Have you considered using a rollerball? I used one for a long time and loved it. There isn't a lot of wrist movement, so it could help. I had a mouse just like this and it was great. Just a thought.

I more meant obsession with PC gaming to mean that's all I play. I'm not addicted and rarely play more than two hours a day, plus I went all of 2012 without gaming because I was traveling.
I'm more a Final Fantasy fan than a JRPG fan. Every other one I have tried I didn't like much and didn't finish.

I might try Ni No Kuni though.

Fair enough then.

Well, consider giving some of the SMT titles (at least the non-Persona ones, like Nocturne or Digital Devil Saga) a shot. I think you'll find that they are very different from your standard JRPG fare.

I thought I would give an update after basically being console only for a month or so:

I hate analog aiming in first-person. It's really driving me up the wall, I was hoping I would get used to it but I'm not. Ranged stuff through a scope isn't bad but anything else is just random luck about how well the acceleration and my thumb work out. This kind of takes away shotgun run-n-gun, which was always my favorite. Having a hard time here.

Snap-to aiming is the really horrible part of it. I knew about auto-aim that lingers on the target and stuff from playing Halo on Xbox with friends, and I thought all console shooters were like that. Here I discover most of them now literally snap your aim to an enemy? And aiming down a scope auto-targets an enemy? Are you even playing a game at that point?

That aside, I am having a lot of fun with platformers and third-person combat games. Playing Sly Cooper and Ratchet and Clank is extremely fun and a nice change of pace from PC shooters and RPGs. Some games like Splinter Cell and Assassin's Creed feel much more at home on a console. There's also the nice social aspect of having my wife in the same room doing stuff and talking to me when there's no game dialog. It makes me feel much more social and involved with her than going to the other room and putting headphones on. That said there is also a negative here: she sometimes talks over stuff I want to hear, it's less immersive and my TV speakers suck compared to headphones. Getting a nice speaker setup would be too expensive after just buying all these machines.

My wrist hasn't hurt since switching though, outside of long internet sessions which I try to avoid, and I like the plug and play aspect, feels much less stressful.

I'm pretty 50/50 on it overall. I miss PC gaming, but also like the new gaming open to me. Arg.

I dont think ive bothered to contribute so far, but from this post, the solution has been to switch to a gamepad to ease the strain?!
Presuming thats correct, then surely there are many PC games you can still play using said gamepad?! - or has that been covered somewhere?

Also: I've an idea how it affects you - I've severe degenerative arthritis myself and am prone to cramps, straisn and injuries (broadly wankers whiplash if ya will! heheh!), but as I've grown up with that, I generally have found ways around it such as posture, a tubigrip bandage for extended play etc.
Without giving the whole bloat of it - there are many solutions to these kinds of problems, and far more things to ease the problem than that. Hope you find something to keep gaming enjoyable, and pain free because I can empathise and sympathise to a good degree! Inabit!

The gist of it is that mouse aim was a big reason I'm a PC gamer and a $1200 upgrade to play new games looked a lot less appealing when the mouse is taken out of the equation.

Though now I am thinking that might have been an error.

Well I'm glad the console gaming is sort of working out for you. Sucky about the auto-aiming though. Still no pain is a good thing!

Just thought I'd share this. I had a bout of CTS but caught it kind of early. Basically at the ow, that's irksome stage, instead of the oh dear god WHY stage. The solution was two weeks of using the hand for absolutely nothing. Not one thing. Hand in the brace all day and all night for the first week. Then for the second week still no use what so ever, just freedom from the brace. Couple that with 10-20 min soaks daily (just the affected wrist and hand in a basin) in a super saturated solution of hot water and epsom salts (of 2 cups epsom salts to a two gallon tub of hot water). At the end of the fortnight, there was no pain and it has yet to come back one year later.

After a decade of only playing FPS on PC, playing them on console with a joypad took me a good couple of years of getting used to.

Also, balanced auto-aim is a bit of a fiddly thing to get right on the development side, and a lot of games do get it wrong. Too generous, and the game just removes the challenge and turns multiplayer matches into a chaos fest. Too strict, and the autoaim becomes useless and you end up shooting around wildly in the hopes of hitting something. Good auto-aim shouldn't remove the challenge of aiming, but it should compensate for the added inaccuracy of an analogue stick (something which Modern Warfare 2 did surprisingly well, I haven't played a CoD since though).

Likewise, you can get used to it. Playing the Resistance series on PS3 was my first console FPS, and eventually I found it far more accurate and less frustrating to side-step (strafe) to line up shots horizontally. It allows much more precision than trying to aim a thumb stick left and right, and has the benefit of keeping you moving from getting hit. Also lowing the aiming sensitivity in the options helped, as I find most games have it too high by default for me. Then just making slight vertical adjustments to get head-shots, etc. Once I got accustomed to that method, the game was a lot more fun.

Interesting. I guess I assumed since Halo got it right 12 years ago they all would have perfected it by now.

Just read this. My condolences, Velvet.

You mean developers actually copying good technology from other games? Are you mad!? At any rate, the stuff you're talking about in your post with your experience with console gaming - yah, that's why I'm not playing most PC shooters with a mouse, but instead on my TV with a pad. 99% of the time, interaction with my wife > focused gameplay.

I agree with that, and I'm already there as a PC gamer, since I mostly play on a laptop (usually from the couch, or sometimes on a small table beside the living room TV). And I am not even hoarding the TV, so I am gaming while my gf is watching some TV show from the same couch. In fact yesterday I watched the newest episode of The Walking Dead with her, while playing Icewind Dale. :) Later when she went to sleep, I played GTA San Andreas (I have to concentrate on that game, so I can't watch some TV show at the same time).

(EDIT: I see this is pretty much what Fenixp also just mentioned.)

The downside is that if I want to hear anything in the game (while she is watching TV), I pretty much have to use headphones all the time. But it works pretty well as she doesn't normally put the TV volume high.

I guess I could do pretty much the same with a desktop PC, as long as I kept it max 5 meters from the TV, and use the TV with HDMI cable (and wireless keyboard + mouse).

I haven't played my PS2 games for ages because I don't want to hoard the TV. I have a pretty big backlog there too, maybe I should check if I could play my PS2 games with PC emulators on the same laptop... (which is what I am already doing with my PSX games).

I guess you can concentrate on non-FPS games on consoles (which is what I've always done with e.g. PS2). I share your dislike for gamepad FPS controls (aiming), in fact even in GTA SA (PC version) I keep now juggling between gamepad and kb+mouse controls, depending on what I am doing in the game. KB+M sucks for flying parts, while gamepad sucks for firefights as a pedestrian.

And I guess PS4 is a good purchase anyway, under $500 and it should be future-proof for many many years to come, even if you decide later to upgrade your gaming PC too.

An alternative to mouse: Trackball.