“The Edge Super Gamepad” Review

Introduction

The world must know.

The world must know of your sins.

Also, this is the weirdest video game title I’ve ever seen —

HEY, what’s up everyfroggy, it’s Froge, Your Boy, Esq. here, and today we’re doing something a little bit different from our usual brand of barely – disguised socialist propaganda. While it’s true the Internet has made all notions of digital “property” to be completely and utterly irrelevant just ten years after its introduction and even less in an era where it is impossible to imagine modern life without relying on it every single day, we are but pounds of flesh making our way through probability fields, and so we still have to buy the hardware that allows us to waste our lives on this dopamine – inducing prolefeed. I have no idea how to review the thriving, devoted medium of video game controller construction, but I am but a man, and a man has opinions regardless of his knowledge!

The Edge

In The Edge Super Gamepad, you play as an underweight twenty – year – old white guy living out of a dorm room bought by a lifetime of debt whose only reprieve from university studies is his hours upon hours of speedrunning video games he never gets better at on a Twitch channel that never gets any more popular despite having streamed every day for several months. It is one of the most gripping stories of 2017, which is only because he can’t get laid and has to jack it to increasingly obscure and estranged brands of pornography in order to sustain his hard – on for more than five minutes before getting bored and going back to video games.

This production is brought to you by “Emio”, which I suppose counts as an independent developer in the sense their particular brand of brand of cheaply – produced nostalgia pandering is at least less popular than the leading developer. The rest of their product line ranges from good in theory to cheaply and inoffensively coy to horrifying abominations that Lovecraft wouldn’t have conjured up if he had the worst drug trip of his life right before a four – day Jägerbomb hangover. Also, they sell a selfie stick in the year 2017, which is bizarrely popular enough to be “temporarily out of stock”. I wish this website had HTTPS support, if only to spare myself the embarrassment of looking up a selfie stick and having my credit card information stolen when I attempt to purchase said selfie apparati. For purely academic reasons, of course.

For what it’s worth, I picked up the Edge from my local Best Buy during a particularly desperate shopping trip while I was trying to convince myself that amongst the eye candy smartphones, $450 proprietary software, unmaintainable built – to – break tablets with $200 keyboard cases that will only ever run Windows 10, and the rows upon rows of artificially scarce video games, movies, and other easily – downloadable produce you can get off the Pirate Bay that still cost twenty, thirty, one hundred and fifty dollars a bundle, I would ever find some happiness in this materialistic blue – and – yellow society I somehow found myself patronising, not unlike that time I got lost in Ukraine and everybody tried to sell me cigarettes. I also got to demo the Nintendo Switch while I was there.

Nintendo. The Joy – Cons are fucked up.

So if it turns out that Best Buy did somehow demolish the quality of this controller while it was sitting there on the ground next to the four other unsold controllers and a third – party transparent blue Wiimote that proudly and unironically advertised “No Rumble!” like manufacturing budget cuts are something to be proud of, it still wouldn’t change the fact I paid $30 after tax for a controller that doesn’t even fulfill it’s promise of controlling. The box art didn’t look like bootleg Chinese garbage, the gamepad looked like it was good quality and with decent hardware, and it even advertised a “BONUS Cheat Book Included! 21 Games! Tips & Tricks!”.

The cheat book was not inside the box. I never found out those tips and tricks.

The Super

Let’s talk about the good first, to give a company that insists on putting “Designed in California” on the box art while still outsourcing their manufacturing to Chinese workers who are slaves on every level except legal, a fair shake. The hardware quality isn’t shitty as far as I could tell within the two hours I could stand using this thing, and it does look like a reasonable clone of a SNES controller like something Nintendo would officially licence; this controller wasn’t officially licensed, probably due to the whole “Compatible with PC” selling point, though it does work with the SNES in case your officially manufactured controllers weren’t good enough to satisfy your need for games built on devices that were built explicitly to assassinate competition and prevent any third – parties from making any modifications or enhancements to baby boxes that at one point cost the same as a brand new PS4.

The hardware is actually pretty solid. While the wire is wiggly as all hell, as is standard for those companies who have yet to figure out the magic of soldering, the rest of the components are surprisingly not wiggly at all, even compared to my year – old GameCube controller whose face buttons can be moved out of position just by tapping them. The controller feels solid instead of just a piece of plastic with a circuit board inside of it, it has a nice matte texture that doesn’t fall out of your hands, and its colour design emulates that of the European SNES layout nicely. It looks like a nice and tidy piece of hardware, and even though $30 is on the cheap side of gamepad purchases, it does look like ti would last a while based on this decent first impression.

It’s fortunate that this thing was able to be detected by Linux out of the box, because I’ve dealt with previous versions of the kernel which would silently fail when you plugged obscure hardware into the back, but I’m glad that it recognises the USB passthrough as a generic gamepad. I was able to configure it in RetroArch as a SNES controller no problem, and it continued to work fine instead of randomly dropping out has happened with some wireless peripherals in my time. You see, even though cables are a pain to manage, it’s just plain practical to have everything wired in order to ensure that, barring the thing physically breaking, they will work 100% of the time until you unplug it. There’s no proprietary software you have to download, and no Windows – only drivers you have to scrounge up and pray it works with Wine. It’s just plug – and – play like the USB standard was made for, and I appreciate that.

Alright, you already saw the star rating. Let’s shitcan this thing.

The Conclusion

Let us all agree that the function of a controller is that it controls, and that if it does not control, then it is worthless; I believe Marcus Aurelius of “Meditations” fame put it best: “Nintendo, what the fuck are these Joy – Cons?”. While the Switch controllers have the problem of being too small and insubstantial, with joysticks that could be pushed by an ant and buttons that require fingers smaller than a twenty – four day – old child, the minds at Emio decided that the best to do was to look at Nintendo’s failings and go in the opposite direction, requiring bigass normie hands to operate and having buttons that require the force of a thousand tons! I though a controller with the title of “THE EDGE SUPER GAMEPAD” would be more suited to twitch gameplay and fine movements that allowed for instant action? Now I know why they included (well, were supposed to include, thanks) a cheatbook: to let the games make up for the gamepad’s failings!

Although the SNES has no games, I’ve managed to break this thing in using Super Mario World speedruns; you can see all my practice has paid off here. And, uh, although I cannot produce any footage of the Crimes against Gamers I have created, (which somehow still manage to be comparable to the times when I’m actually trying to get personal bests), I will say that a D – pad which, instead of constantly going right when I hold down the right button, decides to, in addition to not going right because you haven’t held it down with a one – kilogram weight, also enjoy the privilege of making Mario Crouch and Look Up and also Non – Rightwards Actions (the NRA, as it were).

So not only do I have here a controller that requires constant concentration in order to make sure that you’re pressing down on the buttons hard enough in order for the thing to register instead of pretending it’s being registered even though the button is already depressed, it barely works despite all your concentration evolved. The first moments you spend with this controller is trying to bend it to your whims. When you do that, you realise it is a naughty slave, and won’t do its job unless you are particularly literal and manipulate the D – pad at the exact angle it demands. What’s tragic is how easily it does set itself up, luring you into a security that life, despite its hells, has its heavens, too. The security is false. And Emio is the Temptress.

Oh, I forgot to mention this controller has a turbo function. But when it brings you to The Edge, can you consider yourself Super? Thinking face emoji…