[device thunking in and out] - ...I have no comment. [haptic jazz music plays] [computer buzzes, beeps] Greetings and welcome to "LGR Oddware" where we're taking a look at hardware and software that is odd, forgotten, and obsolete. And this time it is the Novint Falcon.
A haptic feedback controller for not just FPS games, but all kinds of stuff. Mostly FPS though. Let's take a look at it! All right, finally taking a look at this.
The Novint Technologies Falcon, initially released in the latter half of 2007. And yeah this Aperture Science looking thing is a mouse input device alternative, with a combination of haptics and force feedback. With the former providing these kind of subtle cues to feel textures and shapes, just subtle vibrations at your fingertips. Plus the latter giving that kickback, the recoil effect especially, pushing your hand and arm around in reaction to things happening on screen.
And yeah, they really did bill this as a full-on replacement for the computer mouse as an input device for PC games. I mean, even down to the name "Falcon," so chosen because, "A falcon is a predator of the mouse," according to CEO, Tom Anderson. No, not that Tom Anderson. This is a different one.
And I gotta give a huge thank you to LGR viewer Andrew for letting me borrow this particular unit. It's got the accessories we need and is working great, even though it doesn't have the box, or the manual, or the original CDs. That's fine. You can see the box with its prominent Novint logos on there.
And yeah, Novint Technologies, they were a company founded in 1999 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and their whole thing was haptics-focused technology development, largely software from what I gather in collaboration with other companies. Like the Virtual Reality Dental Training System. The Phantom haptic interface for adding 3D touch to computers, and the E-touch Sono letting parents touch their pre-birth babies in ultrasound form. They also did a lot of contract work for organizations like Aramco, Lockheed Martin, Chevron, and Sandia National Laboratories.
With that last one, Sandia, being where Novint founder and CEO, Tom Anderson, worked previously. Eventually they started selling their own bespoke devices like the Novint Falcon, and it was actually based on products by Force Dimension, specifically the Omega first introduced in 2003. You can see the similarity I think, and in fact, Omega devices are still sold today costing $20,000 and up. Well, Novint wanted to sell one for a hundred dollars.
In a way, making it kind of a similar idea to the Space Orb, you know, taking something from the medical/industrial/scientific community and then cutting it down for PC gaming. So yeah, Mr. Anderson worked with Force Dimension already and saw potential in their devices for PC gaming, but a ton of work would have to be done to get that down to cost.
So they hired Lunar Design, and that is an interesting company all in itself. They began in 1984, and they've done so much industrial design and engineering work for companies like HP, Motorola, Apple, Pepsi, Proctor & Gamble, Sony, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, in the 2000s they were hired by Novint to simplify Force Dimension's designs. Cost reducing it such an insane degree that it could somehow get to around a hundred dollars, or at least that was the hope, with images like this of early prototypes revealed in 2005.
And then the next design that is much closer to the final product showing up at CES of 2006, and then E3 of 2006, letting people get their hands on it for the first time leading to some interesting reactions from journalists and folks at these shows, like GameSpot here. - You can feel what direction you're being shot from, you can feel the fur on a character. So really, lots of different applications. - Fur on a character.
Hey Tor, I know what you're thinking about you can use this for, why don't you tell me? - No. [chuckles goofily] - It took another couple years before it actually hit the market though, and once it finally did, it cost $240-ish. That was directly through Novint, but if you were to get it at like Tiger Direct or whatever, I've seen that it was priced around 180, 190.
We'll just say it was $200, and that was for the main bundle with the orb grip and a minigames disc. Initially in silver and white in 2007, with this black and silver version I think arriving in early 2008. And it wasn't long before they introduced this $20 add-on, a pistol grip, which you could swap out the orb for and use that on it instead. As for a response from reviewers and owners once they finally got their hands on it, it was criticized for having very shallow minigames, included limited third party game support, a pretty steep learning curve using it as a mouse, and flopping around all over a desktop while in use, and a high price being a controller with pretty limited game support. So you know, as you can imagine, it was a hard sell for all those reasons.
