[spherical jazz music]
[computer buzzes, beeps] - Greetings and welcome to LGR Oddware, where we take a look at
hardware and software that is odd, forgotten, and obsolete and sometimes spherical. This is the Titans Sphere
that we're looking at today by SGRL from the late '90s. And it's one of the many
different 3D gaming peripherals that came out back then to try and make controlling
3D games... better? Or at least... I don't know, spherical. [chuckles] Let's just take a look at this thing! All right.
This is the SGRL, "SUHGIRL?" We're gonna say "SGRL." Titans Sphere! Introduced in late 1998 or kind of early 1999 more likely, for $129.99 in the US. And yeah, that is "titans"
plural right there. There's no apostrophe. It's not "The Titan's Sphere."
It's "Titans Sphere." I mean, Atlas was a
titan in Greek mythology, famous for holding a sphere. I assume maybe that's where the name was
supposed to come from, but why is there no apostrophe? I don't know. A lot of things
about this are confusing. In fact, let's just
get to this right here. I mean, this thing is
practically made for Oddware. Like, the top quote on here. "This may be the oddest
game controller ever, and the biggest and the coolest." Apparently it's a new industry
standard, not a joystick, not a gamepad or steering wheel. "It is Titans Sphere." Okay. Whatever that means. It's not really a sphere exactly. It's kind of spheroid, but it's like a sphere
with the sides chopped off and there's joysticks on there, but it's not a joystick. In fact, "it's time to
throw away your joystick." Just throw it away! You
don't need it anymore. This is so much better. That's right. This thing is definitely not based. It is baseless. Ergonomic hand controls. Natural hand movements. Comfortable. This is, like, it's so vague. It doesn't really tell you
what the advantages are, except that somehow it's
supposed to be better. Well, it uses existing game
or operating system drivers, so I guess that's good.
But it's just such a... a solution in search of
a problem type of deal, and there were a lot of these things. If you remember, the
SpaceTec SpaceOrb 360 that was previously featured on Oddware. It's kind of similar, sort of,
to that in concept in the fact that it's supposed to be a six degrees of freedom
3D game controller that is kind of based on industrial CAD and 3D design controllers. I have to give a massive
thank you to Alexander for sending this boxed example over. He found it on eBay many years ago and shipped it over from Germany, and it's the only one in
the box I've ever seen. Extremely rare. Not
very well known at all. Although it was one of those devices that was frequently
advertised in magazines in the late '90s and online. But despite its many appearances in ads, it was barely reviewed and very
few of them seemingly sold. Although, sometime after I got mine, Wired Up Retro on YouTube got one and made a video about it
hooked up to a PlayStation, but apparently it broke
after making that video, so that's a good sign. But, yeah, I don't even know
if these things were sold in physical retail stores. I know for sure that it was
offered direct through SGRL either over the phone
or through their website. And possibly also outpost.com the company said that some SGRL products were available there, so maybe the Sphere was. Either way, SGRL was behind it. Second Generation Research
Laboratories Limited, a relatively small company founded in Barberton, Ohio in 1997. Who, according to their website, were "focused on designing and marketing innovative electronic products
for commercial, industrial, and computer peripheral applications." And they were composed largely
of electrical engineers, industrial designers, and the
rest was marketing, it seems. And for a couple years, SGRL pushed hard to market a few different products like these rechargeable battery kits for Game Boy Pocket and
Game Boy Color Systems. That's kind of cool. I
didn't know those existed. As well as something
called the Game Boy Spine, a cartridge storage thing. Deeply late '90s crap here. As well as a Shock Pad game pad, and SGRL Pistol light gun
for the PlayStation, and various PlayStation 2 multi-tap docks. And they also planned to release something called the X Board, a kind of snowboarding slash skateboarding slash surfing game peripheral designed for games like
"Extreme Winter Sports" and "Extreme Boards & Blades." Some painful LGR throwbacks right there. But yeah, the Sphere here was by far their most
famous / infamous device, something they were banking on to really put 'em on the map
in terms of peripheral manufacturers. With the SGRL CEO Brandt Cook saying, "We are confident in our
abilities as innovators to produce products that
will challenge gamers' minds at every level." Yeah, I bet. "The Sphere is just first
in a line of products that we believe will revolutionize
the gaming industry." Well, PC Zone magazine
called the Titans Sphere the "novelty controller of the month," which sums up the overall
sentiment, I would say. Computer Gaming World was one of the few mainstream
magazines giving it a full review, and they trashed the thing, giving it one and a
half out of five stars, saying it was awkward to
handle, tricky to calibrate, hard to learn, tiring to use. Although it wasn't all negative. The Sphere actually came out on top
as being the better controller compared to the Microsoft
SideWinder Force Feedback, at least according to Jevon Jenkins of Game Industry News in 1999. Despite this not having
any Force Feedback, and really not being comparable
to that stick at all. I mean, this is not a joystick after all. It says it like a hundred times on the marketing and on
the box, but you know what? Whatever, they still planned
to create a Titans Sphere 2 that was, I don't know, 30-ish
percent smaller or something. But nope, that never happened. The company withered away. Anyway, that's enough of that.
