I’ve been on sort of a “Launcher Quest” lately, looking for the “Best Launcher” for PC that’ll let me quickly play any game on the PC I use solely for gaming. There are a ton of “Top 5” or “Top 10 Game Launchers” out there, so I started with a few of these lists. Here’s an example:
I won’t list any others, but there are a LOT of these lists, and they’re all completely different. Most of these lists usually end up having one or two top launchers that the others have, and these are the most popular ones. I found a lot of issues with many of them, and some were actually pretty good, but none of them were quite what I was hoping for. They all had limitations in some way, or were difficult (or impossible) to add certain types of games, but I tried many of the top picks from several lists as well as a few others that sounded interesting.
End Result: I’m using FENCES. This wasn’t even on ANYONE’S recommended Launchers list and isn’t even considered a “Launcher”, it’s more of just a desktop “add-on”, but I wasn’t able to find ANY actual launcher that supports all of the different game sources I use, and Fences supports unlimited Fence Desktops and literally ALL game sources (and apps) that I use, so it’s a clear winner for me. It doesn’t have any 3D or other “bells & whistles” that the top lauchers do, but I don’t care, it works and it works quite well for exactly what I need it for.
Since I use all 4K monitors (and one 4K TV) on my PC, I just set the icon size to “Large”, which makes them very easily viewable on all of my monitors and my TV, then I just created as many different Fence Desktops as I needed, and grouped by icons accordingly, with separate fences for “Apps”, “Currently Playing”, “Emulators”, “Mini Games”, “Misc. Games”, “Google Earth”, etc., then I can simply grab the left or right edge of my screen to flip to the previous or next desktop as needed. Since I can have an unlimited number of desktops and fences, my options are wide open, and every single game source is supported! The Google Earth Fence might sound odd, but I love it! I save an icon for every interesting place I want to–like my home, my work, and other interesting places on the planet and I can instantly just open any of them up and explore the area–in 2D or even 3D, or even drop down to street view and look around. In 4K this is really sweet to play with.
But back to Fences–I can even add apps and games installed from the Microsoft Store… I simply created a shortcut to “explorer shell:AppsFolder”, then whenever I need to create a shortcut to a native Windows 10 “tile” app I just open that “Windows Apps Folder” and find the app icon, right-click it and “Create Shortcut”. Windows then prompts me saying it can’t create a shortcut here, do I want to create a shortcut on the desktop instead?” I say Yes, then I just go out to my current desktop’s default Fence, grab the icon, and drag it to the Fence I want it in.
I can even color-code each of my Fences any way I like and change their behavior and appearance in many other ways as well. For me, I haven’t found any other PC “Launcher” that works as well as Fences for everything I need a launcher to do.
As far as what was missing from ALL of the launchers I look at and tested, “BigFish” was one of them. Some might laugh and might call this one a joke, since it’s probably not even considered a “real” game distributor, since they only sell mostly “mini games” that were much more popular “back in the day” with much earlier versions of Windows, but I really enjoy a lot of these and still have a monthly subscription to a few of them, which means I have amassed dozens, if not hundreds, of games on their platform, so it’s relevant to me, but apparently not very popular these days as none of the “top launchers” in everyone’s recommendations support this service’s platform or its games. I just love me a simple game of BrickQuest, Slingo, or Fishdom now and again.
JimTrottier.com 