Even when you know a game will show up in Steam Next Fest, it’s still fun to get a chance to check it out on a show floor while chatting with members of the team about it. The background energy of a con combined with the face-to-face interaction makes a unique experience, but it’s getting to check out things I’d never see otherwise that makes shows so exciting.
This year, I was really intrigued by a few different pieces of gaming hardware and accessories at the show. I got to use an awesome arcade pad, a terribly named lightgun, and some weird gloves, and I came home with a set of headphones that I’m still conflicted on.
Junkfood Arcade SWORL
Arcade sticks appeal to my nostalgia for wasting endless quarters on sticky cabinets. I've got a cheap one at home that I hook up every once in a while for retro games, but since I’ve never really been into fighting games I don't really follow that corner of the market. When people started replacing the giant stick with keyboard keys for arcade pads, I totally checked out.
I did a double take when I walked past the Junkfood Arcade booth at PAX West when I saw someone playing Mario Kart World with one of those key based “fight pads”. It turns out that Junkfood has made an arcade pad called SWORL that I can understand by slapping a couple of spheres where your thumbs sit that work as analog sticks.
Two of them. Which means that this isn't just a novelty, it's a fully fledged controller.
I got to drive around a bit myself in Mario Kart World, and I was surprised at how quickly I got used to the controls. Your thumbs sit at a very different angle than they would on a typical controller, more like your thumbs resting on the space key of a keyboard. It didn’t take long to adapt to the strange stick, and being able to use them and the full breadth of the face buttons with my fingers felt really good.
To be honest, though, it was hard to focus on my own experience with the arcade pads, because I was watching the guy next to me beat an Elden Ring boss on one.
It ruled.
I’m not sure that either Mario Kart or Elden Ring is “better” with an arcade pad, but having all the inputs necessary for any game makes Junkfood’s Arcade SWORL way more appealing than any other fight stick or pad I’ve looked at.
The SWORL is available now, but $255 for the multiconsole version might be a tough barrier to entry.
G’aim’e
It’s such a shame that we lost light gun accessories right when we gained plastic guitars.
For those who might not remember, every cheap plastic gun your parents bought you for everything from your NES to your PS2 stopped working as soon as the family room got its first flat screen tv. Lightgun technology was developed for CRT screens, and – for a bunch of technical reasons that I don’t really understand – was never able to make the jump forward from there.
With the G’aim’e (just pronounced “Game”), the team is bringing back Time Crisis and a handful of other classic games to modern screens, with the help of AI. The team used a library of 273k images of TVs along with one-off calibration to allow their system to run just like the good ole days.
This is the part where I need to note that I’m pretty staunchly against AI in general and in writing, art, and game development specifically, but that I’m trying to be more open minded about its possibilities on a purely technological level.
The system seems to work fairly well. I played a bit of Time Crisis single player, but also got to watch a multiplayer team and even a speed runner take a crack, and everyone seemed to be having a good time. I felt like I was making the shots I expected to at least as well as I did back when I was teaming up with Aerosmith on the Revolution X cabinet at my sister's indoor soccer field.
The biggest issues I have with the G’aim’e are its limited library and high cost. The lowest tier of the product is one gun, no foot pedal, and just one game available. That set costs a hundred bucks. Jumping up the ultimate version for $200 gets you a second gun, a pedal, and three more games.
I can’t imagine the licensing for these old games is easy, but unless they find a way to open the library a bit more after the fact, $200 for a box that only plays four games feels steep.
Gauntlet Gamer Glove
I'll be honest, I rolled my eyes a bit when I saw the Gauntlet Gaming Gamer Glove booth. I was around when people wrecked their palms on the Nintendo 64 control stick. We saw gloves as a weakness then and I've only seen them as a weakness since.
But, I'm also older. My hands sweat sometimes. When I play for a long period, they start to cramp up. I'm at the point where maybe a little extra padding or support would help… so I stopped for a look, and then realized that while the Gamer Glove helps with all that, its secret power is much weirder.
