What can I do about my Nintendo Switch controllers?
A Thank you, suspiciouslynamed reader, for bringing to light an important topic. GaGu will now express his personal feelings (not those of T3 as a whole) as rudely as possible in the hope that those in charge of hardware for the in-production Switch OLED edition actually listen: Switch Joy-Cons are complete rubbish, they’re far too expensive, and Nintendo should be utterly ashamed to have released them as-is. Guru can only presume that they are as crap as they are because selling multiple £50-odd sets of defective controllers to saps is a good way to make money appear. Guru himself is about £200 deep in replacements and repairs alone. Now that his latest set has started acting up, he’s basically decided to give up on the Switch in handheld mode altogether.
In case you didn’t know, the key problem with Joy-Cons is drift, where the joysticks decide they like pointing in a certain direction. This is caused by filth buildup on the contacts, and a contact cleaner (Guru uses WD-40 Specialist Fast Drying Contact Cleaner) can offer some temporary respite, though the drift comes back quickly. You can replace sticks on the cheap with kits available on Amazon and Ebay, though this is a fiddly process liable to create more breakage.
Whipping out the screwdriver also doesn’t solve any of the other problems. The easily-killed buttons, the abysmal Bluetooth range, the random disconnections, the poor attachment to the main body of the Switch which almost immediately loosens out of the box, the fact that the layout is really not made for human fingers. Guru’s inevitable conclusion – clearly not the conclusion of T3, you understand, just that of one crotchety idiot – is this: give up. Get a Switch Lite, or a Pro Controller, or Not A Switch. Why bother fighting?