Happy New Year!

Back in the 90s and early 2000s I was a full time PC gamer, I cut my teeth on Doom, Quake, Unreal and the myriad of 1st and 3rd person games using mouse and keyboard and felt like I was competitive, or at least could hold my own against random gamers in the game lobbies of the day.

In 2005 with the release of the 360 and eventually PS3, the downfall of the PC industry (mid 2000s were in my opinion the dark days of PC gaming) I switched to consoles for simplicity. I had kids at the time and didn’t have as much spare time to tweak my PC, upgrade and Steam was still not the convenient behemoth of software that it is now. It just made sense to switch to consoles.

Now I recall playing Call of Duty 2 on the 360 and thinking, “using a controller sucks, it’s so bloody difficult to feel accurate, I wish I could use m&k or buy some addon to use M&k, I’ll never get good at using a controller”. It took time, but I did eventually get decent at using a controller. Eventually I did end up love using a controller, it was common for all machines (no different key layouts, no different weights per-controller if compared to mice). It was nice to be able to game at home then go to family’s house and play on a different console and not be bothered about the control mechanism because in the end all controllers are basically the same. This last year I got back into PC gaming, I got a good used gaming PC off my local Kijiji, loaded steam and realized that it was time to go back to PC gaming. It was easy to use the 360 wireless controller dongle to use controllers and thus I figured I could just replace my console gaming with PC gaming, save money and enjoy games at a better graphical fidelity. Until last night when I decided it was time to go buy a nice gaming mouse and keyboard.

What the hell happened to me? I feel like a club footed, one-eyed gimp monkey playing shooters (in my certain case, The Division). I can’t remember all the keys to play the game properly. Using a keyboard doesn’t feel intuitive for movement, opening inventory, mantling barricades, sticking for cover, etc. I died 5 times in the span of 15 minutes because the mouse felt TOO fast, movement too twitchy.

I never thought going back to M&K after 10+ years away from it would be so damn difficult. I love my new mouse and keyboard but I won’t lie, I was seriously questioning my decision on buying the new components.

Anyone else find the same? Anyone else decide to skip M&K and stick with a controller?

I played a few competitive matches with a controller in Gears 4 PC but I could tell that to get to the ‘next level’ online, at least in Gears4, I would need to use something that allowed for faster aiming but damn, I suspect I would suck so bad using M&K people on my team would question if I was drunk.

TLDR: Going back to M&K from a controller is a lot harder than I thought.

This is the mouse that I bought:

Logitech G502 Proteus Spectrum

And here is the Keyboard:

Logitech G610 Orion Brown Backlit Mechanical