Plus, to really be sold on it, you just kinda had to try it! And there were a few places where you could actually do that. Not too many retailers carried it to begin with, and the ones that did, most of 'em didn't have demo units. Plus this was 2008, and the Nintendo Wii had come along in the meantime making motion control all the rage, and you don't need a crazy desktop device for that. So it wasn't exactly a huge market hit. In fact, I've kind of gathered that maybe more of them sold to medical, scientific, and CAD folks, which is interesting because that's kind of what it was based on.
But obviously being way cheaper and doing something very similar, you could see the appeal. But yeah, despite selling them for at least a couple years, Novint wasn't long for this world. Their stocks dropped to less than 10 cents a share by late 2010, and went down to single digit stock prices, were delisted sometime after that, and they just kind of disappeared. So it goes. An unfortunately common outcome here on "Oddware", but let's see if it deserved any better than what it got.
And one thing I do wanna mention, well I've got some bruises, don't mind those. Is that this thing is actually heftier, heavier than I thought it would be despite how much it slides around. Yeah, this thing actually weighs around 10 pounds or four and a half kilograms, and that is not enough. They did include this mousepad-like anti slip mat at some point, which, it helps. But it still slides around quite a bit, especially when it's powered up. And on that note, it is USB in terms of the connection to the computer, but it does require an external power supply for all the motors. Which look like this
by the way. I'm not about to take the one I have apart. It's not mine, but I just wanted to show the inside of this and check out that hexagonal PCB, just nifty. USB A there, and then this is the power supply, at least the one that came with this one, 30 volts DC. Hefty wall wart to provide the force that this thing can put out, which is by the way, 8.9 Newtons or around two pounds of force feedback. Pretty substantial in terms of recoil, like, it does the job. So speaking of which,
it is as easy as just squeezing this little bit, and changing out these pieces, which are called End Effectors. And yeah, this pistol one is pretty spot on as I think we'll see later with some FPSs. Although not ideal for any number of other types of games like flight sims, for instance. I mean there's no pitch, rolling, yaw, exactly. This doesn't rotate or do any– It doesn't do anything but like X, Y, and Z.
It's not a six degree of freedom thing. I also like how they went out of their way to add the orange tip and end piece there cuz you know, you don't want anybody mistaking this for a real gun when you're sticking up the local bank. But yeah, the whole thing is extremely cheap and hollow feeling. There's no interesting things going on with materials, or the grip, or really anything. The trigger is plastic and basically has no weight to it.
It feels way less convincing than even that pistol mouse I covered. But you do get four buttons, the trigger counting as one, and these other three here. And unfortunately, this is not ambidextrous. You just have them over here. So if you're like – I can't even do left.
But if you were, you don't get anything there for your thumb. It's just all there. I also wish the barrel was just slightly longer.
It's so tiny. And some of these design pieces are interesting, like these grippy bits as if there was a slide. There's not, it's just a standard back end of a striker fire pistol. But you do have some grooves here for your fingers and you know, overall it's actually quite comfortable. I don't mind it at all, and in fact, even though that's not a sight mount or rail or anything, it's just about the right size, right? [RDS-induced laughter] If you wanna add a red dot sight to your plasticky Novint Falcon pistol grip, you can do that.
It actually kinda works! Eh no, this is "Oddware." We're gonna do things as they were intended. So we're gonna start out with the ball, the orb bit there, and get to set up with a Windows PC sort of of the time period, and give this oddity a shot! [jazz tunes fade] All righty, well I've got it plugged into both the wall and the Windows XP build here, which yeah, I know a later OS would probably be more appropriate, but for this section, I'm gonna go with XP.
Yeah, we have our choice of end effectors. And yeah, you can see it is powered on. You got your RGB situation going there, and all we need to do is just take this, and there we go. That is that, and we still have to use a mouse at this point because we don't have any kind of mouse emulation or passthrough going. At the moment, there's really no feedback of any kind. You can kind of feel it moving against the motors, but it is limp.
So let's get some software going, and I came with a number of things in this bundle, but right now I'm just gonna do the test program and you can see as I'm moving around, all the different encoder position sensors are detecting things, as are the buttons. So yeah, it is doing what it's supposed to. However, this is where it gets interesting. So we have these motor controls here, and yeah, if we do this, we have direct control over each of the axes, the motors here.
