Recently I resigned from my job, hence now I am left with a sizeable amount of free time. One of the crazy ideas I’ve had was to re-play my old games back from the late 90s and early 2000’s. My current setup lacks a joystick, which although is NOT REQUIRED, but it is highly recommended to have one to play those. I mean, it would be really, really difficult to play flight sims with your mouse and keyboard, or space-combat shooters with your mouse and keyboard.

Plus, back during those days, games of those genres expect  you to have a joystick, so the mouse/keyboard combo support is pathetic.

So, I went off to Sim Lim Square (aka SLS) and went hunting for one. I thought I would be in and out in 10 mins. Little was I to know how wrong I’d be!

I arrived, went to a “champalang” shop (local slang for a shop selling accessories and peripherals for PCs and other electronic gadgets, but does not sell actual PCs nor gadgets). I looked, but couldn’t find any joysticks. I did see some Xbox controllers though. Ok so I left that one, and went to another, and another and so on. None of them had any joysticks! I came away totally perplexed, because gaming companies like Logitech, Thrustmaster, CH Products, Saitek etc still make them, and the Flight Sim community is still alive and well (on the Internet at least).

Feeling abit disappointed, I headed for my usual gaming shop, just to see what new games are available. I haven’t been there in a while, because I stopped buying retail games. I hated all the DRM protection that comes with disk-based installs, and now I prefer buying them online via Steam, Origin, Gamestop, Amazon etc. Download copies don’t have DRM and I can just play them without needing a “crack” to stop them checking for my disk before they would launch.

Lo and behold! In that game shop, I saw a whole bunch of joysticks on the shelves! From full HOTAS setups to mid-range all-in-one to simple joysticks! Nowadays I seldom play flight sims, so I decided a full HOTAS setup would be overkill. I’d just get a mid-range all-in-one kind with throttle and twist handle to simulate rudders plus throttle.

I came away with a Thrustmaster T.Flight Stick X, from Thrustmaster of course.

It costs a little bit more than I was prepared for, but still it was so hard to locate a joystick now that I practically didn’t have a choice. Not that I would have gotten anything else because Thrustmaster makes one of the better gaming products anyway, but it would be nice if I actually had a choice and then decided to get the Thrustmaster on my own, rather than to be limited by only having one shop in the whole building selling joysticks and I had to choose from that shop’s inventory.

In any event, the joystick is plug and play – stick it in via USB, Windows auto-detects and loads in the correct driver (by Microsoft, not Thrustmaster), and it’s auto-calibrated with ZERO drift and a no deadzone! This is somewhat of a surprise as I remembered my older joysticks all had to be calibrated once in a while to compensate for drift (some joystick even have trim controls on them) and specify a deadzone so spikes in drifts didn’t jerk the game during play. Maybe joysticks now are fully digital and no longer analog like in the old days… Hmmm…

I fired up Freespace 2, an old space-shooter which I had fond memories of, and went for a spin with the new joystick. I was impressed with the stick, but not with my performance. In the 12 or so years since I stopped playing these kind of games, I now totally SUCK at dogfights. If I were to go online to play flight sim dogfights, I would be blown out of the skies in no time flat. Running LOMAC, or Lock On: Modern Air Combat, confirmed it. I overpulled most of the time, and even if I could get in behind the enemy, I just can’t seem to lay my gunsights on the enemy for a gun kill.

Ah well I guess I will have to practice playing with a joystick again.

 

Related articles

• Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog Review (gadgetreview.com)
• Joystick (wiki.archlinux.org)
• X-Gaming USB Joystick (techfresh.net)