Booster One – Headset with gyroscopes

I recently was contacted by the co-founder of a young Ukrainian company Sixth Sense Technology with an innovative new product for gamer.

Booster One is essentially a high-end headset with additional gyroscopic and accelerometer capabilities which give gamer a new layer of gameplay control. The headset can emulate mouse movement or keyboard presses by reacting to vertical and horizontal head movement, in other words by turning or jerking your head.

Although the product is designed for the normal able gamer’s the company is well aware of the benefits for the handicapped as they pitched me the advantages for a disabled gamer with only one hand. But as many disabilities limit the movement generally including the head, such as in my case, the first question I asked was of course about the sensitivity.

I few days later I received a reply. Apparently the gyroscope/accelerometer sensor is extremely sensitive and can react up to the smallest movement of 2-3 mm. Which is much smaller than I expected and would definitely suffice in my case.

To be thoroughly the headset is made of aluminium and includes a built-in noise canceling microphone.

Lately the eye tracking company Tobii also tried to give gamer new form of control with EyeX, but in my opinion eye tracking is still to complex and error-prone and the biggest problem is that it requires official support from the games itself.

Whereas gyroscopes and accelerometer of the Booster One are pretty straightforward and robust. In addition it doesn’t require any official support from the game developers. It is more like configuring a new game controller, but instead of mapping buttons to keys you map your heads movement.

The headset is currently in crowd funding phase on Kickstarter and will definitely back them. Maybe I could convince you too, if not maybe the following Gif’s will. I put the Kickstarter link below just in case. I guess you can tell that I am pretty hyped about it 🙂

CS:GO – Reloading & Changing weapon

DOTA – Scrolling

Links

Booster One Kickstarter

Official Booster One homepage

No Go: The Witcher 3

Lately I am not lucky at all to find a great game that is playable for me. Same goes for The Witcher 3, a newer RPG game with very nice graphics. But it’s general key requirements were killing me. 4 movement keys, jump, duck, use, key for steel sword and another one for silver sword, lock-on target, dodge, shift as attack-modifier, battle magic in addition to attack and Witcher sense. Freaking 15 keys. I was already frustrated at the second tutorial.

The Turing Test

The Turing Test is a puzzle-solving game which reminded me a lot of Valve’s Portal except the fact that it doesn’t use any actual portals, but they do have similarities in terms of level design, story and atmosphere.

You play as the female protagonist Ava Turing and wake up on board of a space station orbiting Jupiter’s moon Europa. It was an unexpected awakening triggered by an emergency distress call from the ground station. The space stations advanced AI send you down to Europa to investigate. Once you entered the Europa station you have to complete the Turing Test to prove that you are human. To do so you have to solve a lot of puzzles only humans can solve.

Puzzle mechanics

The only tool at your disposal is the energy manipulator which let’s you grab and shoot energy orbs from and to energy canisters. Another source of energy are the energy boxes which behaves a lot like a companion cube in Portal where you use it on pressure plate switches or as decoy only that they additionally provides energy in The Turing Test.

Basically you have to use the energy orbs and/or energy boxes to open doors to the next room. In addition there are different kinds of energy orbs. Blue ones are used to switch things on whereas green orbs turns things on and off constantly.

Common mechanics include the use of switches, pressure plates, magnets and light barriers.

In the end all comes down to logic gates such as AND, OR, XOR, etc.

Controls & Breaking Point

In terms of controls the game does not require a lot of keys. Actually only the basic movement keys (Forward, Backwards, Left/Right), the interaction key and occasionally the sprint key. I haven’t found a situation where jumping or crouching were necessary but I actually couldn’t complete the game. Although 7 keys in total are not anywhere near the maximum of keys I can  handle which should’ve make the game very playable for me.

Nonetheless I was confronted with a mechanic which was undoable for me. It was approximately 1 1/2 hour in the game where I entered a puzzle room with 2 platforms on spring coils which keep moving back up as soon as stopped the motion of dragging the mouse down as it takes me bit longer than normal people to lift the mouse. This is where I hit the breaking point. Fortunately I was just within the playtime of the Steam refund policy.