The Gauntlet Gamer Glove holds the controller for you.
Both the left and right gloves have a little elastic band sewn into the palm designed for you to tuck the handle of the controller into. This fixes the controller to your hand, which means you're having to exert less “grip” to hold on to the controller. It's a weird feeling at first, but within just a few minutes I realized that I could relax some muscles I'm used to using constantly when playing a game, and I was actually able to adjust my grip a bit to find a position that made reaching the buttons even easier.
The Gamer Glove went through some testing with high school kids, but from talking to the team it sounds like PAX West was the first time they were really getting a lot of practical feedback from their target audience. It sounds like they are already planning some tweaks, but you can order a pair designed for controllers or optimized for VR (which is where this will really shine) on their site right now.
Sanwear-Gametype Earbuds
Last year, I got myself a pair of Apple AirPods Pro 2s and fell in love with Active Noise Cancellation (ANC). I have had issues with anxiety and getting overstimulated for years, and knowing that I have relative quiet just hanging out in my pocket everywhere I go has been a godsend.
With that in mind, I was intrigued Sanwear making their lack of ANC a marketing point for their Gametype (GT) product line. The team offered to set me up with a pair of their new earbuds, so I swung by their booth and walked away with a pair of headphones that sound great, but look atrocious.
Every single think about this product is over designed to within an inch of its life. I had trouble just opening the box. After sliding the plastic cover off, flinging open magnetized wing doors, and prying the headphones out of a foam insulation that seemed more intent on keeping me out than them in, I found a hung of translucent plastic with purple accents, with magnetized slots on the side for each earbud.
The “case” is hard to call a case, since the earbuds stick to the side of it like docked fighters on a spaceship rather than being secured inside of anything. It’s also such a weird shape that it feels terrible in any pocket. Oh, and of course its got lights in it. Lights that just turn on on their own at random. I have no idea what they mean, or how to make them stop.
The pods themselves follow the same design echoes, to make sure that anyone who sees you wearing them notices that you are wearing some weird headphones. Thankfully (or unfortunately depending on how you look at it), with the help of several different sizes and shapes of tips, they also feel fantastic.
The reason these headphones don’t need ANC is because they are designed to fit so snuggly that not enough sound is going to get through to even worry about. And in my experience, that’s true. They fit snug, they feel secure, and the block out sound very, very well.
There is a phone app for these that you can use to adjust settings and equalizers, but I actually got rid of it after it was pointed out that there is a lot of talk of AI and NFTs and Web3 and all the sort of stuff I try to stay away from on their website. I reached out to the team for clarification on this, and it sounds like that side of the business was mostly what they used to gather support and conduct their own sort of preorders during the manufacturing side of things. They’ve assured me now that the only AI involvement is a bit of processing on the microphone to cut out background noise.
Still, even without tweaking settings on the app, these headphones sound great. I have used them via Bluetooth to listen to podcasts and music and found a richer sound than on my AirPods.
Of course, these are gaming headphones for gamers, so that’s where Ive used them most. Along with the Bluetooth capabilities, the secret super power of these is that the case itself is a wireless transmitter. Plugging the case into your PlayStation or Switch or PC or Steam Deck allows you to hear your game audio with practically zero delay, and it sounds great. Just don’t expect them to work with Xbox, because Microsoft is weird about that sort of thing.
I really think this is a great set of headphones, and I expect they will be my go to for when I want to really lock in on a game in the future. But between how weird they look, how obtrusive the case is, and the fact that the earbuds get knocked out of the case as soon as I put them in my pocket half the time, there is no chance of them replacing my AirPods as a daily driver.
Final Thoughts
I love hardware. Mad Catz was already in decline when I started at GameStop in high school, but I've never gotten over being excited about weird peripherals in video games. I'm glad I got to check these out at PAX West 2025, and I'm going to make sure to get hands on with as many weird little devices as possible next time I end up at a show.