hey everybody you’ve LAN Simon we’re taking a look today at the hoary d-pad for the Nintendo switch because I’ve been watching people play with their new switch minis and I’ve not been all that happy over the years with my separated d-pad here which is just a collection of buttons on the typical jaikon so I went out and bought this one from Horry that has a proper d-pad integrated and I thought I would do a quick review of this to let you know my thoughts on it now I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that I paid for this with my own funds all the opinions are about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this little joy con is all about so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware this is modeled after the left joy con that you would get with your switch console if you got the normal switch that can dock with your TV the switch light of course has these integrated but what I like about the Hori d-pad here of course is that you have the full d-pad versus the separated button design it feels really light in fact it almost feels like a like a demo that you might see at the store and the reason is is that it doesn’t have a battery nor does it have a rumble motor or anything else inside of it it is strictly a controller and it will only work when it is docked with your switch console it does slide in and you don’t feel the light weight when it is attached so that has been a good experience so far the d-pad is really nice and we’re gonna do a couple of little gameplay examples in a few minutes to check things out so that’s good you have your button here for the circle button here which i think does screengrabs and stuff this one feels a little squishy to me so on the main controller here you get a nice little click to it this one feels very recessed but I don’t push this all that often and if anything it might prevent an accidental push so that
might not be such a bad thing the big thing that I noticed on it is that the shoulder button feels different than the actual shoulder button on the other joique on it has a deeper travel to it so if you are playing games that use a lot of the shoulder buttons it’s going to feel a little different in your left finger than it does in the right and mine has this kind of a little sharpness to the edge of the button there so it works but it just feels different and that’s really the only thing that feels negatively different from the other joy con that’s on there by the way it also doesn’t have any motion controls so it’s going to rely on the other side to do all of that but I think a lot of folks will be using this to play games like the classic SNES and NES games and probably won’t have too many issues there the trigger button feels pretty similar to the original the only other thing that I noticed with it is that when it’s off and you shake it around you’ll hear the buttons kind of rattling and that’s one thing you don’t get with the Nintendo controllers the plastic on it doesn’t feel as high quality as the Joye cons do the Joye cons have that rubberized coating for a little better grip you really don’t have that here and you may not like the aesthetics of this either so these cost less than 20
bucks and not all that expensive but the only three that I could find available right now have some kind of license pattern so this is the Mario pattern this is the least expensive one there’s also a Zelda and a Pokemon one that cost a little bit more and you’re going to have some contrast here depending on what your other joy con looks like but I’m looking at using this as an occasional thing or I’m gonna pop it open and just play with it every once in a while so I think I’m going to be okay there let’s get into some gameplay now and see how it does with some classic games all right so here we are with Zelda and I’d like to test Selda because if we’re gonna have some errant diagonals this is where you’ll see things go off the tracks so as I’m moving link back and forth here you can see he’s staying pretty much in line here and a lot of times you have D pads that might give you an errant diagonal and if we had that we would see him moving up while I’m doing this rocking motion so you can really rock back and forth pretty well here on the d-pad no issues there it actually feels really nice it’s got a decent feel to it it’s not too sensitive and for these classic games I think it’s doing pretty well now another game that really benefits from this d-pad is Tetris 99 I found that on the traditional joi cons I’m often making inadvertent drops of my pieces because the buttons are so sensitive the d-pad here
works much much better with this game and if you are a very frequent Tetris 99 player in handheld mode this is going to be a remarkable improvement over the original I’m actually playing this game a lot better and maybe just maybe I might win a match one of these days too now on modern games the stick feels like it has slightly less traveled than the Nintendo one I’m still able to do fine movements here but there is just a little bit more travel again on the original Nintendo stick versus the Hori one here but it still is feeling pretty nice to me in fact it feels a lot smoother than the Nintendo joi con does but it could just be that these joy Khan’s now or two and a half years old and starting to feel some of the wear and tear of all my game playing going on here there are no motion controls in the Hori stick but you will have motion because you’ll have the original Nintendo joi con on the right hand side so games like this that have some commotion control elements to it should work the same way now one thing I had read about with this is that there was some battery drain issues with this product when it initially came out I have not experienced those in fact I left my switch off its charger all night to see if it might drain when it’s sleeping’s I think that was one of the problems they had with it I’m not seeing any battery drain I played with it a good amount yesterday and the battery drain was about what I typically
experienced I also tested latency on it to see if it’s any better or worse than what you have with your stock Nintendo joi cons and the latency tests that I ran on it came in pretty much the same so I don’t think you’re losing anything by going with a third-party controller here and you’re getting a much better feeling d-pad as a result so when you take it out of the box it’s definitely going to feel a lot cheaper than your Nintendo device will the plastic again isn’t as good as the original it’s also very lightweight because it again lacks the batteries and the Rumble motors and all the other stuff but once it’s docked it really feels like it’s part of your switch and it has a very similar grip to the console like it typically does and remember you can only use it when it’s attached to the switch and for the price I think it’s a pretty good deal so check it out if you’ve been looking to get a traditional d-pad on your Nintendo switch I’m liking this quite a bit and I think I’ll be playing a lot of my classic games with it and of course that tetris 99 game – until next time this is lines Ivan thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lon TV sub orders including gold-level supporters the four guys with Porter’s podcast Chris Allegretto Tom Albrecht Mike Talbert Brian Parker in Cali an Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to land TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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