It is quite the experience. [laughs] We can reset and go all at once. [Falcon thrusting] [devious laughing] ...I have no comment. Anyway, our toy is working perfectly so we can open up something else. And I'm gonna start, let's see, we have these different programs that let you do things. I think the first, we'll just go straight into it.
I'm gonna do the Falcon Tutorial. [2000s sci-fi noises play] I'll change up the view here and get some direct capture going so we can see what's going on. I say yeah, this is the Novint Falcon Tutorial, kind of an enhanced version of the demo that they showed at trade shows back in the day before it came out.
Press any button to continue, including buttons on the Falcon. And yeah, at this point it is gonna be holding in place a little better. - [Voiceover] Welcome to the Novint Falcon Tutorial. The Novint Falcon lets you use your sense of touch to interact with your computer in a completely new way. Also, be sure that you do not let go of the Falcon grip while you are using it, especially when there are large forces, and keep all body parts other than your hand away from the Falcon's workspace during use. [chuckle of immaturity] - Oh, the calibration's already off...
That's great. Great. All right, that's better. Calibration can be a bit of a thing.
Anyway, this gets us straight into the thing's party trick, so to speak. So as it is right now, I can see the little hand on the screen and where I am in real life, and it's uncanny. It genuinely feels like I'm just rubbing this ball. It's like, I'm just like bouncing up against this ball right here with my hand. Like, it's weird, man. It's a really cool, immediately like, "oh, I get it!" kind of effect here.
And then yeah, if you wanna, you know, touch some other balls, you can do that. There is a lot of balls to test. So here we have one that's a nice bumpy ball, and again, the texture, it's so weird and you can go around it. It feels like I'm kind of fondling this thing.
You know what? It just is what it is. Okay, I know what it sounds like. [spherical laugh] Don't worry about it, but like, that's the demo. This demo is about touching balls. So the next one here, this is a fascinating one, the molasses demo, and it's like you can push your hand through it, and it eventually gives. You push it back out.
There's this genuine textured feel there. You know, it's like gooey in the middle, and then yeah, it's really neat. Of course, you're already seeing a problem here in that even with the grippy mouse pad-like surface it comes with, the thing just slides around all over a desk. It's not very stable. It really needs to be like strapped down or something, and these grips that it has on the bottom, they don't grip any better. They're much worse and more slidey.
Sandpaper, again this one is, it's trippy. I'm not sure I'd really call it sandpaper, but there is like a there's a texture to it, and again, circling like this, it doesn't take but a moment for your brain to sort of think, "oh yeah, like," "there's an object there in front of me." I could just imagine how this would be in like VR, or a 3D glasses and monitor kinda set up. The magnetic one is also interesting because it pulls your hand in and sort of sticks to it. So it's like we do it really light here. Yeah, like that? [Falcon vibrating rapidly] Oh man! This one also was just awesome.
The rubber, it's like, you know, smushing into a dodge ball or something. Honey. Again, sort of a variation on the molasses thing. And yeah, no texture at all. It's just a regular old ball. There you go, that's what you got for the demo tutorial thing. Very much something that you would mess around with at a trade show, and that's 'cause that's what that was. It did also come with a number of games or really minigames, and you can open those individually.
Or what they wanted you to do was use this N VeNT program. You're not gonna find any updates. Don't even try. Yeah, N VeNT was their kind of software-loading frontend. Not only loading software, but connecting to their own, I guess their own servers. It was almost like their version of Steam, and you could buy different games to play on your Falcon.
So yeah it's, I mean you know, there's all kinds of other things in there. You've got leaderboards and message boards, and multiplayer connections, and like offers, and whatever. I don't know, they were trying things.
You can select from the games that it came with, but I'm just gonna go and individually open things because that feels better to me. So let's just go in alphabetical order, starting with 3 Point Shootout, and I actually have not played any of these yet. All right, so see what have we got. Options. Sure, whatever. Ooh, you can change the forces.
Let's put it all the way up because I want all the force. What's the point in messing with this kind of thing if you don't get the full feedback? "Make as many hoops as you can." All right, I will figure out how.
