Need for Speed (2015). While this game supports controllers, it’s not very well done. Upon testing my PS4 controller with it, all sorts of weird things were happening to me and it was a struggle to even go in a straight line. So I looked it up and it turns out I wasn’t the only one, other people had this issue too, and apparently, it was the result of double-input with the keyboard and the controller. Seen a lot of mentions of DS4Windows, so I downloaded it and tried it with this game and it worked like a charm! While I am glad I was able to find a workaround, it’s unfortunate I even need one just to play it, but hey, at least I have the program whenever I need it.
Call of Duty Black Ops. While this game supports controllers and you can turn gamepad on, something I didn’t like was, it had the R2 button as the firing button and R1 to throw grenades and such. I didn’t like this because I was used to the PS3 version, which was vice versa of that. Tried reversing the buttons and surprisingly it didn’t work. So I tried to get around it by mapping my controls to what my keyboard was and almost had it a setup I was satisfied with.
…Then I remembered Dead Ops Arcade existed, which has controls that differ from the rest of the game, and my configurations were awful for that game mode. So I eventually decided to just deal with the differing firing controls with the gamepad turned on since it was clear to me that doing it any other way would just introduce even more problems than that. All I really had to after that was map the ESC key and the arrow keys to my controller so I could pause and navigate the menus and I was finally done. I spent more time with this game than I care to admit and while I am not 100% satisfied, it’s at the very least acceptable.
Nerf Arena Blast. Had no issues configuring the controls for this game at first, but I had other problems come up later on for some reason. The game had worked well for me over the years, but somehow, it got to where it would crash upon booting every single time. I couldn’t figure it out for a bit, but eventually, I found I had to disable DEP for this game and once I did, it worked.
While I got that sorted, I don’t know if it’s been like this and I didn’t know it, but something I later noticed is the transparency was broken on some parts of the game. Fortunately, this game has a dedicated community patch that can address many of the game's issues, including this one. While it fixed the problem I had, it also made some undesirable changes to the game and I couldn’t figure out how to revert them without uninstalling the patch. So I decided to just play the game as is since the broken transparency wasn’t a huge deal anyway. I tend to admire mods and patches more after I have already played the original version of the game, so I’ll most likely reinstall it after I have played through the game.
NASCAR Racing 2003 Season. Oh boy. It started off with me configuring my controls for this game. I was able to configure some of them in-game, but things like the pause key and various others needed to be mapped outside of the game. So that’s where Steam Input came in and if I remember right, it worked at first, but then it eventually got to where it wouldn’t anymore for some reason. Not too sure why, but it seemed after I fiddled with DS4Windows some in this game, it never wanted to work right again. I had times when the game wouldn’t even recognize my controller and when it did, it only recognized the left analog stick and nothing else. Eventually, I decided to disable Steam Input for this game and use DS4Windows. A bit impractical to use a 3rd party app for this game, but it works well and I can do exactly what I want to do with it, so I have settled with that.
My problems didn’t stop there though. I wonder if Windows upped its security because like Nerf Arena Blast, it would crash when it didn’t do that previously and I had to disable DEP for it just for the game to work again, even though I should not have to. Something else I later noticed is the game wasn’t even using my GPU despite setting to that in graphics settings and was running slower than it should at 50-60fps. To put it bluntly, I spent a lot of time looking for answers, and eventually, I found some DLL files to make it run in DirectX 9 and it ran a lot better at roughly 75-90 fps, but it still seemed a bit slow for what my GPU was capable of. Yet another issue I had was my game would crash when exiting Single Race or Championship and I don’t even know if it did this before. Spent several days looking for answers and couldn’t find anything about my issue, I even created a Reddit account and posted about it since I felt I was out of luck. Then I found the answer to both of my problems and it was something completely left field that I NEVER expected…
When I connected my controller, either by USB or Bluetooth, somehow my game ran at 144 fps like it was supposed to while barely dropping any at all, and my game no longer crashed. Not just NR2003, but a few others as well. And I know this was it because I experimented multiple times to confirm it and believe it or not, it was true. Now how and why connecting a controller of all things would boost my FPS and stop it from crashing is beyond me, but I had someone tell me it might be related to my power settings. I ain’t even mad though because I intended to to play with a controller anyway, so this is totally acceptable.
Won’t lie, I think I spent more time getting this game sorted than just about all the other games combined and it was a journey in of itself to get there. However, I care a lot about this game, so it was worth it and now my installation is even better than it was before!
Other related stuff. Something I noticed along the way is the reason Nerf Arena Blast, NR2003, and Hot Wheels Crash! refused to work with Steam Input was because having them running as administrator and/or compatibility settings below Windows Vista. Not sure why, but the moment I disabled them, they worked like they should, apart from NR2003 where only the left analog stick did. Anything Vista and above however is fine.
My son is going to be peeved when he gets home - he and his buddies have a Balders Gate 3 weekend planned - and we have all the game saves. Oops.
I pressed the power button and it did nothing, so I tried plugging it up and nothing happened. I panicked for a bit thinking I had compromised my new laptop, but what really happened was the battery was just dead and I had forgotten I had drained it the day before. 
The reason my charger yielded nothing was because I had unplugged the surge protector it was connected to since we had a storm earlier and I totally forgot to plug it back in. 
Elitebooks are basically one of the better HP product lines and they feel very well made; my father has one (not the x360 but a more standard one with a 8th gen I7 and it's serving him well.