Let's open this up! [jazzy unboxing tunes] Whoop, uhp! Don't roll away! Yeah, despite its tendency
to roll around like a ball and the claims that it is baseless, it does actually have a base,
a flat bottom right there, and it kind of holds in place,
but it's not much of one. It really just, it tends to
roll when you're not looking. In fact, the overall design
reminds me of, I don't know, something from "Star Wars: Episode 1" or one of those, like, rolly things that you use for exercising
on the floor, ab work. As for the way that this works, you have these two joystick
appendages, arms, I don't know, sticking out of the side here, and they're just sort
of cut into the ball, and so you've got three different
kind of triggers in a way on the front of each one of those arms. Then there's another little button sort of hid away for your thumbs. A hat over here of a sort. I don't know. It's just four different
buttons in a diamond pattern. A really sensitive little,
little tiny throttle right there. It's very cheap-feeling, all of this. The whole thing is oddly
lightweight, but I don't know. You're supposed to be
holding it up in midair to use for the most part, so
you don't want it too heavy, but, yeah, it's just a combination of different balls and sticks and twisting and turning and
bop it and twist it and bop it. It is a 15-pin game port device, not USB, so you'll need that kind
of thing to plug it into or an appropriate adapter. And then, well, here's the thing. It comes with this, or at least mine did, but this is not the adapter for it. This is actually an InterAct USB adapter, and these are not universal or anything. They're typically made for
a very specific device, and in this case, I'm assuming it was the
Cyclone 3D from InterAct. This just happened to be
in this box that I got, but I think the eBay
seller packed it in there 'cause they didn't know it
wasn't supposed to go with it, 'cause, yeah, this has nothing
to do with the Titans Sphere. This is something that
goes to the Cyclone 3D. We won't be using this. It doesn't see it. And, yeah, that is the
Titans Sphere in a nutshell, or an egg shell. Eh, it's not really egg-shaped. Anyway, let's get this
plugged in to a Windows 98 PC, get the generic device drivers going, and play us some games. See how revolutionary
this oddware actually was. [piano music concludes] Okay, well, I got it connected to a PC, installed as much as I know how to do so, 'cause no documentation,
no software came with it, but as far as I know,
there wasn't any software, and all of the write-ups
that I found online all say that it should just show up as a four-axis, four-button
joystick, and it does. Fully calibrated it and everything. So, yeah, it's, as far as I
can tell, working as it should. Unfortunately, the POV hat, these are supposed to be I think an additional four buttons in
addition to the four over here and the four over here
which are just duplicated, but these are also duplicated. It has the same four,
so we just have four, but, yeah, everything else is working just as well as it can. So you have this really sensitive teeny little throttle right there, and then this twists this way
and then this twists this way, but you can also sort of twist
it the opposite direction and then this sort of
twists around on its own, but it doesn't actually get
to the corner axes right there unless you also twist this one. Yeah, anyway, calibrating
it was a bit of a thing, just to try to get it all, and the problem is it
doesn't center like ever. Like, it just never
fully returns to center. I don't know. [chuckles] So it's proven a bit of a thing just to even get it to
to work, but it does. So, for instance,
starting up Duke 3D here, it's like center the joystick. Well, it is centered, but, like, is it gonna
fully return to center? It's hard to tell. So, I kind of have to go over here and do the calibration. Yeah, see, it's not centered. So, that's centered, but it's not always centered that way, 'cause you can just, you
know, be moving around and now that's the center. It's so iffy. It might just be a problem with this one. All right, so I can already see it's kind of screwed up. So it thinks it's centered but it's not. So it kind of does this no
matter what game I'm trying, but the idea anyway here is that you have, in this game, this right
whatever this is, appendage, goes forward, backwards, and then you can sort of
roll it that way to strafe or you can do this to
turn, which is interesting, and then this also goes
forward and backward, but in the opposite. So, if you hold this one in place, then this one moves independently. So backward is forward
and forward is backward, and it's constantly wanting to, okay, to sort of roll as I'm moving forward, because this base that it has is awful. There's not enough of it in place there. Yeah. Go ahead and kill me. [pistol firing] All right. I think they really did intend it to be a sort of baseless thing as the box said. The problem is, now, when you do that, it means that you can't
independently move this one, so for the games that want you to do that, and there are some we'll get to, you kind of can't do that
and you have to put it down. So, really, the best way that
I found to use this thing is not floating or on
the desk, on the base, but kind of down here between my legs, or like up against my chest or stomach, or just something to kind
