I kept referring to them as Joycons in quotes? Well they aren’t actual joycon replacements and cannot function disconnected from the main unit.
When attached, they make the total unit extremely wide, and it feels like your hands are really far apart which could be a significant problem for someone with smaller hands. Spacing wise It feels like you are holding an iPad horizontally.
They lack any support for gyro which means games like Legend of Zelda a Breath of the Wild that require gyros for solving some of the puzzles are going to require you swapping to another controller.
They lack rumble, which is a net positive for me but I found out yesterday that it apparently is something folks seek out on purpose.
They lack any support for NFC so no ability to use your Amiibos/Cards.
Possibly the most annoying one for me is the fact that you cannot turn on the console by hitting a button on the controller. You have to press the power button to turn the console on first before any input is registered.
While I said there are buttons on the back for mapping abilities to… the can ONLY map abilities from the same side meaning the left button is largely useless unless you really want quick access screen shots.
ViveFox ????
I am going to be honest here… I have no clue what the name of this product is other than the fact that it is manufactured by a company called ViveFox. I found out about the product through a video from Spawn Wave and decided to order one of the controllers to test out. When I say that I do not legitimately know what it is called, it is due in part of the fact that the Amazon listing has the same sort of word salad approach that all Chinese third party products seem to have. I had no planned on writing a post today, but by 9 am I had this sitting in my hand and over the last several hours I have been testing it out.
The package is a pretty simple cardboard box with two joycons contained within a traditional clear plastic molded tray and connected with a cross piece that serves the same role as the switch “dogface” controller. Underneath the tray is a very simple manual, a weird cable that splits from a USB Type A to two USB Type C for the purpose of charging the joycons and something labelled “Myterious Amiibo Card” that has a packing list and customer service information… and is labelled on the back with an acorn icon. To break the suspense the Mysterious Card turned out to be a clone Marshall Amiibo Card for Animal Crossing. For more information on how clone Amiibo cards work, I wrote a thing about that you can find here. For the sake of this not taking forever, I am going to give a similar break down as I did for the Hori above.
ViveFox Positives
They can turn on the console! This one doesn’t seem like that big of a deal but it really is. It is annoying to have to hit the power button each time you need to turn on the device.
The ViveFox joycons are significantly more comfortable to hold in the hand than a normal joycon. They have a decent shape on the back and the shape for some reason reminds me of holding a Dualshock 4.
Has a proper D-Pad but maybe not as nice of one as the Hori. It has a distinct feel of four separate micro switches under it so I agree with Spawn Wave in that it feels very similar to the D-Pad on a 3DS/2DS.
There are significantly better thumb sticks than you get with the default Joycon, but it is a hard plastic and I would have rather had something rubbery. They are a bit on the small side and very reminiscent of the thumb sticks on an Xbox One controller.
They are REAL joycons, which is a massive positive. You can use them detached in either hand and are wirelessly connected back to the switch.
They have a gyro which allows you to use them for motion controlled games or anything that requires a tilt sensor.
Turbo and Macro Recording… and I guess technically the Hori also has Turbo but I don’t really find it that beneficial?
The bracket connects the two joycons at a comfortable angle, making it feel more like a traditional controller rather than one specifically designed for very tiny hands. I could see actually using this as an alternative to the pro controller if I was in a pinch.
They have rumble, which again is a positive for some folks and a negative for others. These have old style rumble and not the Nintendo “HD Rumble”… whatever that nonsense means.
They don’t really increase the width of the unit by a noticeable amount and as a result it still very much feels like you are using a handheld system.
While they don’t have a very satisfying click… they attach really solidly to the device and it feels like you are using a solid unit rather than something attached by a flimsy rail the way that the legitimate joycons can sometimes feel.
The joycons charge while attached to the Switch like normal Joycons, so you will likely never need the goofy cable.
ViveFox Negatives
They got really close to having nearly full parity for actual joycons, but they don’t have an NFC censor which is odd given that they included an NFC card.
They are chonky lads… and are a bit heavier than the default joycons meaning that as a whole it will increase the weight of the unit.
The buttons are micro switches and as a result they don’t exactly have a satisfying feel. There is not a lot of travel in them and they are a bit on the small side. Once again I am going to break out the reference to a 3DS in both size and feel other than the fact that they are inexplicably square rather than circular.