Okay, can I go – Oh yep, I can. This... doesn't really feel like I'm holding a basketball. It's like fighting against me.
Well. I mean, this is immediately confusing. I don't really know what this is supposed to be imitating. Like, I guess it's supposed to be imitating the weight of a basketball? [cracks up at the chaos] Sure! Whatever, man! One of those has gotta get in.
Come on now. This doesn't feel like basketball. [laughs] It doesn't really look like it either! This is dumb. Again, it didn't feel like I was actually throwing anything.
It just felt like there was random sort of central forces being applied. Anyway, let's try Golf. Feelin' It Golf.
Yes, it's another game with balls. This looks like something from Head Games. Remember, this is 2008... Hit mode. All right, so. What?
I didn't press any buttons. Nope, don't wanna do that. Again, I don't really know what they're trying to simulate here. Yeah sure, force is being applied, but to what end? It doesn't feel like I'm golfing.
How many times do you golf like this? [gestures] I don't know, it doesn't really feel like I'm doing anything. And you know, you had like Wii Sports golf things around at this point. This is just crap. This is no good, this is no good.
I did see some coverage of this, reviewers recommended strapping or taping it down, bolting it down even. They're like, anything you can do to get this thing to not move, do it, because it's awful otherwise. Oh yeah, there we go. Seven years of development, who knows how much money, and it's solved by a couple cents worth of gaff tape.
All right, let's try Home Run Smashout. Another ball game. All right.
Ah, that was crappy. At least this seems simple enough that it's not too much that can go wrong. Yeah, there we go. Home run! It does look like you can aim, sort of aim the bat. See if I can just bunt it. Come on now...
Ah, that was nice. Little impact there. Okay, I mean, it's complete garbage again compared to something like the Wii. Like, it's just it makes so much more sense to have a wand, right? Or a Wii Remote. I mean, this is the extent of it right here. This is all you're doing really.
Like I said, there's some light aiming or whatever, and it's just timing. It's so much less dynamic and interesting feeling than like even your basic Wii Sports type of deal. I know a lot of that's probably down to the games themselves here.
These are extremely simple. I think this one's about the most substantial. Oh, we got pre-rendered cutscenes. You owe bank $50,000 something, something. Dude, the screen tearing is insane.
Like, even on the CRT. Play! We'll see what this crap is about. Race or Game Room.
[upbeat game music plays] Are they ripping off Fat Boy Slim? Like, that's totally "Weapon of Choice", right? All right, we got some characters. Mad Sam, Rolland, Duck. [laughs] Doesn't even get a cool name. Yeah, let's just go with Duck. So this is like a Mario Party type of thing? [timer beeping] What the heck? Oh. Guess the buttons do nothing.
I mean, you know, look, I like force feedback or whatever, but this is certainly no better than just like your basic, most basic, Microsoft Sidewinder type of experience. You know, that awesome force feedback joystick, and like this is so much worse because it's like an odd, weird ball thing. I think it's messing up the calibration again too.
All right, next stupid minigame, I guess. It is like a Mario Party thing, huh? Oh, whoa whoa, what the heck? Yeah, the calibration is all off, man. Oh, come on now.
I don't know what I was supposed to be doing at all. Yeah, I'm kinda shocked at how bad these minigames are so far. This is truly bizarre. It's like they had this interesting idea and they had no idea what to do with it. I see why they were using that initial ball demo for the conventions and whatnot, and not these minigames 'cause this is... it's not great.
What the heck? Dude, there's not even any feedback when you hit the ball. There's just nothing going on. It feels like I'm not even...
like I'm just using a regular mouse here. Oh, there was a little bit of feedback there. None there though. I've had better times using that grippy hand controller thing, what was that? The P5 Glove, even that was more interesting, more fun.
Oh this is so, so disappointing! All right, Top Pin Bowling. Let's see what you got. What? So there is a point where you're floating in midair where the hand just sort of does that. So I guess you're just supposed to...
This is so weird. Again, the forces don't make sense. This feels like I'm trying that ball demo again so it feels like I'm rubbing around a ball, but that's not what's happening on screen, and that's not what you do when you play bowling. You don't play bowling by moving forward and do this. Were these made by Head Games? Because seriously, that's the vibe with like all of them.