Other then that the game looked fantastic and maybe enjoyable when you are not limited in your motor skills

Thank You Steam/Valve for this possibility. It helped me a lot.

Availability

The game is available on Steam for € 19,99.

Steam Store: The Turing Test

 

Wolfenstein – The New Order

It has been a long time since I played a game of the Wolfenstein series. The last one was Return to Castle Wolfenstein from 2001 which I played a lot in a short time frame.

As I slowly discovered the last few years that I actually don’t like games in open worlds such as GTA, Fallout or Skyrim. Instead I enjoy linear games with one main story. Solving one objective at the time and completing 1 or maybe 2 side quests on the way.

Plot

You play the role of Captain BJ Blaskovics during the World War II like all Wolfenstein installments. The game spans over a decade as you sustain major head trauma after the first mission and recover years later. The Nazis and General Deathshead have won the war and are now dominating the world in this alternative timeline. As part of the last rebel group you try to end the Nazi regime once and for all.

Diversified Missions

Although the game is strictly linear the missions itself are still very diversified. There are in total 4 types of missions in Wolfenstein – The New Order. One of the most common one are the intensely action packed missions that flood you with hostiles where you must eliminate all threats with guns blazing. The second of the most common type are stealth missions where it is possible to complete the objectives without the enemy noticing by using knife or pistol with silencer. However whenever you get caught it you will get some action. Especially when someone who can trigger the alarm is still alive it will become a fully fledged action mission as the reinforcements arrive.

Every now and then you will come across very relaxing missions without enemies where you simply need to find objects and give it to a certain person. For me it was a welcome change to recuperate after some intense missions. It also allows you to explore the safehouse a bit and chitchat with other people.

The last type are boss fights or missions where you operate large machinery. These missions are fun and challenging as they differ completely from “standard” missions.

Basic controls

The number of total keys I found required for a pleasant gaming experience is 10. Namely for basic movement (Forward, Left/Right), interaction with objects, jumping, sprinting, crouching or stealth mode, changing weapon mode, melee attack and reloading. As it exceeds my limit of the keys I can handle on the keyboard I have to decide per mission between jumping, sprinting or changing weapon mode. Fortunately I always needed just one of those are for each mission.

I however did not include the mouse in the calculation. As my right hand can handle the mouse without any larger problems except the fact that I cannot click with mouse wheel.

I am very thankful that this is a shooter that allow me to select grenades with the mouse wheel like all other weapons. Many of the newer action game require a separate key to use grenades, including the successor in the Wolfenstein series.

Assistance needed

On multiple occasions the game required me to press forward, sprint and jump all together which I was unable to do by myself. I get that it sometimes is a good tool to generate additional suspense in action sequences. But this mechanic sometimes feels unnatural whenever used in parts with a slower pace and lesser action.

I was confronted with this mechanic in the first 5 minutes of the game. It was mandatory as the game would not continue without performing “sprint jumping”. So I was already thinking about returning the game, but since a friend recommended it, I tried other ways to proceed. In the end I asked my assistant to press the sprint key for me. Fortunately the mechanic wasn’t required very often, only 4-5 times.

Verdict

Wolfenstein – The New Order has an amazing story with a good diverse mix of missions. I can definitely recommend this game. Unfortunately in terms of how playable the game was for me I have to say that I cannot play it without someone else helping.

Availability

This game is available for Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and Windows.

Beware when buying the game in German-Speaking countries because of the heavy censoring, as the word Nazi or the Swastika symbol are forbidden in Germany.

I bought it on Steam for € 19,99

Steam Store: Wolfenstein – The New Order

Miaou Moon Review

As my motivation for the game No Man’s Sky was dwindling I needed to play something completely different before I can continue my NMS adventure.

The game Miaou Moon was kind of a spontaneous decision, I thought a cat on the moon – what can go wrong. Normally I am not so much into casual games but I really needed a change.

In this game you play as Captain Miaou who lost his space craft in an meteorite incident and is now stranded on the moon.

