Picture this: you just bought a fancy, brand-new console, and your first thought is to find a bunch of strange plastic that might somehow enhance the experience of playing games.
This wonderful world of weird video game accessories, peripherals, and controllers emerged around the 1980s, and it’s a bit of a dying art nowadays, with manufacturers practicing the weird practice of making sensible and practical things.
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That doesn’t mean every company has completely stopped making strange decisions for their peripherals, far from it, but in the hopes we’ll get some more ridiculous things, I decided to rank my favorites.
All of these are weird, usually have some spark of a good idea, and are at least fun to look at, even if they aren’t practical. I decided to go with one entry per console, and usually picked whatever I thought felt the oddest.
10Dragon Quest Slime Controller
A Sticky Slope
While a controller with variations for every major console sounds pretty normal,the Dragon Quest Slime Controller has just a slightly odd shape that makes it hard to play just about anything.
You have to hold the oddly squishy, silicone slime upside down, using the buttons and sticks on the bottom, while gripping the slime tightly, none of which feels comfortable at all.
It is just a fully functional, standard controller beyond that, which means it’s not super strange, but scores extra points for being a silly control made out of a silly creature.
It’s just nice that it’s a rather recent thing in the grand scheme of things, showing that at the very least Square Enix is willing to do something wacky with their hardware despitetheir awful business decisions.
9Power Glove
Slightly Terrible
You know it, you probably love it ironically, but instead of criticizing the Power Glove’s awful controls and lackluster software, I want to focus on the positives, since it feels like a precursor towhat Nintendo would do later.
Aside from the rather unnecessary glove itself,this was essentially a big controller you could wear on one hand, that would enable motion controls and let you play games normally at the same time.
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This same concept carried on to the Wii Remote, and especially to the Switch’s Joy-Cons, and while I don’t think there was a board meeting at Nintendo where they said “Let’s do the Power Glove again”, it does feel similar.
I think it was a respectable effort and a very cool idea, the technology to make it function well just wasn’t there at the time, which is what makes it rather weird, but still a respectable effort.
Limited Mobility
This is one that doesn’t make sense to me at all. The Gamebike is an exercise bike that’s meant to hook up to games to encourage fitness while playing games, but it’s incredibly lackluster.
It needs to be wired, and the main appeal of it is having a controller in between the handlebars. It’s the same price and usually a bit smaller than most other exercise bikes, so I don’t see the point.
With something likeWii Fit, it’s a bit odd, but it’s supported by enough games and unique enough to feel worthwhile, whereas a Gamebike gives you a slightly worse experience than a normal exercise bike.
You can just get a stationary bike, put it in front of your TV, or use a handheld console of your choice, and play whatever games you want while working out. This feels like a far more convoluted way to achieve the same result.
7Booster Boy
Clunky and Unsightly
The originalGame Boyhad issues, sure, and the Booster Boy was an attempt to solve those problems, but it’s so huge and janky that it’s barely worth using over the default.
It surrounds your Game Boy in a huge plastic case, makes all the buttons massive, and turns the D-Pad into an analog stick, which feels like a completely useless addition.
It doesn’t just do that, though, it also gives you a magnifying glass, and a light, amplifies the speakers, adds so much weight, and drains so much battery that it ruins the idea of it being a handheld.
It’s so emblematic of 90s video game culture, turning the Game Boy “bigger and better” while being a huge clunky piece of plastic, and being actively detrimental, yet still kinda charming, in a weird way.
6Wii Speak
Game and Shout
Nintendo has always had a strange relationship with implementing online Voice Chat, and while Microsoft and Sony had it figured out by the late 2000s, theWiiSpeak was Nintendo’s bizarre attempt at it.
It was a physical accessory that was meant to be placed right next to your TV, and depending on your setup, required you to yell over the game audio to have anything come through clearly.
This weird attempt at communication was implemented for a total of 13 games and usually resulted in people yelling at each other with low-quality microphones, making it a complete nightmare to listen to.
