Series-ously Good

I said I was going to review the Xbox Series controller after I received it, and here it is... it's pretty good.

Oh wait, you probably wanted a more verbose description. Okay, let's try this. This gamepad has become my preferred way to play Xbox games, because it's both reliably responsive and cleverly ergonomic. The D-pad works a lot better than you might expect from its off-putting appearance, trapping your thumb in the center with its scooped design and offering a click you can both hear and feel with every press. The back of the controller and the two trigger buttons are textured to keep even the sweatiest hands anchored in place. The action buttons have just the right amount of give, not so wobbly to make them feel unsteady under your thumb but not so rigid that they resist your input. 

The Xbox Series pad doesn't reinvent
the wheel, but it vulcanizes the rubber
for a smoother ride.
(image from Xbox)

The icing on the cake is a "share" button that should have been on the Xbox One's controller when that system debuted eight years ago. It was always a bummer to have to pause the game with Guide and press Y to take a snapshot, but now it's as easy as it's always been on the Switch and Playstation 4. Better late than never, I guess!

Would I say that I prefer the Xbox Series controller to my M30 or a good joystick for fighting games? No. Would I say that it's the best analog gamepad for those kinds of games? Absolutely, and it's well suited to a lot of other genres which aren't appropriate for digital pads and sticks. I've tried the Xbox Series pad with all kinds of games, from the third-person shooter Armed and Dangerous to overhead view shmups like Ikaruga to old school classics like Pac-Man, and it handles them all magnificently. 

(It's worth mentioning that the Xbox Series really shines with Pac-Man and its sequel Pac-Man Championship Edition, thanks to a tactile D-pad which reads cardinal directions with absolute precision. I don't think I've ever had a gamepad that works this well with those two games, and believe me, I've had plenty. You're probably not buying an Xbox Series pad just for Pac-Man, but if you should happen to dust off this golden oldie for a few plays, you'll be in for a fantastic experience.)

There's not much to complain about with this controller, really. The square edges of the D-pad are a little rough on the thumb, and the multi-format compatibility that sounds handy in theory is a little awkward in practice. If you pair the Xbox Series pad to your PC with Bluetooth, you'll have to re-sync it to your console later, something that probably could have been avoided if the pad had a mode switch instead of just a sync button.

The Xbox Series pad is easy to recommend. It doesn't look like much has changed from the Xbox One controller, but when you start using it, you'll quickly recognize and appreciate the subtle differences. Kudos to Microsoft for making it compatible with both the recent Xbox Series and past generation consoles... those of us who aren't ready to step up to the new hardware extend our thanks.

Not Labeled for Individual Sale

I thought this comic from Keith Stack was worth sharing, having a couple of these cartridges in my collection myself.

pic.twitter.com/KDosmyJpWC

— KEITH STACK (@keithjohnstack) May 25, 2021

Maybe it was a pressing concern in 1992, but these days the warning probably holds as much weight as those mattress tags which warn "do not remove under penalty of law." Who's going to come after me, the Dream Police? Too late, they already live inside of my head.

Anyway. I bought a lot of games over the last two weeks, including a bundle of Assassin's Creed titles on ShopGoodwill for an unexpectedly reasonable price, and a clutch of Xbox One discs discovered at Saint Vincent RuPaul's (and don't @ me, I will cling to that joke until the day I die). I swore that I was going to keep my Xbox One collection strictly digital, but every man has his breaking point, and five dollars each for three fairly recent games was apparently mine. Hold on, let me see if I can dig up a picture of my haul...

There we go. I wanted to dip my toes into Watch Dogs 2... I heard they lightened the mood considerably from the dour original, in an apparent reversal of Ubisoft's previous decision to follow up the lighthearted Prince of Persia: Sands of Time with Warrior Within, a game best remembered for its grouchier protagonist and Godsmacked soundtrack. 

Unfortunately, Watch Dogs 2 came with a nasty surprise that left ME a little grouchy... a mandatory eleven gig download on top of the data already on the disc. I don't have any data caps, but I do have miserably slow DSL out in the boonies. Making matters worse, the Xbox One monopolizes what bandwidth is available, leaving all my other devices incapacitated until it finishes its downloads. I'd better fall in love with this game after the hours it left me twiddling my thumbs!

We Tried to Warn 'Er

AT&T is having second thoughts about its purchase of Warner Bros., as evidenced by its attempt to share the financial burden with Discovery. The telco giant will now own seventy percent of the studio, with Discovery claiming the other thirty percent. As for the company's interactive entertainment subsidiary Warner Games, nobody's sure where that will end up. It seems AT&T and Discovery will take the Solomon approach, cutting their baby into pieces and each taking a handful for themselves. I would humbly suggest they sell Traveller's Tales to Lego, since they don't make anything else these days.

image from Wikipedia

What else? I recently bought an Xbox Series controller, since I've heard that it's got the best D-pad in the twenty year history of the product line. Like the (outrageously expensive) Xbox Elite controller, it's got a circular, concave design, keeping your thumb in place while you use it, and like the Neo-Geo Pocket Color, it clicks, giving the player important auditory and tactile cues as they play. 