The layout feels a little cramped. They are worlds better than the original joycons but nowhere near as roomy as the Hori pads. I noticed some weirdness with the thumb stick getting in the way as I was using the D-Pad while playing Bloodstained, which might get annoying.
The charge ports are on the bottom side of the grip and depending on where you hold the joycons they might be annoying. I found a comfortable way to hold them, but my fingers normally would have rested on top of this nubbin sticking out.
The bumper and trigger buttons are not really comfortable. They are probably slightly better than the original joycons but again they are not the massive improvement that the Hori controllers had.
The underside of the controller is slick plastic, and doesn’t have any sort of a grippy surface. I think I can probably fix this by applying something rubberized. They don’t slip out of my hand, but I would have liked them to have some sort of grip to them.
The Takeaway
The truth is that both are really good alternatives to the original joycon, depending on what your use case happens to be. I probably find the Hori option more comfortable, but there are absolutely annoyances for not having them function like normal. Firstly with them attached they are going to be way the hell too large to fit into almost any case designed to hold a Nintendo Switch, whereas the ViveFox does not add a lot of size. They are both in the $40-50 ball park and at that price are probably worth it.
For me personally… I am probably going to keep using the ViveFox for awhile. There is going to be an adjustment curve but I think once I get used to them I am going to like them better. Essentially other than Amiibo support they offer everything I care about in a Switch Joycon. We have a switch dock hooked up in the game room at work, and I never liked the thought of needing to either use the base Joycons or bring a separate controller with me in order to partake of some lunch gaming.
For now I am pretty happy with them, the only real negative that I have not addressed is that it might be hard to find at a later date. These Chinese word salad listings seem to come and go from Amazon, and I already noticed that the original listing is completely sold out… with only option available being a market seller with a 22% positive rating. At the time of writing this I am not finding any place else online to purchase them including AliBaba or Wish. So sadly I am writing about what appears to be a really solid product, that currently appears to no longer be available.
The post Alternatives to Switch Joycon appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning folks! I spent the entirety of my weekend in Horizon Zero Dawn (minus a bit of time playing World of Warcraft while podcasting of course). I’ve played the game before, in fact it was my game of the year from 2017. However like always, my preferred method of playing games is on the PC and with Mouse and Keyboard and there was a lot of the game that I found trying because if the imprecise nature of controller gaming. Additionally there was a Frozen Wilds DLC that was released after our initial play through, and I never quite returned to pick that up and play it. So with the release of Horizon Zero Dawn on my preferred platform, with my preferred play style, and with new content I had never seen… It prompted me to sit down and play the game with fresh eyes some three years after my first visit to this world.
There is a bit of controversy surrounding this game, and I am not sure if it is coming from legitimate issues or hyperbole. So some things that you need to know before heading down this road. The game install is about 70 gb and there will be a 35 gb patch immediately after installing. I am not sure if the binaries have been updated in steam to allay this issue or not, but I pre-loaded and was greeted with a significant day one patch. The game also really wants you to be on the latest revision of your video drivers, so I highly suggest doing that before attempting to play. Those things out of the way immediately following launching the game it is going to do this step that takes a significant amount of time as the shaders are pre-compiled on your hardware to make sure the game runs as smoothly as possible.
For me this was about a 15 minute process, but for some folks I am hearing it can take upwards of an hour as they wait for their game to reach a playable state. From what I understand if you are running the game on the “Original” preset, you are effectively playing the game with the same graphical fidelity that would have been present on a PlayStation 4 Pro. For me, the game detected High preset and is running at 4k resolution, and I have largely left that alone and run with it. Unfortunately I scale down the screenshots to 1080p and compress them before uploading to the blog so it doesn’t exactly do the game justice. It is hard to state just how pretty the game is and how good the experience of running around in this world feels on a PC.
The other complaint that I am hearing is that the game crashes, and that is not entirely untrue. I don’t have significant issues with crashes but I have experienced a handful while playing. Normally it happens after a two to three hours of gameplay and the game will just lock up… before crashing out and asking me if I want to send a bug report. I am hoping that later patches will remedy this, since hopefully they are getting an influx of bug reports about this issue. However it really hasn’t caused that much of an issue while playing. The game is pretty prolific bout creating auto saves while you run around the world, and I am also extremely used to hitting every campfire I happen to pass. The combination of these has meant that I have never really lost any significant progress from a crash.
