The Exigent Duality
Not What I'd Hoped - 09:26 CST, 7/28/21 (Sniper)
I fired up Flight Simulator on the Series X yesterday and was pretty disappointed: the game runs great, but where I'd assumed they'd have completely re-designed the user interface to be controller-centric, instead I found that the UI is essentially untouched, and that they're expecting the player to move a semi-sticky mouse cursor around the screen with the left analog stick. Just getting through my pre-flight checklist, communicating with the tower, and getting the plane in the air took twice the time it does on PC. The Series port does fully support a mouse and keyboard, but if I'm going to drape peripheral cables onto my bed and fumble for some kind of mouse-friendly "comfy couch" surface, why not just run the PC version, which is hooked up to the same television?

On top of the frustrating controls, I'm also constantly taking and editing screenshots in the PC version, plus hacking the ".pln" files to put in custom GPS waypoints-- stuff with is either cumbersome or impossible on a closed console. Interestingly, the menus were totally broken when I first ran the game. After a bit of fiddling, I found that this was because the game imported my PC controller settings, something about which broke the menus. So if you're like me and played the PC version to death first, make sure to create a fresh controller profile from the defaults. Of course, don't overwrite your PC controller profile by accident!

I'm sure console-only players will have a lot of fun with the port, and it's nice that I have Flight Simulator installed on another device in my home in case anyone wants to come over and play co-op. But it sort of reminds me of playing "Warcraft II" on the Sega Saturn: it's possible, but if you have a DOS PC, better to just play it there.

On another game-related note, it's funny how things come full circle: I was a regular reader and occasional poster on NeoGAF, a long long time ago-- a forum which I came to call "NeoGAG", because it had been taken over by radical Leftists, SJWs, and pedophillic admins-- until the site imploded, at which point I jumped to "ResetEra". That forum wound up being the largest SJW nest I'd ever encountered, as they wound up banning over forty percent of the registered accounts for "wrong speak", almost always for politely disagreeing with someone over Woke religious precepts-- blasphemy! In my case, I posted a link to an innocuous YouTube video and was banned as a "white supremacist", even though the video had literally nothing to do with that concept.

Fast forward to 2021, and NeoGAF has not only banned all political discussion on the site, but the conversations half the time aren't that much different than what I read on 4chan or Gab! Bizarre.