And I mean that in the most disrespectful way possible. Oh god, get in the... What the? [laughs, then laughs harder] The bowling ball gave up! And nothing is happening now. Oh my word! [cracks up laughing] It just ejected itself from reality! It's like nah, this sucks! [laughs even harder] Okay. Those... suck!
The Home Run Shootout – Smashout, whatever, was probably the best one just because it was so simple. You literally just move left and right with the tiniest little bit of up and down. But you know, it makes sense. That's the most restricted one. There's a very controlled space of simulation going on.
Same with the ball demo itself. This right here is probably the most impressive thing because it's sort of matching what I'm doing with my hand in real life versus what's going on on-screen. Like, it feels like I'm rubbing up against this bumpy ball. Thankfully though, we also have third party game support, which was a big part of their strategy, especially going forward. Like, I know they were trying to make some of their own games, but if they were anything like those games, I don't wanna play 'em. But yeah, with the F-Gen Manager here, this is supposed to let you apply some of these forces or add them to games that don't have them.
So yeah, you can get the different buttons on the Falcon and remap them to like, keyboard keys or mouse controls. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get this to work at all, and I don't really know what's up with that. We just get this "entry point not found" thing, and I've tried some different versions of drivers, and none of them are supporting the ability to use this just kind of as a regular mouse with whatever game you want. And the games that do officially support this, like "Half-Life 2?" This version I have of "Half-Life 2" here, this is just the original retail release which doesn't support this.
They updated it later on, but yeah, you gotta go on Steam and Steam on Windows XP is no longer a thing. I don't even think it works on like Vista, or 7, or even 8. Steam just keeps removing support, which is proving to be really irritating for me testing things on LGR. So I'm going to attempt to get this working on a modern system with Steam, and see how that goes. [XP shutdown sound plays, Windows 11 startup plays after] And we're back with annoying Windows 11, and after a bit of distraction from the LGR Birds feed.
Yeah, had a bear come by and take down one of the bird feeder poles, so that's fun. Just a little guy though. It was easy to scare him off. Anyway, I am happy to say that this was so easy to set up. With the right driver, the mouse cursor is moving around and we are now able to use this as a mouse.
Thankfully, there are lots of archives of this thing, and I just used the 4.0.28 point blah blah blah. Whatever the latest Falcon driver was, and it worked straight away on Windows 11. So, very happy to see that. And we can still use the regular mouse if we want to, but we also have this, and I gotta say it doesn't feel too bad, and when it kinda gets to the edge of what it can do, it just sort of keeps on going and scrolling, treating this like a TrackPoint nub, really.
Or a really old trackpad where you get your finger to the edge of it and it just keeps going. And like I said earlier, you can set this up, have these buttons do different mouse buttons. So we've got left click middle mouse button, right mouse button, and then this thing called G-Cube. Like in Notepad here you can see the text then go that way, then go that way, go that way.
Yeah, it just enters different keyboard keys. You can set that to really anything you want. Auto-centering is also more or less working as it should I think, and it's remembering how to stay calibrated way better than it was on XP. So yeah, I think having this F-Gen Manager and some newer drivers is really helping things out.
So let's try some games starting with, of course, we gotta do "Half-Life 2" 'cause they added official support for that in 2009, I believe. And I mean none of this, we can't have that. We gotta go with the pistol grip, and it very much works the same. It's just now it's got left click here and right click, middle mouse over here, and that G-Cube toggle. And yeah, we also have in the options a section here labeled "Falcon."
So force master scale, recoil forces, got that turned all the way up, and a bunch of other different scale stiffness and sensitivity settings. Fairly early versions of this could work with a mod called Haptics Life 2, but I've never been able to find that. So anyway, just glad to get this new version going, and you can see it's pretty much what you'd expect, and immediately things like jumping around, you can see it reacting, and yeah, different movement forces and things, moving left and right. It swings around like that. And then of course, shooting. [gunshots popping off] Yeah, nice little bit of recoil and it changes with every weapon. So you move up to something like the .357
[higher caliber gunfire] There's a proper kickback. Again, as mentioned earlier, it can do up to two pounds of force, and it feels like it. Nothing like a real .357, but you know, like a lower .32 or whatever.
