Knowing full well Nyko’s pathological hatred of wires from our E3 tour, we weren’t entirely surprised when we received word that the hardware manufacturer was preparing to debut a new wireless controller for the Nintendo Wii. Dubbed “Wing,” the battery-powered wireless device will connect via dongle to the Wii Remote, and present an ergonomic, larger alternative to the Classic Controller, for use with all your Virtual Console titles and Wii games which allow the Classic Controller as an option. What did surprise us, though, was that Nyko had sent us a prototype made out of paper, and we’d have to put the controller together ourselves.
Nyko, it’s rather unfair of you to expect gamers to be capable of hardware assembly just to use your products. I also have to say, this new controller of yours is kind of light and flimsy, and it wouldn’t sync up with my Wii at all. I hope the final version is available pre-assembled, and has some working parts in it.
Hit the jump for pictures of our adventures in peripheral papercraft.
Nyko helpfully included photos of the Wing controller in its final form, looking sleek, shiny, and game-ready. See for yourself:
Looks pretty slick, eh? Nyko is promising the Wing will offer 30 hours of gameplay on 2 AAA batteries, and a 10ft range to the Wiimote with no wires required. Well, let’s see what we’ve got to work with…
Okay, so, it’s a little less sleek, and the triggers are printed backwards. That’s fine; it’ll just make you feel more Russian if/when Karnov comes to Virtual Console. Besides, clearly the Wing allows for the mod community to arrange their buttons any way they want.
How many other controllers will let you spell out “Ax Baby?” Tell me that.
This has been a real eye-opener for me — I always assumed they had machines to do this. Now I know better. If nothing else, building a controller from scratch really makes me respect hardware manufacturers. It’s got to be a tough job, sitting there in the Nyko factory, punching and folding all day, getting glue everywhere.
Honestly, though, I don’t see how Nyko can stay afloat with this kind of assembly process. The lost man-hours just for glue-drying time have got to be staggering.
To top it off, once the controller was finally built, I had a number of complaints. The batteries kept falling out of place, the Bluetooth had absolutely no range on it, and the analog sticks were stiff and unpleasant.
Nyko is expected to announce the final details on the Wing next week. I hope, for their sake, that they iron out all of these issues by then.
Full disclosure: At time of publication, Nyko was a client of TriplePoint PR, a firm managed by Richard Kain, owner of our parent company Pantheon Labs. A TriplePoint representative sent us the papercraft model.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
All true, but it’s very green — totally recyclable, uses no electricity, &c.
August 29th, 2008 at 10:11 am
That’s pretty cool. If I didn’t already have the classic controller, I might totally jump on that, but the little wire going from wii-remote to classic controller does not bother me enough to buy a 2nd controller.