Game Joystick or ?

[JohnIrish]

Hi..

I am an OLD guy... I grew up playing Donkey Kong and MS Packman.

I now have a fast computer and can play some games (E6420 with 8800GTS 320MB). I am looking into shooter games and Flight Simulator. I have not decided on the best single shooter game ( I dont even know how to do a group shooter game over the internet). I wonder if I will even be "Wowed" by the new games or not.

What hardware is everyone using? I dont want to use my keyboard to move and shoot.. that seems kinda silly. There must be something much better? A different mouse or joystick or ?

Ideas?

 

[KermitM42]

you could grab a gamepad or console controller (ie an xbox 360 wired controller) if you really dont want to use your mouse and keyboard.
as far as fps's go, for multiplayer something like battlefield 2 or 2142 would be good. for singleplayer with good graphics try fear or prey or half-life 2.

 

[mercanucaribe]

You can't really use a gamepad for first person shooters. It just doesn't work. Neither does a joystick. You don't just use the keyboard to move and shoot, but the mouse also. Think of hard it would be to use Windows with a joystick instead of a mouse-- aiming is even harder. For a flight sim, maybe check out Logitech's joysticks. They are cheap and seem nice.

 

[0roo0roo]

logitech works.
yea joysticks is about degrees of acceleration in direction and changes in angle in a fully free 360 degree enviroment, very good thing joysticks do.
it doesn't apply to fps where perfect precision is required in aiming and its mostly about rotation in one axis with very limited up/down view change. wasd with 3 middle fingers for movement foward back, and a/d for left right straff + mouse are unbeatable. consoles only use joypads because they have nothing else and have the difficulty and aim dumbed down in their games to compensate for the clumsy interface. that being said fighting games and mario style games work best with joypads.

as said battlefield shoudl be nice for multiplayer.
counterstrike source is good, but it has a high learning curve. there are death match servers now so you don't have to wait for your team to win if you die to play again. good for getting the hang of it.
ut2004 is still good, but the new version is coming out soon and will really be awesome on your system.
team fortress 2 is also coming out soon.
search the software forum for the thread that has the trailer, very pixarish look.