It's quite enjoyable, and with things like the crowbar, you get this like downward kind of motion like this. It's immediately so much better than those demos. Oh yeah. Going up against things, pressing up against it. Look at it, it's trying to rip the tape off down there. So much force, it's great! All right, head crab zombies.
Let's go. [much shooting commences] Let's see. Oh yeah. That feels so great. [chuckling] Eh, this aiming. Yeah, like going to the edge thing.
Definitely takes some getting used to, but it's certainly not unplayable, and like, the trade off or you know, the upside is that you get to enjoy this just magnificent amount of recoil. Now here's where it starts to get a little bit funky sometimes. Yeah, sometimes it doesn't know what to do with centering.
Like, that should be centered and now it's not anymore. You're just supposed to go back out and then in again, and then it usually gets the centered calibration back where it should be. It's a little weird. [firing at nothing because it's fun] I love that. Let's see, let's try some of these other things. Got the pulse rifle.
[pulse rifle pulsing] That's pretty nice. Crossbow. [crossbow thunks] Ooh, that's a good thunk. How do I right click? Let's see. Here we go.
[crossbow thunking] Oh yeah, even like putting the next bolt in there, I can feel ta-chunk. Like, it's just... this works so very well! Oh yeah, like even, yeah throwing a grenade was just like, whomp. It felt like I was actually throwing as opposed to holding a bowling ball earlier, which didn't feel like holding a bowling ball. It felt like I was caressing a bowling ball.
It was just so strange. Those were just unfortunately made. Whereas this, oh yeah, this feels like what it was made for. Even though it literally wasn't made for it, but they found the right use case.
First person shooters. Another one that is absolutely no surprise is awesome is "Portal." This is so appropriate 'cause this looks like something from Aperture Science. But yeah, this one has even more exaggerated effects for just moving around, which is quite fitting considering this is sort of a first person puzzle game with a lot of jumping and acrobatics. It's pretty awesome, and I love this here, like, when you pick something up, it has weight to it. Like, it's really, really believable.
Even just picking up these little coffee cup pieces, or a little clipboard or whatever. Yeah, like there is legitimate weight. It's so cool feeling the physics of this game. Oh, this is gonna be real heavy. Ohh! Oh yeah. [cube clunking] [laughs] That is nuts.
Oh wow. Oh, it's neat! This is neat! Yeah, of course we got the Portal Gun itself, right? Oh yeah, it follows the recoil trajectory of the gun. So, you know, it kinda moves over to the left. It's genuinely doing that a lot. Augh! That is like about the most recoil I've felt in anything so far. Wow okay, so as an example here, right? So lemme just use the regular mouse.
Nothing holding it back. Look at that. Yeah, like, okay we move up against it.
Oh, it's like getting punched with a two pound punch. Again, it's nothing extreme, but... It makes everything feel just wonderful even more so, at least for first person shooters, than something like the Sidewinder.
As much as I love those joysticks, it's that connection of the feel of this with what you're seeing in the game and that almost one-to-one or close to it feeling. You know, it's like that gun mouse that I covered, as silly as that was, that felt great just because it felt in your hand close to what you were seeing on screen, but that had no feedback at all. This having such a kickback is beautiful. Unfortunately though, that's where we start getting to the negatives because this only supports a handful of games for what it calls a F-Gen Gold. And this is a game that's been fully made to or fully patched to support every feature of this.
All the different force events, and in-game interactions, and all that kind of stuff. There's F-Gen Silver, which isn't nearly as much going on, and then F-Gen Bronze that has limited effects. Basically, you're just using profiles.
Like for instance, I've installed one here that they made for Crysis 2. And then you use these script files to create your own and just sort of program what you want the game to be doing. So different effects for firing, and recoil, and different amounts of haptics for holstering or start shooting, stop shooting, hitting an object, whatever, getting hit by bullets.
That kind of thing. So you're gonna have to program these yourself, or you could download either community made patches, or official patches. They're less so "patches" really, than they are just pre-made scripts that go into this F-Gen Manager.
