Please enjoy this commentary taken from our Rerez vaults. This was originally written in October 2014
A little while ago I made a video about one of my favorite controllers ever — the Nintendo GameCube controller and the Wii Pro controller. Both of these controllers offer a lot of really great features and provide a really good way to interact with your games. And I believe they've set sort of a standard for other game companies and other developers of controllers to follow. But that doesn't mean that Nintendo is always flawless because to be quite honest the worst controller that's out for any system right now that's being produced by a major manufacturer is Nintendo's Wii U GamePad controller. This is by far one of the worst controllers anyone has ever designed. But let's take a closer look.
The main feature for this controller is its screen. When everybody talks about this controller this is the thing that they talk about. They don't talk about the camera. They don't talk about the motion controls. They don't even talk about the little speakers on the front. Really this screen is its biggest feature but it's also its biggest flaw. When you think about a game like Mario Kart well what would you use the screen for? Obviously a map or maybe even the stats of a race but the problem is you're racing up on a TV in front of you and when you're doing that well you really shouldn't be looking at your controller because you're getting distracted from the events that are happening in the game. That is a very big problem but it's not the only problem that the Wii U GamePad has. The biggest one is its placement.
The screen is positioned in a way that you really can't touch it with your thumbs. Now basically that's a problem because if something happens that requires your input with your finger on the screen you're not going to be able to touch it unless you take your hand off the left or the right side of the controller. And when you play a video game like Tetris on the NES you're using the d-pad on the controller and you're not once looking at the controller. You and the video game have become one. But this controller prevents that from ever happening because its screen is constantly distracting you from ever getting completely lost in the experience of playing a video game. To be fair there are a couple of Nintendo games that don’t use the screen and actually turn it off when the game comes on but why would you have the screen there if you were not going to make use of it? See it's a catch-22. No matter what Nintendo does this controller design was a bad idea and that makes a terrible controller for what could have possibly been a good console.
Does that mean that you're an idiot for liking the Wii U GamePad? No. There's a couple of features I like about the controller that kind of add to the experience of playing a game but to be quite honest the negatives are piled up so high against it that I actually have to imagine that most people that use the controller really don't like it for all the reasons I just mentioned. The controller is really bad and although it offers a couple of interesting features that’s not good enough. We're not dealing with an iPad or a tablet but with a controller with the primary function of being for a video game on another screen. And Nintendo apparently didn't know that.
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