of balance it in place. Anyway. [gun firing, alien dying] With it down here, I can actually sort of make this work, other than me, whoops. Okay. Oh my goodness. I keep jumping because... because this thing is a piece of [bleep!] Because this button right here, or also this one where
your thumbs naturally rest is the easiest to press button ever. You just barely move it and
you're pressing that button. So you almost have to, like,
put your fingers down here, but then you're hitting this throttle or these other buttons,
which is also a jump button, 'cause then all the buttons are duplicated and the throttle becomes a problem, and this thing is immediately so bad. [pistol firing] Die. You know, I might be onto something here. This whole chin control
situation isn't the worst, Because at least I'm
holding it in place now. [shotgun blasts]
[lizard trooper roars] Like this had to have been a little better back in the day, right? It had to have been, 'cause this is unbearable. Oh my goodness! It, ugh. Even if it's centered perfectly though, I just don't understand this design. It's so odd, and you'd think it might be better with something like Descent, right? Even though they call out
Duke 3D as being like, oh, yeah, it's designed for that. Let we play "Descent 2" here. It's just the one I have on here. All right, so we do have the ability to kind of move around, but, and you know, we can
shoot a couple of things, but most of the buttons don't work and a lot of these other
axes don't work either. The throttle doesn't work. The sort of twisting doesn't
work for strafing or whatever. So, yeah, for some reason,
no matter what I do, and it's calibrated again in here, no matter which of these
joysticks options that I choose, if we go in here, for some reason, nothing will show up. So I can't adjust flares or bombs or do any of the other
things to remap them, and these, I can change, like which axis does pitch and turn. The throttle shows up, but it shows up as, like,
throttle for joystick two, and for some reason, it does nothing. So, yeah, I can't move forward.
I can't move backwards. All I can do is really just
sort of twist around in 3D space and shoot a couple of weapons
and that's it, which... [chuckle of failure] So much for, like, kind of the ideal-seeming
situation for this. Six degrees of freedom games were pretty much what
these were designed for, especially something
like the SpaceOrb 360, and, you know, this part of it, this second appendage on the side seems like it might be
actually kind of good for a full-3D,
six-degrees-of-freedom game, except, you know, it doesn't have, like, the pushing and pulling and twisting and all that kind of stuff that made the SpaceOrb so effective at that. I wish that I could try
it a little bit more, but no matter what I change options-wise, it just doesn't work. So when I was testing this,
I was just like, okay, we gotta try something that has some decent
joystick support, right? "Unreal Tournament." Let's get that going. Now, this doesn't have
specific support for this. I don't know that anything ever did. Again, it didn't come
with any disks or software to have mapping directly for this. Maybe there used to be on the website, but none of the downloads
are still available. Anyway. So it just shows up as a normal joystick. I've remapped it a bit
to try and make it work. We have looking up and
down, rotating this way. For some reason, the rolling doesn't work to strafe
like it did with Duke 3D. That axis just is not
detected in UT at all. So I can't strafe, but
I can move forward, so. [gun firing] And backward. Okay, very badly. Wow. That's a great start. [gameplay blaring] [chuckles] This is the, I don't know actually. This might not be the
worst way I've played UT, but it's pretty bad. [explosion booms] Kill us both. Take us out of our misery. Aw, really? I got knocked out of the way by the rocket and now I'm still alive. How unfortunate. Because of the way the
centering works or doesn't work, it's like there's a massive dead zone, and then there's just
like tons of movement. Like, it's like nothing,
nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Look at this. No movement at all, and then lots of movement, and there's pretty much
no way to change that. I mean, you can change
what the X and Y axis do. I just have it put this way, 'cause it kinda sorta made
sense, but even the other way, yeah, you still run into the same issue with the sensitivity, and, again, why doesn't it support doing
this way so you can strafe? Don't know. Duke 3D lets you do it. This doesn't. So UT's kind of a bust. Well, how about some GTA 3? Yes, I was playing this recently anyway, so I figured, why not? So, like UT, this really just has kind of generic joystick device support, but, eh, you know, we have the ability to get Claude to walk around and whatnot, so I'll just remap some buttons to make him move forward and backward, because doing this just
kind of makes him walk, and then to make him run, you have to push this one backwards, both at the same time in
order to get quicker movement. [laughs at confusing controls] Anyway, I know this is not the
type of game it's made for, but it's still really, really annoying. So, as for steering, again, an analog method
for a car or whatever, this actually seems like it would, it could be pretty good. It isn't because it sucks,
