Novint Falcon Limited Edition

We are the mods

Of course, as with any geek gadget such as the Falcon, itsappeal doesn’t just lie in the games created for it. The long-term appeal also relies on support from the homebrew community and modding communities.

Although professionally made by the HaptX team, the Half-Life 2 and Quake 4 mods created for the Falcon show that it is actually quite possible for existing games to be semi-easily ported to the new interface provided you know what you’re doing.

The Half-Life 2 mod, which bears the name of HaptX-Life 2, is especially well suited to the device – remember it was Half-Life 2's gravity gun which saw physics become the flavour of the month for gamers.

The mod itself is fairly simple to use – just leave Steam running in the background as you boot up Novints proprietary software platform, NVent, and download the new driver files. One install later and HaptX-Life 2 can be played as a mod.

At first, I found the Half-Life 2 mod a lot more difficult to control than Penumbra and the reason for this was fairly simple. Penumbra isn’t an action game by any means – it’s a puzzler which lets players occasionally do some dirty and clumsy melee fighting. Half-Life 2, on the other hand, is a shooter through and through with a large arsenal of weapons and the need for quick, precise movements and sidesteps.


In a fully physical simulation this translates into tremendous amounts of force feedback. A few 9mm shots give tiny kicks of recoil which are rarely a problem, but the .357 and shotgun are a lot more difficult to wield and really will hammer your hand about. It’s difficult to master at first and makes the game uniquely unplayable for a few minutes, but thankfully there are pages of options to fiddle with. Players can alter the sensitivity of each access and tailor the recoil and feedback of every game action – perfect for finding your own balance between realism and fun.

In fact, once the settings have been tweaked, mastering the gameplay becomes a matter of fighting your own instinct. I watched a number of people try the Half-Life 2 mod when I was taking a much needed break to prevent crippling wrist pains and over and over I saw people crash cars or back into walls. Everyone was blaming the Falcon, calling it every name under the sun, until I pointed out that they were unconsciously trying to navigate with both the keyboard and the Falcon.

It’s simply so ingrained into gamers nowadays that to turn or steer one way or another we have to use the WASD keys that, even when the Falcon was being used, players would press a button without realising it. Using the A or D keys as well as pushing the Falcon in the intended direction lead to massive oversteer and more than one Game Over scene.

For some gamers this new approach to gameplay interaction in HaptX-Life 2 is a positive boon as it makes the game more interesting and appealing – encouraging replays and simultaneously showcasing the possibilities for the device on a larger scale. After all, if it works in one Source Engine game...


However, at the same time this may be exactly what puts some gamers off the device – and there is more than one gamer in the office who thinks the Falcon is nothing more than a gimmicky knick-knack bound for the bric-a-bric. After all, these games are being ported to a new device and that, while admirable, is never going to be as exciting as giving players a handful of good quality new games.

It’s probably worth mentioning here that the Novint Falcon does come with some of its own games, but to be honest they are so low in quality that they may as well not be there. Control wise some of them are very good and make excellent use of the Falcon – I’m thinking mainly here of the Super Monkey Ball-alike called Roly-Poly.

What lets these new games down though is the presentation of them – it’s all overly bright colours, monkeys and bland, poorly animated overlays. They feel like kids games at best and not very well made ones at worst. While it’s possible this was intended to be part of the charm and that Novint was aiming for a kind of kitsch Mario appeal to the games, it’s something which has fallen flat even if it were true.

Modifications and remakes are all well and good, as is the integration of the Falcon into the HaptX version of Penumbra, but when the only new games on offer are Newton’s Monkey Business and poorly built Table Tennis games, one does have to think hard about what the future of the Falcon may be – the modding and homebrew communities will only take you so far.