To move around in the low gravity environment the cat releases gas from him’s space suit to propel himself either to the left or to the right. Each boost costs energy and deflates the suit. Eating fish snacks which are scattered in each level will inflate the space suit back again and therefore increasing the energy level. Captain Miaou will die when his energy level sinks to zero that’s why it’s critical to ration the energy.

Space is already dangerous by itself but you’ll also need to look out for sharp obstacles and space fish as you’ll lose precious energy when you crash into them.

In addition to moving in space Captain Miaou can also attack. Each press of the attack key will put the cat in attack mode for 2 seconds. During this time Captain Miaou is invincible and will inflict damage to cloud obstacles and space fish.

I also found it very cute that space catnip was added as a dangerous psychedelic magnet, which pulls Captain Miaou towards it and makes it hard to get away from.

As the game only require s 5 keys to play it is very playable for me. It is one of those games that are easy to learn and hard to master. It is definitely a fun and colorful game which is also child friendly. I especially recommend this game for people with cats.

Available for PC via Steam and cost 8.99 €

Links

Steam Store: Miaou Moon

Dishonored Review

I recently enjoyed the stealth action-adventure game Dishonored which is another Bethesda title. As the game is from 2012 and Dishonored 2 will be released in November this year, this review is long overdue.

Although the game has a considerable amount of keys bindings, it depends on your play style how many you’ll actually need. As soon as I heard stealth it was clear for me that I would play it like a ninja. Avoid detection and only kill as last resort.

The great thing about this game is that it always gives you non-lethal ways to complete mission objectives, so it is possible to complete Dishonored without killing. In addition you can unlock mini-achievements each mission for being undetected and non-lethal.

Although there are various powers you could use I only needed 2 as my personal goals were being undetected by hostiles and not killing anyone. Which also limited my choice of weapons to sleeping darts.

Playing as an undetectable ninja also allow me to ignore the keys for healing since I would not lose any health at all and sprinting as I cannot make any noise when moving around.

At my own pace

This specific play style lets me choose the pace myself. Taking as much time as I need to think before making decisions. Basically I would sneak around in the dark or hide behind corners and walls while observing movement of the hostiles and gaze with the power Dark Vision which lets you see behind walls. Whenever I find a good time window I would get behind the enemy, choke them to unconsciousness and put their bodies in hiding. To get in a good position I would use the power Blink for teleportation in addition to climbing and jumping. This way I would clear house by house, section by section until I completed the mission and gathered all collectibles.

I found out early that it’s possible to play without jumping as you can replace it with Blink. Which came in handy whenever my right feet, which I use for jumping, became too tired.

Playability depends on play style

As Dishonored is a game which can be played in various ways I can only say that with the play style I chose it was very playable for me. Whereas playing with guns blazing, using various powers or just by being non-stealth and lethal would considerably increase the pace and number of keys required, therefore making the game unplayable for me.

Conclusion

The game has a good story and great game mechanics. Of course the best thing are the different ways the game can be played and has therefore a big re-play value. I must say it was one of the most fun games I played recently. Let’s hope Dishonored 2 can keep up.

Links

https://dishonored.bethesda.net/

Steam Store: Dishonored

Project Highrise Review

Although I mainly play shooters every once in a while I enjoy slower paced games as well.

As I was a big fan of the construction and management simulation SimTower from Maxis in the mid-90s, I was intrigued by the game Project Highrise which strongly reminded me of it. That was the reason why I put it on my Steam Wishlist as soon I heard about it. Since it was all prior it’s release I had to wait 1 month until I could finally play it.

Due to the nature of construction sims I was sure that it would be playable for me. It turned out to be as expected. The game only requires a mouse since all functionality is accessible by it. Of course there are keys you could use but they are more or less optional for good gaming experience. As the the game can be paused at anytime, to queue up construction or management orders, I can play it at my own pace.

In the the game you start with a 2 story building including stairs, a construction office and an small electricity transformers. The basic goal is building higher and higher while making profit and having happy tenants. You begin by allocating space for offices, apartments, restaurants and later on retail from which you collect rent.

