The Stack

Not much progress to report today. I’m still trying to become sufficiently proficient with the flightstick to tackle the highest level I’ve reached without it. I still maintain that it will be a benefit to me once I’ve mastered it, but right now, it’s a learning curve. It strikes me that the game’s ideal player is one who’s already over this hurdle, just as, say, Animal Well is built on the assumption that you’ve already mastered basic platforming skills. It’s a game for people who have graduated from the likes of Wing Commander and are seeking something more involving, more complex.

I’ve been replaying from the beginning, on Easy, and in the process I’ve seen some Sinistars that I had previously passed over by destroying the gate. For what it’s worth, I don’t consider replaying from the beginning to be all that much of a setback; this is a game that’s positively designed to be replayed from the beginning. But being worse at the controls means that I kill fewer worker drones, which makes it less likely that I’ll destroy the gate before the Sinistar shows up. And some of them are real toughies, ones that I have no idea how to even begin to approach. There’s one that’s surrounded by a flickering green spherical force field, and sometimes it projects force fields at you, sending you hurtling away as speeds sufficient to destroy you if you collide with anything. Even in Easy mode, I don’t know how to survive that encounter long enough to do the kind of experimentation needed to figure out how to so much as scratch its paint.

I’d gladly read a walkthrough for some of these guys, but there doesn’t seem to be one online, even at old mainstays like GameFAQs that host hits going back to the dawn age. It just never had a sufficiently large fanbase to produce one. I guess that’s what happens when your target audience is the intersection of “nostalgic for 80s coin-op games” and “proficient with a flightstick”.

How long has it been? More than a week? It’s been a busy time, largely due to the latest Puzzle Boat, my first. Maybe I should post about that. But I’m not going to do that today, because I’ve just resumed playing Sinistar Unleashed.

The main bit of news here is that I went and did what I said I might, taking advantage of the holiday sales to get myself an actual flight stick — specifically, a Thrustmaster T. Flight HOTAS X. My understanding is that this is exactly the same as the Thrustmaster T. Flight HOTAS One, except that the One can be plugged into an Xbox and the X can be plugged into a Playstation. Since I have no intention of using it with anything other than a PC, I don’t much care about the difference. It’s a cheap-end-of-midrange device, and comes with a detachable throttle lever, which seems important for this game.

Having now experienced it in Sinistar Unleashed, I am absolutely sure that this is the intended experience. All those extra options like perpendicular movement and rolling left and right, which I had evicted from my gamepad to free up button space, are available trivially. At the same time, it’s going to take a while to get used to this, because it’s way more responsive to small movements than I’m used to, including involuntary small movements. I keep rolling without meaning to, just because I’ve never used a controller that actually cared about torsion on the stick before. I’m reminded of a bit in Wing Commander where you’re given an experimental prototype fighter to try out. In the debriefing, the player character says “It handled like a dream”, while I wanted to say “It turns way too fast. I had basically no control over what I was doing and kept overshooting my targets.”

The other big downside is that I pretty much have to use it while sitting at a desk. My home computer setup is like this: I live in a four-room apartment. Bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living room. The living room is the only reasonable place to put a computer, so my office space is a desk on one side of it. My PC is connected both to a pair of normal PC monitors on that desk, and to a projector positioned opposite a couch. It is from this couch that I watch movies and play those games that benefit from being projected onto a large screen.

(Some years back, Valve started selling devices with the sole purpose of enabling “couch gaming” while keeping your PC in a different room than your TV. This always bemused me: why would people be willing to pay money for this when they could just put their PC and TV in the same room? But then, I just bought a fancy joystick for the specific purpose of playing a 25-year-old game that cost me less than the joystick, so who am I to talk?)

Sinistar Unleashed is definitely in the category of “games that benefit from being projected onto a large screen”. You want to fill as much of your vision as possible with that starscape, helping the illusion that you’re physically there, gliding and swooping around. And as long as I was playing it from a wireless dual-stick controller, entirely designed around couch gaming, that is how I played it. But I can’t have that and the proper controls at the same time. I gladly choose the controls, but I know I’m losing something as a result.