Another plus is that the controller can be used with a handful of devices... not just its native Xbox Series, but the Xbox One, home computers, and even an Android phone should you need it for that purpose. I don't know when my controller will arrive- since I bought it from ShopGoodwill it might take a while- but you'll likely see a detailed review on this blog when it does finally get here.

ZAMN It All, or Curb Your Dogecoin

"I don't wanna" can make nothing happen to you, too.

Sorry folks. There's currently not much to report, and not much motivation to post what gaming news is available. I can say that Disney is releasing a two-pack of Zombies Ate My Neighbors and its stealth sequel Ghoul Patrol for the Switch, under its Lucasfilm Games banner. (I thought it was "LucasArts" now? Geez Mickey, make up your tiny rodent mind. Also, pay your damn sci-fi writers while you're at it.) Special thanks to the always reliable "Oh no!" Mollie Patterson for the scoop.

Zombies Ain't My Favorite.
(image from Reddit)

I personally wasn't a big fan of ZAMN, but then again, I was a Genesis man back in the early 1990s, and it didn't feel like LucasWhatever put its best foot forward in that version of the game. Maybe it couldn't have been better on Genesis, since the game's charm was heavily dependent on clean sound samples and colorful sprites. Strip those away (and cover a quarter of the screen with a black bar) and you just have Gauntlet: Late 20th Century Edition, and there's a perfectly good version of Gauntlet on the Genesis already. A version of Gauntlet which, by the way, has one of the coolest damn soundtracks you're gonna hear on that system... none of that crummy GEMS sound engine crap like Zombies Ate My Neighbors had. GEMS... when you only care enough to send Genesis owners' ears the very least.

So, what else? Switch Pro (or is it Super Nintendo Switch?) rumors are flaring up like hemorrhoids again, but I'll be honest, I have very little interest in buying another game system at the moment, let alone a third Switch. PS5s and Xbox Series-es have been tough to hunt down thanks to the pandemic slowing down chip manufacture, but I'm quite happy with the previous generation of consoles, and I don't see that changing any time in the near future. 

(Gee, I sound like a re-run of myself from 2016, except then I was sticking with the Xbox 360 and PS3.)

What I could use is a new PC, and I've been slowly putting one of those together from random bits and bobs. You know, a spare hard drive here, a refurbished motherboard there, and a generously donated GPU to top it all off. Did you know that the GTX 970 is seven years old but will still run you a kingly $400 on the open market? That's mostly thanks to the virtual stripmining operations people have running in their basements. I have expressed my contempt for cryptocurrency in the past, have I not? At least some friends managed to make Dogecoin work for them when someone (who recently hosted SNL, and badly) decided that it had value beyond making fun of all the other brands of invisible money on the market.

Toys for Bob(by)

Oh, that wacky Bobby Kotick. He's pulled Activision's internal development team Toys for Bob away from the Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot series and assigned them to Call of Duty, because heaven forbid there be the slightest bit of carefree whimsy in this industry that doesn't come directly from Nintendo. On the plus side, the ashtray-filching, subsidiary-shuttering CEO is getting his comeuppance in the form of a significant pay cut. On the down side... he can make all that back and more with bonuses. So much for karma. 

This situation irritates me, because Toys for Bob has been around for a long, long time, first creating the Archon series for the Commodore 64 as Free Fall Associates, and then moving on to the doomed 3DO, developing games like Star Control II and The Horde. For those who missed it, that was the wonderfully weird hybrid of hack and slash action and town building strategy which featured Kirk Cameron's declaration that he was "raised by a kind herd of wild cows." 

(Fun fact: I was one of the voice actors for the fan translation of Ys IV: Dawn of Ys, and my portrayal of the hapless villager turned spider Lemneth was heavily influenced by Cameron's performance as Chauncey. Lemneth was a weenie, Chauncey was a weenie... it just seemed to fit.)

I hadn't been paying too much attention to Toys for Bob's latest efforts, including the Skylanders series and the recent revival of Crash Bandicoot, but it nevertheless seems incongruent to put this team to work on the blood-soaked and seemingly endless Call of Duty series. It's like, exactly the opposite of what they've been making for the last twenty five years. 

Activision's used a hammer to fit a square peg into a round hole before, taking Vicarious Visions out of its natural element as a successful developer of handheld games to work on the PC and console title Diablo. It makes absolutely no sense, but then again, neither does paying Bobby Kotick kajillions to set fire to the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Guitar Hero franchises. I wouldn't pay this guy minimum wage to sell Pro subscriptions and creepy latex figurines at GameStop, but what the hell do I know?