For each type you can unlock increasingly advanced tiers which affects the number of horizontal building blocks needed. All of them require at least electricity while some, especially in higher tiers may also need water, telephone, gas and cable tv.

Offices and apartments however also demand specific services for which you also need to allocate space. For offices that may be courier services, copy services, commercial printing, janitorial services, etc. while apartments require handyman services, plumber, laundromat, etc. service companies affects the daily expenses the most.

Your daily income is solely dependent from the rent you collect. It is also the main source of income, however you can receive onetime bonuses by completing contracts. In addition you can get loans for a quick cash boost but it’ll add up to your daily expenses + interest.

Speaking of expenses in addition to cost of constructing things you’ll also need to keep an eye on the daily expenses. The things that impact the expenses most are on the one hand infrastructure spending’s such as trash & recycling rooms, maintenance in general and storage rooms for retail companies. On the other hand the utility costs for electricity, water, telephone, gas and cable tv.

The game mechanics are pretty straightforward. You select everything with the left mouse button. You also use it to build structures and to give orders to your staff. The right button is exclusively used for switching from construction mode back to normal mode. The play, pause and fast-forward buttons are easily reachable.

You can either build upwards or downwards. Unfortunately for me I only found out mid game that some structures can only be built below ground. For example utility structures such as electricity transformers, water meters, phone switchboard, etc. While apartments, offices, restaurants and retail require to be above ground. Preferably higher floors for more advanced tiers.

If you have a hint of OCD, like most people I know have, you might feel a slight tingling in your brain when you first encounter structures with an uneven amount of blocks as they result in gaps in your building. I found my peace by adding interior decoration such as plants, chairs or lamps to those empty spaces.

The only drawback that I noticed is that the font size of the UI is too small and no I am not using a 4k display. I specifically chose a gaming laptop with FullHD resolution to avoid problems with font-size. But it didn’t really matter after I was familiar with the game and knew where everything was.

The game felt like a mixture of the old SimTower and the very indie game Prison Architect. I would say Project Highrise is a worthy successor to SimTower. The game is definitely fun and addictive if you are into construction simulators.

Links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower

https://www.introversion.co.uk/prisonarchitect/

http://www.kasedogames.com/projecthighrise

Steam Store: Prison Architect

Steam Store: Project Highrise

One more key

Being limited on the amount of keys I can press, every additional one is game-changing, especially when it can be pressed simultaneously. To understand the importance you must know that I can only press one key at once on the keyboard. So you may see that games which require moving and jumping at the same time are problematic for me.

I almost gave up playing Doom as moving and jumping simultaneously is a necessity. But necessity begets ingenuity. Since I already owned the Blue2 bluetooth switch from Ablenet which has 2 programmable buttons I started experimenting with it. In the end I found a way to use one button with my right foot. Intuitively I programmed the Space key to it which enabled me to jump with my feet.

So now I am able to press one key on the keyboard, use the mouse and press one key with my feet all at the same time, 3 in total.

On a side note the bluetooth switch is originally used to control a smart phone with only two buttons. As this is a rather specific piece of equipment it is quite expensive.

Links

https://www.ablenetinc.com/blue2-bluetooth-switch

Deux Ex: Mankind Divided + Tobii EyeX

Since I read the news that the game Deus Ex: Mankind Divided would support the Tobii EyeX eye tracker I was really excited about it. A game about body augmentations combined with eye tracking technology should have a lot of potential. I really thought that this would immensely improve the gaming experience for us disabled gamers. Instead I was utterly disappointed when it turned out to be just a gimmick for a normal gamer.

Sure, the Extended View, which allows you to pan the camera with your eyes is great but it does not have a real impact on the gameplay. On the opposite the eye-gaze features such as moving from cover to cover are definitely useful.

My main complaint though is that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided require a vast amount of keys and the usage of eye tracking doesn’t change that a bit.

Following eye tracking features would’ve helped greatly:

• Eye tracking in dialogue decisions
• Eye tracking for looting enemy pockets
• Activating augmentations with eye tracking

As the game exceeds the amount of the keys I can press considerably I could not test the game any further (Total playtime approx. 1 hour).

