My son’s been complaining on and off for a couple months that one or more of his Nintendo switch joy-cons were drifting. Thing is, when he handed me the controller it would stop as soon as I gave it an input.
Honestly, it seemed like a nitpick to me and admittedly at the time my Mr Fix-it priority list looked something like this:
Why the heck isn’t this c# app compiling and why does Nuget package restore keep failing
“Honey”, the car has been making a funny noise
“Honey”, the heater fan in the house has been running non-stop for days
The lawnmower sounds like a Blue Man Group concert when you engage the blades
“Honey”, the gas stove delivery people said they can’t handle the install
Medieval Madness’s left orbit kick-out is hanging at the top of the VUK during gameplay
Scared Stiff’s crate is eating balls during multiball
Galaga’s Fire button is loose
Cocktail Table needs to be Degaussed
“Explain Common Core Math to me”
Christmas is coming
Miles’ Joy-Cons occasionally drift.
Finally, over the holidays I took some time for a stay-cation and to catch up on my Mr. Fix-it list and found myself a couple days before Christmas, looking at his Joy Con issue.
Turns out, it is a real thing. I found this article from over the summer: The Verge - Joy Con Repair is a Thing
”Cats in the cradle and the silver spoon”…
..I started to feel like a real Daddy-McJerkface for shrugging off his concerns and not looking at this sooner.
Admittedly, though I have a little controller-spend PTSD, partially attributable to Microsoft.
Yeah, this tool box in my garage is a bit of a mess. Judge not, lest ye be judged.
There, in my garage toolbox, three allegedly broken XBox 360 controllers sit like abandoned Andy’s Toys waiting on me to verify their functionality, fix or throw away. Another 2 or 3 of these $69 money-pits are lurking somewhere in my office as well, awaiting me to get around to repairing them.
Solution
We bought Miles two more joy-cons (which cost about half what the other systems charged) and it only took about 10 minutes to test and identify the affected controllers, fill out the RMA form and print the (free) return label.
Seriously, Nintendo even covered postage.
2 major holidays and 3 weeks later, the impacted joy-cons arrived back - fixed and ready to rock.
If you’ve ever had to endure the mostly common sense Customer-Service training that large corporations thrust upon their employees under the guise of an employee benefit, it goes something like this:
Day One: A look at Disney hospitality
Day Two: Role Playing: Turning a negative into a positive
The gist is that an unhappy customer on the phone is an opportunity to dazzle them and win loyalty.
Looking back, Nintendo really did just that. It was a fast, hassle-free repair arrangement and… at no cost to the consumer, even for shipping? Nintendo is an Over Achiever ya’ll.
Progress Bars are Hard
In 2020 even Pizza Deliveries have progress bars that are more accurate than Windows, Mac, ChromeOS and Linux. Seriously, the math behind a progress bar is:
100 x (([Number of Operations Total] - [Current Operation]) x .1)
But the best and brightest software companies on earth (ever) just show a spinning circle during long operations or a bar that looks like a coked-out squirrel running back and forth at the bottom of your TV.
See below, Nintendo (in partnership with a third party dev firm) ported a version Mario Kart to iOS.
Look at that glorious progress bar… Not only do you get real progress bars but they went so far as to include an extra decimal point. Nintendo is just showing off their mad 4th grade math skills to the world.
I’m sorta half-kidding here but all joking aside that port of Mario Kart from the Switch / Wii codebase is pretty good considering the limiting nature of touch controls.
Speaking of the Nintendo Switch
Maybe the reason I have a sensitivity towards progress bars is that we are stuck staring at them so frequently. Every time I turn on the xBox One (when it worked..) or PS4 it seems like another 10-30gb update is waiting and needs to be applied before you can play.
Meanwhile after being switched off for 2 months, I pick up one of the classic NES controllers for the Switch and press A. It turns on, applies a quick 200mb update and within 20 seconds I’m at the game-selection menu of their quite awesome Classic NES library of games.
Just to appreciate the hidden complexity of that mundane task… This Switch has bindings for 5 total controllers. The controller, which still had a charge -turned on and woke up the Switch, which assigned to Player 1 status and booted up ready to go.
No “resync” the controller nonsense. It.. just .. works.
Repeating the theme “It Just Works” zooming out on the right, huddling in the dark - there is my 35 year old NES which.. also .. still works. Above it, the 23 year old Nintendo-64, still works.
So do all of their accessories.
Meanwhile over at Microsoft…
For contrast: There, beneath a pinball machine amongst a sea of parts totes and a broken guitar amp sits my XBox One. Lonely, unplugged and unplayed for over a year. My $500 Day-1 XBOne was unplugged for good following the 5th optical drive failure and about 16 total hours invested in frustrating technical support/RMA calls and emails with Microsoft.
A VCR-sized paperweight with just about as much utility. Part DVR, part game system, all missed potential and confused strategy.
When it was working, load times were long and update necessity was frequent. X-Box Live was a very good experience, otherwise.
To say I was a Microsoft gaming fan is an understatement. You can find pictures of me standing next to the Master Chief statue at the old XBox offices in Washington following a series of interviews with another division at Microsoft. There are no fewer than 4 working XBox 360s in our home. My license plate was D0tN3t for Pete’s sake.
This was the road from a nearly fanatical apologist fan of all things Xbox to the dusty & dejected hunk of plastic you see above.
Honorable Mention: Playstation
Also: good job, Sony.
In the interest of fairness. Our two PS4’s, PS3 and Vita all work, have always worked and I’ve never had to fix or replace anything on any of them. Their game load times were a little faster between the PS4 and XBone (for the same game title).
Updates and downloads are still large… Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019) needed a 90 gb initial update to be playable but that’s as much on Activision and Infinity Ward as it is Sony. PSN can sometimes be a slight pain or feel like an afterthought by comparison to X-Box Live.
But all things considered the Sony ownership experience has been a solid one, as well. Sony’s exclusive titles haven’t grabbed me like Halo did back in the day but Sony has earned my loyalty.
Conclusion
Ten months from now the next-generation of consoles are going to be competing for your hard-earned money and coveted spot beneath the Christmas tree. As I stare at the two displays trying to decide what to get:
I’m going to remember that the xBox One was a hot-mess designed by the disjointed committee that brought us Windows ME and not the visionary genius that gave us the original x-Box and later made the x-Box 360 so dominant.
I’m going to remember my overwhelmingly positive ownership experience with Playstation products, how much fun we had with PSVR and how great God of War was.
Finally, I’m going to remember that for 35 years Nintendo has been making and delivering solid hardware and software with few exceptions On the rare occasion that I had an issue, they made it right. Over-achievers that they are.