it's retro no it's not not today anyway
8bitdo is known for their retro controllers or retro style controllers
but these are a little bit different they're more contemporary kind of like
the xbox controller here and this is kind of the yardstick i'm going to use to
measure them so these are the pro 2 controllers what
are pro twos like the pros were controllers that had the handles
and the sticks along with the kind of retro style
aesthetic while the pro twos well looking at it i i don't really see
much of a difference so let's see what they have to say about themselves not a whole lot on the back
here it just says that it supports the switch version 1.0 and
above for the i guess the traditional switch it's the firmware and 9.0 and above for the switch light
Windows Android macOS steam i mean
if it works with the operating system why would it not work with steam at raspberry pi as well with bluetooth 2.0
and above interesting so i can't imagine the bluetooth 2.0
experience would be very good but i don't have a pie handy to test that with
yeah not a whole lot else going on in the box so i guess it's time to take it
out i am a bit of a fan of 8-bit dose packaging okay
that is kind kinda neat looking but i do
not like the plastic it needs to all be cardboard be
environmentally friendly first of all i feel like they've changed
the shape of the grips they were basically like circular before
like just basically you're holding onto cones whereas now they're
a little bit more triangular prismy shaped sort of
it's kind of weird to describe but it's it's
better it feels better in the hand analog triggers
yeah that's something that 8bitdo hasn't had i don't think the pro
original pro controllers had them uh you can correct me if i'm wrong
that is huge and also i'm noticing i'm
pressing these little pedals on the back here yeah it's got grip
triggers as well which i think you can program
to be separate functions like i'm not sure if they can be macros or what
but yeah that's kind of cool sticks
they feel all right i have grown
very accustomed to having the sticks in this position
which i mean at first i didn't like it because i was used to the playstation
but now i'm not and this
no longer is all that comfortable to me but your mileage may vary
there's another thing that i noticed on the back here that is not on the pro
as well the original pro and that is a
battery door yeah it's got a built-in battery that
can be taken out and you can just replace it with uh
double a's how about that yeah so you don't have to
worry about your 8-bit doe controller dying over time and you had to use it
wired all the time capacity is a thousand milliamp hours uh i don't
know what the battery life is though
twenty play hours of four hours of charging time yeah that's about right i
guess obviously i was putting it in wrong before i guess it goes in
contacts first and then it yeah slips down like that
neat because yeah you can't remove the battery at least not easily
from other 8bitdo controllers that i've used
or the playstation 5 controller microsoft's been pretty good about that
over the years yeah i'm not a fanboy or anything like i
run Linux but their controller is just nice so let's put this aside for now and
go through the rest of the box there's not a lot in here you get uh
usb type c i believe yes usb type c
charging cable which uh yeah it's type c to a
and it is wired for data but usb 2.0
only which is fine for a controller but don't use it to plug in a usb
SSD or something and also we have the
instruction manual and is this also plastic feels like it's
plastic and it's glued in i mean it's fine i guess
i'm i'm not sure what aspect ratio you would call this
cvs receipt yeah cvs receipt yeah there you go and on the back
we've got a mode switch that is interesting because before you had to
hold down a face button while turning on the controller to change different modes
which is super confusing and i to this day do not remember how all of them work
they say that they don't support hd rumble ir camera of course they don't
notification led or anything like that nor can the system be woken up
wirelessly really does nintendo not wirelessly turn
on the switch when you turn on a controller i
thought the switch pro controller did that i think it does yeah that sucks
good thing i'm not using it on the switch but before i use it on anything
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unbounce okay that looks cool we've got
profiles that we can set up here that's what the profile button is all about
uh i think technically they could display
as many as six profiles with these leds but you only get three
so it's not the most intuitive interface in the world
in order to map everything you've got your controller map here you would think
that you'd like click on something and it would like give you an
option but no over here is what you're looking
at so l2 goes to left trigger
you can assign that to whatever you want same with l up down left right
so you can literally modify any
anything you want here so let's see can i do turbo from here i know there's a
turbo setting you can do separately so let's say i want y oh
no no you can't do that okay
that's a little unfortunate but not a big deal i mean
once you change something you just click sync to controller and it syncs and then
please turn off the software after customization in order for the controller to return to its
required mode for playing games on usb what i don't understand what it's
telling me i guess it means quit the software uh press to load profile okay cool so
let's go back to what it was and it actually shows thankfully it
shows the default with a little dot here regardless as to
what you have it set to so if i have it set to x for the x button it still has y as where
it should be and it is it's currently saved as the x button
so if i set it to y sync it again there
you go that's helpful let's see the sticks
it's not the highest resolution thing in the world
it's kind of skipping over a bunch of steps so we can adjust the dead zone
i don't know why this says zero here it should be adjusting to show me a
number so i can get like the actual percentage i want uh again that's kind
of interface fail but it's nice to be able to adjust these
things so with the dead zone set like this i can go this
far actually without actuating anything and
then we go out to here and it's 100 we can also set it so that the actual
active area is much smaller so you get 100 much
sooner that is kind of cool what that allows
