Recently I wrote about playingSuper Mario Bros. Wonderwith my wife, andgetting a new perspective on the game’s multiplayer. I had originally written off playing Mario together after a disastrous attempt to play online that flattened all of the joy and whimsy from the game in favour of a banal race, but with local being more cooperative than competitive, it feels like a whole new game. However, what that article lacked was the true details of the full scene.
Picture this: my wife and I are sitting on the sofa, playing Mario with the Joy-Con turned sideways in our hand, smiling away as we transformed into elephants and stomped so many Koopas we’d make Chris Pratt proud. We looked like a classic Nintendo advert, or would if I was even the least bit photogenic. The buttons are pretty simple, mainly just stick to move and buttons to jump or thwack with your trunk, so it’s not a struggle to play with the sideways Joy-Con. But as we were playing, my wife pointed to the controller I have lying next to the Switch and asked, “why don’t we use that?”
The plural of Joy-Con, like sheep, is Joy-Con. Feel however you feel about that one, it is what it is.
This controller she was pointing to, as you may have surmised from the headline not being ‘Haha My Wife Is A Dope She Thinks You Can UsePS5Controllers For Mario’, was the Nintendo Pro controller. I also have one of those knock-off controllers that works on all the consoles in a box full of old wires I might someday need when we revert to dial-up modems, so we could both be using them. The problem is, I just don’t like them.
This is not to shill for the Joy-Con, which is one ofthe most consumer-hostile controllerson the market. With drift issues, thelong struggle for fair repairs, and the need to buy them in pairs, I don’t feel all that comfortable going to bat for the Joy-Con. In fairness, across my three pairs (one with the original Switch, one with the OLED, and a knock-off third set), I’ve only had drift in one out of six controllers, and that was the knock off one. It not happening to me doesn’t make it any better or fairer for those it did happen to, but it does colour my own enjoyment of the Joy-Con quite a bit after five years of regular play across both machines.
It’s a shamethe Joy-Con suffers with drift so much, because it is otherwise an engineering marvel. It’s a motion controller that you can attach to the console itself and has gyro functionality, but also works as a regular controller which can remain attached to the console, be held neatly in your hands, or turned sideways to turn one controller into two, without any real compromise to how it functions, with a form that works for both children and adults. It charges while plugged in, and switching between whatever way you want to use it only takes a second. It’s a little bit of a cheat to say if it didn’t break so much it would be great, but if it didn’t break so much, it would be great.
It’s not that I have anything against the Pro controller, necessarily. I just don’t think it feels very ‘Switchy’. I don’t mind using it for a game likePersona 5 Strikers, where it feels like a video game that I just so happen to own on the Switch, but for games likeMario, for games that represent what the Switch is about, it has always been Joy-Con or bust for me. There’s a magic that goes beyond which one makes pressing buttons easier - I’m not trying to min-max Super Mario over here.
It reminds me of my epiphany withPokemon. When I was a kid, all I wanted was to play Pokemon on the TV, where I played all my other games. N64, GameCube, and Wii had some spin-offs, but I wanted proper Pokemon. Then we got it withSword & Shield, and it just felt… wrong. Maybe it was that it didn’t look all that, but mostly, it was because Pokemon felt like a game meant to be cradled in your hands like an injured bird while you lay on the sofa.It doesn’t really matter if playing on the TV is ‘better’. Playing in handheld is ‘right’.
So I understand why people would want to use a Pro Controller - by all accounts, better for playing video games than a sideways stick of plastic - but I just don’t feel the magic in it. Of course, I didn’t go on a 700 word rant when my wife asked me why we wouldn’t use the Pro controller. I just said, “this is easier” as I handed her a Joy-Con. And really, that’s true too.
