Introducing a future Exhibit A
As a major video game press outlet, we get a lot of emails in our Tips mailer asking us to cover Kickstarters, iOS games, Steam Greenlight trailers, and all kinds of garbage. It happens! Any good PR representative will tell you that press coverage is a crucial part of a product’s release cycle. And, let’s be fair, sometimes cold-emailing reporters does work! If you’ve got the right subject line and an interesting pitch, you just might grab somebody’s attention.
This nightmare device — known as the R-HANDLE — absolutely grabbed my attention, as well as the attention of our publisher Niero, who said it reminded him of the “Wild Wacky Action Bike” from South Park. Me? I think it looks like some horrific The Fly-esque combination of a Dreamcast fishing controller, and those Xbox keyboards. Like if Dahir Insaat made a video game controller.
It’s Russian (obviously), and currently only a single prototype exists. Here’s some footage of it being used to play Dota 2, which thematically I can get behind. A complicated controller for an equally complicated game makes a lot of sense.
Looking at this thing, I don’t even think I’d instinctively know how to hold it. When you grab a DualShock 4 or an Xbox One controller, your hands just naturally fit on the thing — your palms grab the curvature, your index fingers rest on the shoulder buttons, your thumbs end up near the face buttons and thumbsticks.
Creators Alex and Eugene Nesmeev claim that the R-HANDLE will be the best controller of all time, beating out classics like the GameCube controller, the Xbox 360 controller, the Xbox One controller, and the DualShock 4. “Tests show that this prototype absolutely surpasses all known gamepads,” this Doom video claims. I doubt this very much.
The duo make a good point — thumbsticks are not as accurate as a mouse and keyboard — but I doubt this abomination is the way to fix the problem. If you’re only really holding the controller with your left hand, with your other hand grasping the massive side protrusion, wouldn’t that create stability issues? There are an excessive number of buttons as well, some even crammed near the d-pad!
Currently, there is no way to buy this or even donate to a Kickstarter. I hope the R-HANDLE gets funded so we can all learn a valuable lesson about solving problems that don’t really exist.
(PS: If your name starts with ‘R’, I’m going to start calling you R-HANDLE.)