but if it didn't suck and like actually properly auto-centered and wasn't so darn sensitive, and, like, that dead zone
issue is happening again. Yeah, if you could make
it good and work properly, then I think this would actually
be pretty cool for driving, or, you know, steering, an analog method, 'cause, I don't know,
there's something about this twisting over here with
this right hand appendage that actually kind of works. [RPG explosions booming]
[car horns honk] Yeah, I don't have aiming
mapped to this thing, so I gotta do this to shoot the RPG. Anyway um, yeah! It almost
kind of works for driving, which really got me thinking, with those reviewers back in the day comparing it to the Microsoft SideWinder, how about "Motocross Madness,"
which some of the SideWinders were pretty much literally designed for. Thank goodness, in here, you can actually adjust that sensitivity, so we're gonna do that. [engines revving] Yeah. So I believe the way it works is this should be, yeah, leaning
forward and backward sort of. Oh. Ah, anyway, and then this rocking around steers you like that in
a sort of analog fashion, again with a terrible dead zone. You can see how long it
takes to kick in there. There it is. Eh. Other than that, this
is actually pretty okay. I'm not sure I'd call it better than the SideWinder Force Feedback or the, what is that other one? The Freestyle or whatever, but, you know, it's all right for a game like this, especially since, you know,
I adjusted that sensitivity, and it's just that auto centering, which I've gotta assume it's
just kind of broken or worn out or I don't know. This gets me at least to the point where I could imagine this almost
being cool for a game like this. I still don't like it, but I can almost see the use case for it. There we go. [cannon goes off]
[pleased chuckling] We got to. It's "Motocross Madness." [whistling]
[rider groans in pain] - All right, one more
thing. A flight game, right? Because, you know, that's another one that they specifically called out as being ideal somehow for this. Like, "it's better than joysticks!"
[incoherent mocking of marketing] Let's try some Jane's USAF,
United States Air Force. It's just the demo. I don't know where my CD
is, but it works the same. Go over here to controls. We've got a normal flight joystick with rudder / pedals, throttle, the dead zone or dead band. You can adjust that a bit, which is cool. Let's go. Actually, let's go to an external view so we can see what's going on. So this is the only game
that I've tried so far that has a working throttle control. So, you can see, you can turn
on the afterburner there. It's an extremely sensitive,
very light throttle, and it's kind of awful. I'm constantly hitting it with my thumb and adjusting it when I don't
mean to, but it is what it is. At least it works here, and the controls are a little bit odd. Controlling your yaw or
rudder is right here. Twisting sort of just this
way, which that makes sense. This controls your roll. So that's cool. And then pitch is the weirdest one, okay? So, you'd think, ah, you
could just do this or this or this or this. Nope. You gotta do 'em both
in the opposite direction. So, in order to pitch up, we'll
need to do forward over here and then back on the right like that, and then it's the opposite to pitch down, which also means you're
kind of rolling and yawing and doing all sorts of
crap at the same time because of the odd sensitivity. I can tell you one thing. It is anything but intuitive
to fly a plane this way. [laughs at airborne Chaos]
What's going on? Oh, it's bad. Talk to me, Goose! I can't! I've got a Titans Sphere! Well, so it goes. Man, this thing is just, it's so, so bad. I am kind of shocked. [jazzy unboxing music] So here's the thing. Assuming everything on the
Titans Sphere worked perfectly as if it just left the factory, like the sticks returned
to exact center every time and the dead zone and
acceleration was flawless, I still would not care for this thing. Even if it was perfectly calibrated, the overall design baffles me. It moves all over the place on a desk. It's tiresome in handling
this thing in midair, as it seems to be intended, and when you actually
like hold it in place down somewhere on yourself or wherever, no, it's still just
bad, the entire layout. There's nowhere to easily
place your fingers and thumbs. Any logical resting spots are taken up by all the buttons and the throttle, so gripping it to properly twist
it around is uncomfortable. The core concept here is just iffy. Sure, 3D gaming was taking
off in the late '90s on PC. SGRL wanted to make a 3D controller as their flagship product, but taking a 3D space ball kind of device and then making the ball part huge and attaching twistable
joysticks to the ball instead of twisting
the little ball itself, it's a bizarre choice, and I don't think that the
proposed Titans Sphere 2 that would've been, I don't
know, 30% smaller or whatever would've improved things that much. The whole concept is downright odd to me. Perfect for LGR Oddware. Extremely awkward for anything else. [jazz music intensifies] And if you enjoyed this bit of weirdness, check out my other LGR episodes on various oddities of the past, or stick around for more
continually in the works. I have no shortage of strangeness here, and as always, thanks for watching.