you to do is make it so that you don't have to flick
quite so far in order to get to 100 of your
motion so if you're playing a
driving game and you are well insane
you can make it so that 100 is
pretty much instantaneous that's kind of cool you can invert your sticks here
along both axes that's interesting
you can swap the sticks so for games that for whatever reason
have movement on the right stick you can swap them the triggers
so these have the same kind of range of motion adjustment
now it's not going to actually change the range of motion of the controller
itself it's still going to go the whole way but i can make it so the left trigger's full
actuation is like right there so basically giving
you a hair trigger i can make it even shorter so it's got two vibration motors so the
right motor is obviously the fine motor and the left motor is the chorus motor
and i guess yeah you can adjust how powerful you want your
rumble to be so you can actually set it to zero if you don't like it like
some people i know do you can set it for five which is the highest possible so
you have the biggest range of vibration yeah that's actually a really
cool feature because not all games let you change the strength of the intensity of the
rumble and finally we have the macros here so macros hmm how do we make one
okay so down down forward
forward and um let's say
why yeah so that'll now do uh
basically immediately so i don't see a way to even
so much as tests the motion capabilities of this controller
but it looks like the switch mode
is required for it so nintendo switch mode it emulates a pro controller
and interestingly in switch mode it has a fairly deep
dead zone of like it says it's like 25
but it feels more like okay maybe it is 25 so yeah i'm just gonna go ahead and
not do that there we go now i've got the full range of motion on that
yeah that should be just about right so
switch mode in case you didn't know should work
perfectly fine with steam with retroarch
with a number of things that actually support it steam should work with gyro aiming
with flick stick i haven't tried it yet and i may not
because we're currently signed in as david and i don't know if he wants me to
kill his kdr in cs go or whatever
so um let's play to this thing's strengths
and play some retro games feels solid
actually like i was using those retro handhelds before
they had uh you know a fair amount of
input lag at least by default you can set them up for
much better input lag configurations
if you put the part like the time into it i feel like
that's probably part of why this feels so good but like this is bluetooth
you wouldn't normally expect bluetooth controllers particularly on Windows
to be quite so good okay so that d-pad is
very responsive all of the buttons are very responsive actually
there's a nice snap to them i don't normally really
like that but for a membrane controller like this there's a rubber membrane
underneath these uh these buttons it's pretty good like it feels good it
feels right to me now Linus who grew up as a
nintendo kid and you know is entirely in love with
the super nintendo controller will probably have plenty of things to say about this
but uh you know for me i actually
kind of like it it's comfortable you've got the handles
and you do have these sort of grip buttons
they're okay how do we put this
those grip buttons can be used yes for turbo and
yes for like holding down buttons stuff like that which is great
but there's no reason why you couldn't have set up any of the other buttons for that as well
it's just not exposed in the software so
we're looking at the software here now i can assign any button to any button
that's that's the thing i can do but only on these extra buttons like the
uh the star button or these trigger buttons can i do
turbo or hold or swap or any other special function i guess those are the
only three that seems really arbitrary to me there might be times that i want to have
the y button here set to the b button and the b button here set to the a
button but there might also be times where i want like this
and then these to be turbo and like being able to select between profiles
like that on the controller without having to go through the emulator
would be a lot easier to me
with that being said maybe i can set it up so that when i'm holding down these
switches those changes are made but it seems a
little clunkier than it really should be now Linus just walked into the building
and i'm sure i could find something that would make him upset about it is it cool yeah it's cool
enough that's all right it's kind of trying to
be a snes and a ps1 controller
and it's sort of neither yeah how's input lag over bluetooth
okay i swear like not all my bees were going through hmm
come on one up i need more water oops no that's not a one-up that's the opposite
of a one-up wired wire so there you go like i don't
like everything that 8-bit doe does their original pro controllers they
didn't really wow me in the same way like i was like oh yeah finally a retro style controller with
handles that i can kind of hold and you know it just didn't really do much
else other than have the handles compared to the sn30 so with that in
mind this feels like a lot more of a mature product it's got a lot more
features to it it's got the rumble it's got the 6x controls it's got the
removable battery it's got usb type-c it's got switch
pairing mode it's got pretty much everything you can want it's
programmable and yeah i mean how much is it like 50
bucks not in stock but yeah 49.99 it gets you
a very competent controller that feels right
for retro games these sticks aren't going to blow you away
they feel fine they're perfectly serviceable
but they're certainly not on the level of the
xbox series controllers nor the
dual sense or even the dual shocks but that's not what these sticks are for
these sticks are there for more of a general purpose kind
of thing it's for your playstation 1 games your
n64 games basically for games that are going to be you know old enough that
the sticks that were on the original consoles weren't all that great
but these are better they're not amazing and
that's kind of what this controller is all about it's bringing back that
feel of the classic controllers but better
is it worth the 50 i would say so i would say that if you're into retro
gaming at all yeah you could do way worse than getting
an 8-bit dough controller especially one like this well thanks for putting up
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