Gadgetory

in this Dravida games there have been a lot of weird controller designs trying to accomplish all sorts of stuff and we've covered a few of those in the past but something we haven't talked about before is times where it actually worked sometimes really well and one of those controllers is this weird little guy right here the Neji Khan from Namco released back in 1995 for the PlayStation one the reason this exists is because Namco made a game called cyber sleds for the arcade that they ported to the PlayStation 1 and they wanted something that would recapture the arcade style controls that it had which featured a pair of levers and so the way they would do that with a controller is this twisting motion right here which is why it's called the Neji con because in Japan mid Giroux means to twit by the way I love the way they actually branded this guy where there's a little twist symbol right here and that's also the G I mean yeah a lot of people probably call it the neocon on accident but it's kind of a pun and I love that now obviously the big weird thing about this controller is the twist action which acts as going left or right on a control stick but there's a couple other odd things about it too for one thing it's missing a lot of buttons PlayStation 1 controllers obviously have these set of four shoulder buttons this guy just has two up here and on the front side some of these buttons are actually analog not just simply digital ones so the ones right here that normally would be Square and X are now these actual analog buttons you can press down and feel the full motion of it's also missing a select button so obviously this would not work well for a number of games but something that people discovered is that while this does work for Cypress LEDs as intended another genre it makes a lot of sense for is racing games it turns out the twisting mechanic meant for driving a hover tank is actually really appropriate for any kind of vehicle based game so a lot of the racing games in the PlayStation 1 and even some jet based games all used to this controller and supported it and it worked really well a lot of people prefer to using this over the official PlayStation 1 controller so we're gonna test it out I just hooked up my ps1 and let's see how this goes a quick disclaimer I'm just terrible at any kind of serious racing game anyways so this is not gonna be pretty either way oh no it starts in like actual drive review I'm bad at that how do I switch to car nope that's rear view there we go okay you see the card I just made all the racing game fans cringe so obviously Energy cons missing some buttons but for a lot of older racing games all you really need to care about is accelerate brake and turn so all I need these two and this I think this is actually kind of really intuitive like it just gives the idea of yeah just twist returning like turning a wheel this is all bad now no I take everything back okay now something that's cool about this guy too that people kind of learned and figured out over time was that yeah you can't hold it and use it like a traditional controller and that's definitely the way a lot of people are gonna use it out of the box but depending on the game you're playing since you really only care about two buttons and the twisting mechanism you could also do something like switch to a grip like this where you're hitting the buttons and the even more kind of just natural turn feeling you're not twisting both you're just twisting the one and I'm doing actually a lot worse now that I started doing that because I was proper tucking at the same time there we go yeah so this gives you a little more natural feel of just turning a wheel or something instead of twisting both sides at the same time yeah this is actually really cool I mean look I'm gonna be honest we first ordered this thing just cuz we thought it looked ridiculous and now that I'm actually using it this is really awesome so I am still very bad at these games but I will say all the problems I'm having are definitely because of me and not this controller I actually think it'd be a little better because of it what really stands out to me about the neji con is this idea of a super specialized controller designed for a specific kind of game in mind that works really well because you know most modern controllers especially with the mainland ones that come with systems these are designed to be one-size-fits-all and something that's gonna be comfortable and work for racing games fighting games action-adventure RPG whatever this is going to work and make sense but something like this is so much more unique and specialized whether they actually had to come up with more weird innovative ideas to make it work I mean you have some things today that are specialized like for racing games yeah you can get a full-blown wheel or fighting games have fight sticks and a few fight pads but something like this where they actually come up with a unique awkward solution for something that's going to work for a specific kind of game with this mechanism you just don't really get that anymore now of course there are good reasons why you don't see stuff like this all the time because it can be expensive to invest in a weird unique idea like this and have it not pay off but there are plenty of examples this past to where weird peripherals have paid off big-time and when we have entire franchises built around the idea of using odd controller let me just look back at band and guitar hero you're using this guitar or drum kit that just acts like a controller and yeah you could play with the controller to have it be a rhythm game but that changes the entire way that you interact with it and makes it a more fun experience and this is something that to me is super important because games are awesome but if everything boils down to using the same control scheme in everything it starts to get a little repetitive and so the idea of these different word peripherals that change the way we play really keeps things interesting I don't think that time is over and gone yet you know I mean look at the switch the droid cons are by no means traditional controllers and while they can kind of work like one on their own there's all kinds of ways that you could incorporate those with other accessories to change the way we play games I am just super excited about that possibility