I realize it is a bit unusual for me to address things in this order, but in the case of this game and its current mixed reviews on Steam, I felt like I wanted to get the negative bits out of the way first. The positives of the game greatly overwhelm these and for me who has not played the game in three years… it felt like visiting an old friend. The biggest take away I have upon returning to the game is that I am just significantly more powerful than I was the first time. That isn’t a change in a game, but more a change in the way that I approach it. I understand how combat works now, and I understand how important it is to target the weak points on enemies. For example there is a latch on the back of a shell walker, that if you disable with your bow will cause a treasure trove to pop off of its back. I didn’t do a good job of this the first time around and as a result I missed out on a lot of powerful loot as a result.
There is a moment early in the game where you are set up against what is supposed to be a very intimidating encounter. However that same encounter with time becomes something that you see pretty often out in the world, and as a result I went into it knowing exactly how to disable it and take it down efficiently. Essentially as I titled the podcast this weekend “Precision is Power”, I know how the world works now and as a result I can do a much better job of navigating its hurdles. Coming back to the game, I find myself remembering so many things that just keep flooding back in waves as I arrive at areas. It only took a few minutes before the Keyboard and Mouse controls felt like an extension of my arm, rather than something that I was having to account for.
If you want my gaming impressions, you are probably significantly better off reading my original post from 2017. Those are the thoughts of someone experiencing the game for the first time, and probably a better experience for those who have never played the game. To be honest… Horizon Zero Dawn might be on my Games of the Year list for 2020 because playing it on PC and with my chosen input method is such a more enjoyable experience that it elevates everything to a new level. That said… playing the game with the expansion content adds a new dimension to the game. I wasn’t exactly sure how the new content would weave its way into the story, but it does so in a manner that feels seamless.
You can branch out into the new content as soon as I arrive at the city of Meridian, which depending on your play style could be pretty quick… or could be several hours into the game. What is unique however and the thing that I noticed almost immediately is once you have exited the “tutorial” content, the world seems significantly more alive than it used to. The only frame of reference I can really give you is that the game now has Skyrim-esc random encounters as you are roaming the world. You might come across a pack of enemy bandits trying to take down a machine, and you have to choose to either avoid the entire mess or take advantage of both sides and get some easy kills. Additionally there are encounters were you happen across some Nora braves, and you can help them out and get experience for doing so.
It is a little thing, and subtle… but it adds so much life to the world. In the original game, once you left any of the settlements it was more or less just you and the zoids out there. Now there are other human beings along the way that make the world feel more inhabited and vibrant. I love this game so much, and coming back has felt amazing. If you have never had the chance to play the game I highly suggest checking it out on your PC storefront of choice. I picked up the game on Steam and have been happy with that decision, thought it is also available on Epic Game Store. However it seems like the EGS didn’t offer preloading which was a bit odd. Bow combat feels so much better with the precise nature of the mouse and keyboard, and I am legitimately wishing this had been an option from day one. I am hoping as we go through the next generation of consoles, that more games will natively support KBM.
The post Horizon is Better on PC appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Due to improper planning and the fact that last week was Belghast’s wedding anniversary so we called it for the evening. Tonight we are back and with a proper show chock full of goodness. Actually just prior to the show Tam carpet bombed the trello with like two dozen topics, so we will probably be in business for several weeks. Kodra participated in the very first GenCon Online and has lots of things to talk about regarding it. During the middle of this discussion we break into a side tangent about how we feel like Shadowrun would work well using the World of Darkness Storyteller system. Grace and Bel revisit Horizon Zero Dawn on the PC and talk about how much better the game feels with a mouse and keyboard. Ash talks about playing Gundam EX vs Maxiboost ON and this leads to a side discussion about Gundam Breaker. Bel talks about finishing Death Stranding and how emotionally connected he was to the characters in the game. Finally we dive into a discussion about games and companion apps and how a lot of tabletop gaming and the company fear of the internet shoots them in the foot.