No Man’s Sky review

Since the hype of the game No Man Sky began I was not interested at all, as flight simulators in space were not the kind of games I like although I really enjoyed Freelancer back in 2003.

But then the hype got to me a week after the release when No Man Sky actually turned out to be a survival game where you need to manage your inventory, mine resources needed to survive and upgrade the spaceship to travel in the enormous procedural generated universe. After watching a series of Let’s Play videos on Youtube I became increasingly intrigued until I decided to give it shot despite the hefty price tag of 60 bucks.

I hesitated a bit before I bought it as I knew from gameplay videos that it may take a while before taking off to the skies. So to test if the flight controls work for me may exceed the steam refund time limit of 2 hours. But I took the risk anyway.

In this review I will cover my experiences with No Man’s Sky, the obstacles I faced and the workarounds I found to overcome them. Basically I will rate how playable the game was for me specific to my disability.

Fixated controls

In the first hour or actually in the first 10 minutes I was already confronted with serious problems in the control configuration which actually made the game unplayable for me without the help of others. I will get back to that a bit later.

I already knew before I played it that No Man’s Sky would require a lot of keys. But as you can get away with omitting some keys in most games it is also true in this one. However the amount of required keys is not the problem. Instead it’s that some of the most vital and often used keys are hardcoded – the game simply doesn’t allow them to be remapped. This is especially frustrating as Tab, the button for the crucial inventory is one of those. The other keys that fall in this category also revolves around the inventory, namely Mouse wheel click for discarding items and X for teleporting items from exosuit to spaceship, or vice versa. Unfortunately the keys Tab, X and Mouse wheel click were unreachable for me.

I tried to use AutoHotkey as a workaround to remap the fixed keys to custom ones but the bindings were somehow not adopted in-game. However I was fortunate enough to have a programmable bluetooth switch. This piece of hardware consist of 2 large buttons that can be programmed to my liking on hardware level (I will explain it in a detailed hardware review soon). As I use the switch by pressing my 2 feet together I can only activate one of the buttons. In the end I mapped it to the inventory so I’d be able to use items to keep my in-game character alive by myself. Yet I was still dependent from others whenever I needed to discard or transfer items.

Another Console to PC Port

On a few occasions No Man’s Sky felt like a PC port of an console game.

It first catched my eye when I tried to change my multitool to weapon mode. To do that the key T had to be pressed and I asked myself why can’t I use the mouse wheel to cycle through the different modes. The mouse wheel does not have a purpose in this game in addition it’s not possible to bind any actions to mouse wheel up or down. For me personally the less keys a games requires the better, as my hand is already on the mouse using the mouse wheel would make sense. But I think for normal PC gamers it would also be more intuitive to use the mouse wheel for weapon (or in NMS weapon mod) selection. I guess the game controls were designed with controllers in mind and were then directly reapplied to a keyboard/mouse configuration. Be that as it may the concept of choosing the weapon with the mouse wheel is very common in first person games and it is also easy to implement. Therefore the game designers should’ve taken it into consideration.

Another thing that may originate from the console world is that the button for quitting the game is hidden in the options screen. This may not be a problem for consoles as it is common to simply shut it down after saving the game anyway. However it is not the case for PCs which you use for a variety of tasks. I know almost no game where the exit button wasn’t in plain sight right after hitting Escape. So found it very annoying to go to option screen every time I wanted to exit the game.

Required to Reload

In all the recent games it is common that the weapon would automatically reload after emptying a clip. This is not the case in No Man’s Sky which requires manual reloading.

For me since I am limited on how many keys I can reach. I sometimes omit the reload key in favor of more important controls. I would force a reload simply by emptying the clip. Generally I have difficulties to reload while engaging enemies. So this time I wouldn’t get away with leaving out the reload key.

Conclusion

The game itself runs smoothly and looks beautiful. It was exactly what I expected: A survival/exploration game in space. No Man’s Sky is definitely fun to play and also quite relaxing. But since the game has serious issues with key customization in form of hardcoded buttons and not utilizing the mouse wheel at all, I cannot play it without the help of others.