Either way, it does add some support to games that were not specifically designed to use this. [pistol firing, enemy perishing] Yeah, not nearly as engaging as like, "Half-Life 2" or "Portal", which again, had full support built in. So these are just sort of generic feedback effects. You don't get like the movement of your hand and the mag going in there when you're reloading or anything.
But the effects that it has built in that it can make use of, again, you can put these effects in any game, effectively. Effects effectively. Yeah, it's not bad. The pistol feels like a pea shooter though. I don't know why it's so weak. Rifle's not too bad.
Definitely satisfying in full auto. Again though, the connect of what's happening in your hands versus on screen is so good. I mean, you know, just go with the same kind of stance as what you're seeing there. [laughs] I just think it's great. This is such a cool device for games like this, but yeah, the fact that you have to create your own profile for every single game that's not supported, which is like 99% of games, or just kinda deal with the generic Windows mouse emulation like this here. So yeah, it's just working as a regular mouse.
You have three mouse buttons, and that fourth one for doing whatever, and that's about it. So, not ideal for real time strategy of course. You don't even have a scroll wheel kinda control on here, so I'm having to use the regular mouse for that. But yeah, like if you wanted to, you could play it like this. Yeah, there's just a specific few games or types of games where this really makes sense to use with, especially with the pistol grip, but even with the ball grip. You know, first person shooters, that ended up making the most sense with this controller and it's obvious why I think.
Yeah, like racing games, you really wanna control it like this, or with this? Or even flight games. This is not a joystick. This would be kind of terrible for those, and again, those poor demos, or really the minigames.
The ball demo was fine cuz it was so simple, but all those minigames it came with, they really did not paint this in a good light at all. And I think that's really the fault of those minigames. Yeah, FPS games, that is an entirely different story once you get used to some of the quirks of the way things move off the edges like that.
It's just so great. Like, any of the weirdness of moving around is mostly negated by how good the recoil, and impact, and just environmental feel of games in first person. This thing is just great for that. That's about it for this episode of "Oddware" and the Novint Falcon.
A genuinely impressive and enjoyable device to use, and a real feat of cost reduction. Getting this thing down to the area that it was, but also an unfortunate dose of reality when it comes to marketing, getting the word out there, and getting enough support from third party developers. As enjoyable as all the first person shooters are with this, and it is fantastic, it really doesn't do anything for that kind of minute manipulation of objects that I think this thing is extremely good at as well. Like, feeling that bumpy surface of that one ball demo is so cool, and there's just nothing like that in any of the first person shooters I played. It feels like it really needs like, a first person adventure game, or puzzle kind of thing. Like, a "Myst", or "Obduction", or "The Witness", or "What Remains of Edith Finch", you know? One of those kind of things where you have just all kinds of things in the area to pick up, and look at, and inspect and explore, and add together.
I mean, like, imagine going around kind of a "Myst" situation where you're physically moving around puzzle pieces, or sliding bricks, or feeling around inside of some sort of thing to like grab something that you can feel but you can't see or, you know, levers. And just, there's so many things that you could do that I don't feel, or at least nothing that I've seen takes advantage of. You know, just like looking through a list of supported games either officially patched with scripts or fan made scripts... There's just not much in that way other than like "Penumbra."` There's some of those that had like, a "HaptX Edition" as they were called, and that was supposed to support this. But I don't know how in depth it went.
I tried my versions of "Penumbra." That didn't work, the Steam version didn't work, so, don't know. Either way, I'm glad that I got to try this thing out for a bit before I send it back, and it's just got me thinking like, what would've happened if this continued to evolve and get more support and had a version two or whatever. Especially with VR, the possibilities are crazy.
I've seen some videos where people get this working with some modern VR things, and that seems awesome too. Anyway, this is one of the more intriguing and genuinely enjoyable bits of oddware I've had in a while, so I hope you enjoyed taking a look at it with me! And hey, if you had one of these back in the day, perhaps you still do, let me know your own experiences. I'd be curious what you thought, or just lemme know what you thought about the video in general. I hope that you enjoyed. Regardless, there's always more stuff here on LGR in the works for the future. So stay tuned, and thank you for watching.
2024-07-06