{"id":1102,"date":"2014-06-28T00:36:06","date_gmt":"2014-06-27T14:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/?p=1102"},"modified":"2014-06-28T00:36:06","modified_gmt":"2014-06-27T14:36:06","slug":"on-the-ridiculous-state-of-pc-gaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/on-the-ridiculous-state-of-pc-gaming\/","title":{"rendered":"On the ridiculous state of PC gaming"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I bought Brothers for PC in the Steam sale. Looked like something interesting.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I have three different controllers, two generic PC controllers and a PS3 controller.<\/li>\n<li>None work. Apparently only X360 controllers are reliable and you need to make other controllers emulate them. OK then.<\/li>\n<li>I try playing the game with keyboard. It\u2019s tricky, and one part really feels like it\u2019s buggy with the keyboard \u2014\u00a0do I really need to hold these keys down while my on-screen characters move very slowly for at least 30 seconds? The controller is a big part of this game, as you control each of the two characters with one of the analog sticks.<\/li>\n<li>So, trying again for joystick support.<\/li>\n<li>Solutions online point to x360ce for generic controllers and motioninjoy for PS3.<\/li>\n<li>I find x360ce, but it doesn\u2019t initially launch.<\/li>\n<li>Motioninjoy\u2019s site is down with a 502 error.<\/li>\n<li>I find a semi-dodgy looking copy on a third party download site. It\u2019s got lots of ads, and still doesn\u2019t work. Giving up on the PS3 controller.<\/li>\n<li>Downloading an older beta of x360ce.<\/li>\n<li>It at least launches, my joystick is detected, I\u2019m able to configure it, and then the newer version will launch.<\/li>\n<li>I read online that x360ce needs to be launched from the game directory itself.<\/li>\n<li>Of course it does. It didn\u2019t bother to tell me, though.<\/li>\n<li>I move it there, launch it, I get a couple of errors, and\u2026 the game won\u2019t launch at all; it\u2019s now missing a DLL.<\/li>\n<li>I go through Steam\u2019s local integrity check, and it finds a missing file, which it says it will reacquire.<\/li>\n<li>Game won\u2019t launch.<\/li>\n<li>Go through Steam\u2019s local integrity check again. Nothing wrong.<\/li>\n<li>Game won\u2019t launch.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Oh, and Sleeping Dogs? Doesn\u2019t work. Won&#8217;t launch at all, but it played through the first few minutes of the game several times before crashing, which is even more tedious. Other people have the same issue, but tech support won\u2019t help because a Mac running Boot Camp is apparently an unsupported platform, even though it\u2019s got a PC graphics card.<\/p>\n<p>Seriously? No, really, seriously? Why do people actually put up with this? I&#8217;ve been mucking around with computers since I was six and I&#8217;ve had enough. To be fair, not everything&#8217;s had the same issues. Skyrim&#8217;s mostly worked, and it was fantastic. Alan Wake might not be a great game, but it launched and hasn&#8217;t stuffed itself up. Most things have been OK, but the exceptions have been the most spectacular failures.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s unfair to expect that joysticks just work. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s unfair to expect that games just work. You shouldn&#8217;t have to Google, you shouldn&#8217;t have to install weird crap from weird sites. Until it all just works, all the time, PC gaming can never go mainstream.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I bought Brothers for PC in the Steam sale. Looked like something interesting. I have three different controllers, two generic PC controllers and a PS3 controller. None work. Apparently only X360 controllers are reliable and you need to make other controllers emulate them. OK then. I try playing the game with keyboard. It\u2019s tricky, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/on-the-ridiculous-state-of-pc-gaming\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">On the ridiculous state of PC gaming<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}