The GameCube controller is my favorite controller ever. I love how rounded it is, and clicky, and colorful. The only way it could possibly be improved is if I could use it to quickly type to whoever just beat me at Rocket League that I intend to shag their dad.
With that being said, and given that there really does exist a controller for the GameCube that is a keyboard too, you should be careful what you wish for.
The official GameCube ASCII controller was made to be used with Phantasy Star Online. It doesn’t really have applications outside of that if you don’t count the obvious other uses such as a tea tray, a throwing axe, or a surfboard. Since the GameCube version of Phantasy Star came out in 2002 one can assume this was when the controller also hit the market – presumably taking out a few small children when it did so.
You will notice also that it features hiragana characters – yes, this was a Japan-only controller. This is frankly an absolute insult to those of us in Europe such as myself who would one hundred percent buy this horrendous badlad purely to be able to type out those aforementioned insults on a game I would probably never otherwise play.
One of the beauties of games like World of Warcraft is that you don’t need to switch between a keyboard and a controller when gaming and telling other gamers they need to get in the bin, because of course as a PC game you’re already at the keyboard and your chicken tendies are well within reach.
Online console gaming of course brings a challenge in player communication thanks to the limited button spread – one which a lot of console games these days handle by giving the player pre-written chat to deploy at the press of a button. Side-note, isn’t it rubbish that the only chat you can send in Mario Kart on the Switch is so limited and polite? At least let me tell whoever just utterly bodied me on the Baby Park track that I’m going to stand on their hat or something.
But it’s not like the GameCube had a dedicated internet access point or anything, like the Dreamcast did. There was no real need for Nintendo’s console to have a keyboard, aside from purely for Phantasy Star Online games. Phantasy Star had already been released on the Dreamcast – but that console did have extended online capabilities such as a browser and as a result, offered individual keyboards that didn’t have the system’s controller trying to get all up in that.
It’s very much the modern thing to have stuff that doubles up as other stuff. Those of us who have lived in London in which our beds took up 70% of the available space we were paying £650 and ten strands of unicorn hair a month for know that there is real beauty in a saucepan that can also be used for frying; a desk that folds out to be a dining table; a box of cereal that can be both breakfast and dinner. Literally just the box, not the contents. Put some sugar on it, and cardboard can be quite palatable.
This keyboard controller isn’t like the Tiger R Zone DataZone. It’s not two things that are known to be shit – in this case, an electronic organiser and an R-Zone console – mashed together. It’s two good things mashed together to make a…thing. Saving up all the space having both separate things would have taken up. Which is so, so much space. SO MUCH SPACE. And honestly, I would use the heck out of a modern version. Not even joking.
What a lovely piece of utter, pure tat.
