Ask Paul: July 5 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here's a surprisingly detailed Ask Paul for a holiday long weekend that I hope is well worth your time.
PC gaming
anderb asks:

Doom 2016. Keyboard/mouse or joystick?

I use an Xbox Wireless Controller (though it's wired, via USB) and pretty exclusively. That said, as part of my video game testing on Snapdragon X-based PCs, I've played for stretches using the somehow still-familiar keyboard/mouse setup, I guess it's like riding a bike.

But I do prefer the controller: I fully switched from PC gaming to Xbox in 2005 when the Xbox 365 arrived, and I never really looked back until a year ago March, when I played my last real game of Call of Duty on the Xbox Series S. Three months turned into six months turned into one year and more, and today, I don't really play games on the console anymore, though I'm not opposed to it. I've been playing games on the PC instead, usually sporadically, and a lot less frequently than I did on Xbox over the previous—dear God—18 years. But where I got over my game habit/addiction, I never really dropped my preference for the controller.

I still think console gaming makes more sense in general because of the seamless experience. But PCs obviously have many unique advantages. And while most would point to the possibility of the best-possible graphics and performance, to me, I have other preferences. And with the advances we're seeing in modern integrated graphics, it's becoming more and more possible to play games with acceptable quality on mainstream laptops. And I love that.

Over the past year, I probably spent the most time playing the OG Half-Life port Black Mesa via Steam, but I also dabbled in a lot of other older games, including various versions of Doom and Quake, and a few months of Halo Infinite, which I found a bit tedious. This year, I picked up Doom Eternal because it's in Game Pass—and I don’t have any Activision Blizzard games to play yet, for some reason—and I got past the section I had gotten stuck at years earlier.

With the Copilot+ PCs, I went back to Doom (2016) because I didn't want to pay for Doom Eternal on Steam, as I get it for "free" on Game Pass. And with that game, I had gotten much further into it originally, but I just went past that section of that game too. So I hope to finish both and look at whatever DLC is available. I wasn't so enthralled with Doom (2016) when it first came out—the movement felt like ice skating to me—but I've warmed to it. (I still hate the inability to save games arbitrarily: Some of the checkpoints are brutally far apart, and having to continually replay certain sections repeatedly still gets old.)

Anyway, I have large collections of PC games in at least a few places—Xbox, Steam, Epic Game Store—and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which provides me with access to many PC games (just not on Copilot+ PCs, at least so far). I feel like I'll be playing PC games for a while, still more sporadically than before, and mostly older titles. I...