I’ve been a proud Switch owner for a few months now, and one thing I’m surprised at is that so few people are talking about how utterly rubbish the JoyCons are.

Yes, clearly they’re somewhat of a compromise to allow for the system to be portable, but they’re also impossibly small for adult hands. Then there’s the fact that the right analogue stick is in exactly the wrong place. It needs to be much further to the left to allow comfortable transition of your thumb from the stick to the facia buttons – as it is, you kind of have to hold your thumb at a right angle to actually use the damn thing.

And what about the D-pad? Or rather, the lack of it? Nintendo invented the damn thing, yet bizarrely they’ve decided to ditch it for the JoyCons in favour of four buttons that do a really rather terrible impression of acting like a D-pad. And don’t get me started on the way these tiny, irritating pads will only charge when they’re attached to the console. I do most of my gaming on the big telly, so if the JoyCons run out of charge when I’m using them with that weird controller grip that tries its best to convince you you’re actually playing with a proper joypad, then the only option is to plug the JoyCons back into the console and continue playing in handheld mode with the console plugged into the mains. Why isn’t there a charging port on the controller grip, for goodness sake?

Sure, you can buy third-party controller grips that fix this needless oversight. But why would you want to do that, when you could instead buy the best controller that’s ever been made in the history of the world?

Confession time: I think I’m a bit in love with the Switch Pro Controller. It may generally copy the layout of an Xbox controller, but it exceeds its inspiration in almost every way. For a start, it’s just so damn comfortable to hold, with all of the sticks and buttons in what feel like the perfect positions. The analogue sticks in particular are nice and responsive, smartly flicking back to the neutral position in quick time, and then – WHY, LOOK OVER HERE, IT’S AN ACTUAL PROPER D-PAD! Praise the lord!

Not only that, it has a few hidden tricks up its sleeve, like that sweet, deep, HD rumble, not to mention an NFC reader buried within its innards to scan in all those amiibos you never use. Plus it’s a right beauty – observe the almost transparent casing, giving you a glimpse of its innards. Ooooh, you saucy minx!

Finally, and best of all, the charge on this thing lasts FOREVER. My battery hungry PS4 controllers are always screaming to be plugged in, yet the Switch Pro Controller can seemingly go weeks without being charged. It’s a miracle, I tells ya. Seriously, this thing is the king of all controllers.

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