Latham's Lament

Time for a little good news/bad news. The bad news (since that's always requested first) is that Michael Latham, the creator of the short-lived Eternal Champions series for Sega game consoles, passed away on April 10th according to Sega Retro. Was Eternal Champions my favorite versus fighter? Not particularly... it didn't feel as well constructed as the Street Fighter games, and there was an emphasis on status effects and location dependent fatalities, features which were both pushed to irritating extremes in the 3DO release Way of the Warrior.

Still, Latham gets credit for making Eternal Champions and its Sega CD sequel one of the most ambitious Western-designed franchises in the early 1990s. Too many Sega Genesis games developed in America felt like they were just good enough to justify being released, whether they were original creations (Kid Chameleon, Greendog), based on television and film licenses (Batman Returns, TaleSpin), or just titles meant as an alternative to whatever Nintendo had released the month before (Art Alive, which forced you to draw with a joypad and should have been banned under the Geneva convention as an instrument of torture).

Eternal Champions had some of the same issues as these games, like grainy graphics and an underwhelming soundtrack provided by the GEMS sound driver, but one complaint you couldn't make is that it was designed out of grim obligation. It's clear from the detailed back stories of the cast alone (there was a hotline you could call to learn more about the fighters! Really!) that this project was important to Latham and his team. In fact, Eternal Champions was more important to Latham that it was to Sega, which cut the series loose out of concern that a Saturn version would distract players from Virtua Fighter. It certainly would have had the edge over that game in violence, if this footage of the Sega CD version is any indication.

It probably goes without saying that this video is pretty graphic. We're talking way over the top, disturbing even by today's standards, "Stop, stop! He's already dead!" graphic. Special thanks to Laser Time for the footage, and thanks to the late Michael Latham for being one of the rare Sega Genesis game designers on this side of the pond who actually seemed to give a damn about his work.

Okay, now onto the good news. If you were annoyed that Capcom didn't include one of your favorite arcade oldies (cough cough Black Tiger) in their recent collection for the Switch, they're selling a fourth game pack in the near future, and including suggestions from fans. Personally, I'd like to see the aforementioned Black Tiger, Pocket Fighter, one of the Darkstalkers games, and 3 Wonders... the last one is technically three games, but they're all very good and I'm very greedy, so I'm sticking with that selection. 

Games that probably won't make the cut include demanding titles like Power Stone which will be too difficult to port, licensed games like Marvel vs. Capcom and The Punisher, and games that fit both descriptions, like that wretched Spawn game for the Dreamcast. If you want Spawn, just play as him in Mortal Kombat 11... don't subject yourself to this little slice of hell on Earth.

One other thing. Capcom will sell an invincibility patch for the rest of the games in Capcom Arcade Stadium. I'm not convinced that this will make much of a difference in quarter inhalers like Final Fight and 1943, but Ghouls 'n Ghosts...? Fine, just take my damn money. Anything to kill Firebrand, that swarthy red gargoyle bastard.

Dial C for Complete

So, that spinner I was complaining about earlier? Yeah, you can say I made some progress on that.

It turns out that the problem I was having with the background art is that the library's copier was very specific about which files and hardware it would accept. It wouldn't recognize the Verbatim flash drive I purchased from an estate sale for five bucks, and it wouldn't accept the PNG files on the Lexar SD card I used as a second option. The picky bastard was finally placated when I converted the file to JPG... it's an old graphics format and it's generally not as crisp and colorful as PNG, but yanno, any port in a storm.

With the artwork finally printed, I could move on to assembling the spinner. Here's a quick peek inside...

The GRS spinner on its own doesn't have support for all the buttons I wanted to use, so I took a USB controller, stripped it down to its printed circuit board, and soldered the L and R triggers to a couple arcade-style buttons I had tucked away in a junk drawer. The spinner and controller were then plugged into a USB hub, and its cable was led out of a hole in the back of the enclosure I used to house my homemade peripheral. Some hot glue and zip ties kept everything in place.

So far, I'm fairly satisfied with what I've built. I really should put some weights on the bottom half of the enclosure to give it a more solid feel, and the spinner dial is too large to comfortably play Arkanoid and other brick breakers, but this crazy controller works a treat for Victory, Omega Race, and Star Trek. Here are my latest scores in the latter two games...

Okay, I'm not breaking any world records here, but cracking six figures in Star Trek nevertheless felt like one hell of an accomplishment. Also, I beat a droid force in Omega Race! Do you know how hard it is to get that five thousand point bonus? Even the VIC-20 version makes you sweat for it, and the arcade game has more onscreen activity and smarter enemies.

By the way, just in case you were about to ask, I still suck at Major Havoc. Look, the spinner makes games more comfortable to play, but it's not a miracle worker.