This was succeeded with an under-utilized built-in Microphone on the Wii U and the even weirder voice chat that requires you to plug your phone and Switch into the same outlet. They’re still using these “unique” solutions instead of just letting you use a headset.
5Nintendo Labo
Cardboard Machinations
The four sets ofNintendo Labothat were released before the project’s ultimate discontinuation were cool and underrated, but understandably disliked by the main audience the Switch was targeting.
The first set wasa unique variety pack with games you could finish within 10 minutes after building the set for another 30, which left a bad taste in many people’s mouths, despite the clear potential of a Lego-esque gaming experience.
These cardboard crafts were fun to put together, had interactive tutorials that helped a lot, and the VR Set was compatible with a ton of games, and technically allowed you to playBreath of the Wild in Virtual Reality.
It’s a little sad that the series never got to see past the VR Set, and even though many of the prior sets were a bit gimmicky, as a proud owner of weird cardboard, I can say they were a ton of fun, and very difficult to store afterward.
4Game Gear TV Tuner
Pathetic Signal
Have you ever wanted to watch satellite television on a tiny, low-res screen with only an hour of battery life? No? Well, too bad, theGame GearTV Tuner exists for some reason.
With the Game Gear displaying at a crisp 140p and the TV tuner taking up even more battery out of the system known for guzzling energy from 6 AA Batteries like it’s nothing, it’s a surefire disappointment, but quirky nonetheless.
There is an undeniable appeal to using your portable system to watch your favorite shows. It’s just heavily brought down by it being on the Game Gear and limited to satellite channels only.
It’s practically unusable nowadays, and while Sony attempted the same idea on the PSP, it ended up the same way, with far too weak a signal and far too small a screen to be an enjoyable experience.
3Xbox 360 Kinect
Let’s Get Moving
Microsoft saw Nintendo doing motion controls with the Wii and decided they wanted a piece of pie, and instead of making something practical, revolutionary, and fun, they half-assed theKinect, and it’s barely usable.
With Wii Remotes, and less so with the Playstation Move, you could just sit down for most games and have the motion controls enhance the experience, butthe Kinect demands you stand up in a large room and be centered the entire time.
Even under the ideal conditions, the menus are awful to navigate, and it doesn’t register your input half the time. The tracking is so bad, that I don’t recall it ever working as intended for a substantial period.
There’s an appeal in being able to move your entire body to do actions in-game, but that appeal was only realized with the advent of VR, with the Kinect being firmly left behind as a janky piece of history.
2Onimusha 3 Demon Siege Katana Controller
You Are Already Dead
TheOnimusha3Demon Siege Katana Controller not only has the longest name ever, but it’s also a standard controller that is equal parts hilarious and very impractical, with all the buttons placed on a Katana.
It’s a ridiculous control layout, having six tiny buttons followed by the left stick, the D-Pad, and then the right stick, all plotted along a single line, which is as uncomfortable to use as you’d imagine.
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It’s an impractical controller that somehow also has every input you’d need to play most games, and since no one ever wanted it and are only rediscovering it due to how weird it is, it now goes for around $1000.
It comes in a very sick-looking box, with a stand to keep it on display as if it were a real Katana. Everything just came together to make this one of the strangest controllers that is also genuinely kinda cool.
1DK Bongos
You Know It Well
The DK Bongos aretechnically just a Gamecube controller in a bongo-shaped trenchcoat, but unlike something like the Slime Controller, it’s only intended for one game,Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, but somehow works on most other games.
You have six entire buttons, two on each bongo, one in the middle, and an extra input whenever you clap, which all read as standard Gamecube inputs, and can be theoretically used to play any game that supports that controller.
This means you can attempt to playSmash Ultimate with the DK Bongos, with limited success, or hook them up to your computer and do aquick playthrough of Sekirowhile clapping to the beat since it’s a rhythm game and all.
It’s charming, it’s designed in a rather wonderfully weird way, and it’s strangely effective at giving you a very funny limited control scheme that forces you to clap your hands whenever you want to parry.
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