Novint Falcon Limited Edition

Getting a grip

The Novint Falcon is a cool little device, as you no doubt agree, and it makes games like Penumbra all the more involving, exciting and just generally awesome – but there are some obvious concerns which customers might have which need to be addressed first.

The first worry that many people might have is that the Novint Falcon is doomed to the same circular dead-cycle as the PhysX Card. Very few developers want to program for it because of the limited number of people with one – but then very few people want to buy one because there aren’t any games for it. It’s a vicious cycle.

The question is though: can the Novint Falcon possibly escape from this death-spiral?

Well, maybe. The company certainly seems to be going the right away about it at the moment – aiming the hardware at a more high-end market of tinkerers and gadgeteers rather than plastering the packaging with unfulfilled promises of how it stands to revolutionise gaming.

The selection of games available also shows a somewhat canny understanding of the market – using indie games which have incredible word of mouth and compatible gameplay to showcase the technology, but complementing that with cheap (and nasty) mini-games and modifications to larger games. It’s an effective way to tell these gadgeteers that the technology can be effectively ported to a variety of games.


That said it is kind of hard to see the Novint Falcon selling well in the future despite its cleverness. The why of that is a bit hard to put into words, which is an admittedly lazy and lame thing for a writer to say, but I’ll try my best.

From a gameplay perspective, the Novint Falcon is a nifty little gizmo which serves as both a unique conversation piece (or would if all of us geeks were anything but anti-social) and a gameplay enhancer. It takes force feedback to its natural evolution and is pretty much a revolution in terms of gameplay.

Physics is something of a buzzword in games at the moment, but the Falcon uses HaptX to show companies like Havoc, Karma and Ageia how physics as a concept should be pushed forwards. We don’t need new hardware which, at best, gives us more stuff blowing up on screen – we need new outputs and inputs entirely to convey the very sensation of the physical in a new way.

However, that doesn’t mean it will successfully replace the mouse, or even the joypad, as a staple of PC gaming. I’d compared it to the DVORAK keyboard – a keyboard which uses a better key layout and allows typists to reach much faster writing speeds, but that has never caught on purely because the QWERTY keyboard is an accepted standard.

Everyone forgets that the QWERTY keyboard was originally designed for typewriters and was created with the deliberate aim of slowing typists down to avoid jamming the hammers on a typewriter. Man, don’t even get me started on keyboards.


I think that that little tale is essentially true for the Novint Falcon too. The Falcon is a fantastic game controller, although I still think a few kinks need to be ironed out. With the circular grip we used the Falcon quickly became painful to use unless you had a lot of desk space to spread out on, for example. Several of us ended up almost up-ending the Falcon completely with some over-enthusiastic swings, for example.

However, just because it is good, it doesn’t mean that it’ll sell or that it’s good for the market. I’ve been round the block enough to know that selling something like the Falcon, even to seasoned gamers, will be an uphill struggle.

This is the major fault of the Novint when you get right down to it – it’s an awesome gadget, but it’s a pretty sure thing that it’ll never really sell well enough to take off. Is it the coolest peripheral we’ve ever had our hands on? Undoubtedly and, although the comparison has probably been used before and is a bit unfair to start with, the Novint puts the Wiimote to shame in many regards.

Unfortunately though, we can probably only recommend it to readers on the “Oh my god, that’s so cool” factor at the moment. The reality is that there just aren’t enough games out there which are new to the Falcon and, although the Quake 4, Penumbra and Half-Life 2 mods are fantastically cool, without the promise of support from future developers, they just don’t amount to $239 worth of cool.

• Build Quality
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Ease of Use
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 6/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 5/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

What do these scores mean?