Motion Controls for the SNES! - Power Pad Tilt - Rerez

When most of us think of Nintendo and motion controls we usually think of the Nintendo Wii. But a long time ago another company came out and tried to make motion controls for the Super Nintendo years earlier. This is the Power Pad Tilt from Champ, and it is one of the worst controllers we've ever looked at on Rerez. Despite the fact that this controller came out sometime in the '90s, we happened to get a brand new unit. I mean it was still sealed and everything. The claim on the front of the box says "This controller features patented tilt technology that gives your thumb a rest, while adding more excitement and fun." And you know what? I'll give you that. It DOES give your thumb a rest, but it angers you to no end because the tilt functionality on this controller is a damn nightmare. Now I'm a big fan of F-Zero, and I could control the game pretty well with the regular Super Nintendo controller. But for some reason the tilt controls on this controller here really put the game at odds. You see with the D-pad and the little shoulder buttons on the top, you've got a really good way to control your vehicle and make sure that you don't hit the sides of the walls. But with this controller its tilt functionality kind of holds to the left or right, and it doesn't really stabilize itself so you're always knocking the walls. And in a game like F-Zero, where if you hit the walls a bit too much, it kind of makes your vehicle blow up, you kind of can't play with this controller.

I figured if we're going to try another racing game that might work with this controller, we try something else like Super Mario Kart. And I first thought Super Mario Kart would be a great game to try on this because unlike F-Zero there's a little bit more give and it's not as difficult to play. But it still sucked a hell of a lot. In fact, I would have to say it was worse than playing F-Zero for some crazy reason because the tilt functionality on this controller kept getting locked whenever I made sharp turns. I tried out two different platform games, just to see what this controller would be like with the platforming style of gameplay. Now usually with those kind of games you're moving in one direction, which works really well when you're trying to use a controller like this because once you've locked into that one direction you're really not going to be moving in another direction. But unfortunately even then it's almost impossible to play because in certain games where you hold down and you duck well this controller will just natively do it by accident when you're tilting the controller just a bit too much close to you and that really sucks. For me, I really like to hold my controller nice and close to me but with this tilt controller you kind of have to hold it flat and out away from you. Make sure that you're not shaking it around too much otherwise you'll kind of shift the controller around and it will tell the game to just jump and move all over the place. It's a little bit insane. Even in Street Fighter moving your character around just seemed to be kind of messy and hectic. And you know what? Any kind of movement you are trying to do in Street Fighter II, whether it be some kind of fireball attack, or whatever it may be, it will not work with the tilt feature on this controller. In fact the actual D-pad itself is not really the greatest so it's pretty hard to implement moves with that as well.

This controller has a couple of features I really like. For one it has a ten foot long cable which is fantastic, especially if you're sitting really far away from your TV. But for some reason whether it's the cable itself or something inside the controller I quickly discovered this just didn't work with every system we owned. Now it worked with our original Super Nintendo, and even the Super Retro Trio, but it wouldn't work with the Retron 5. As soon as we plugged it in, it just didn't register anything at all and it acted like we didn't plug in a controller. So that was really strange but I guess back in the day when they were making these controllers they didn't have to worry about Retron 5s. But today you kind of need to worry about that. Now the button placement on here is a little bit awkward. Now the buttons on here are actually pretty good. The little shoulder buttons are a little squishy. But one thing I really didn't like was that the select and start buttons are really dead center on this controller and it's kind of hard to press with your thumbs. I know you're probably thinking that maybe that would be okay but they've kind of extended the reach of the controller so that it's really difficult to hit the select and start if you're holding the D-pad and the buttons at the same time. And then they did manage to put in some turbo switches, which are fun. I like turbo switches when you get to use them with certain games. And these turbo switches work really well. They've got two different speed settings, medium and then fast, or off. And when I was using them I found that they worked pretty well but one thing this does include which I'm not a big fan of is slow-motion. You see slow-motion is basically just the start button being pushed again, and again, and again, and no matter what game you use that with, it's completely useless. And they've got another button right in the dead center here that turns off the tilt motion, so you just use the D-pad which I think is the preferred way you should be using this because as I've shown you already the tilt motion really doesn't work.

Now outside of that though it's a completely serviceable third-party controller. The D-pad being a shield is just something I'm not a fan of and I'm pretty sure if you were to compare this against an original Super Nintendo controller you're just going to prefer that Super Nintendo controller. Motion controls for the Super Nintendo are just kind of stupid and you really don't need them. I can't think of a single game that was ever created on the platform that would benefit from tilt controls. In fact one of the games that came to mind directly when I was thinking of this controller originally was Star Fox, but because of how bad the tilt features are on this you wouldn't be able to lock out of your orientation at any point and you'd keep just swinging to the left or right of your screen which makes the game completely unplayable. When I think of motion controls, especially nowadays, I'm looking at the way we use VR games on the HTC Vive and even the Oculus Rift. VR is really where motion controls are having a really good resurgence. But back in the old days of the Super Nintendo they were pointless. There was no reason to have them whatsoever. So if you're looking for a third-party controller that offers some kind of kitsch value, or maybe you just want to piss off your friend and turn the tilt function on without him knowing it's on, that's the thing you can do with this controller. Outside of that though it's kind of useless.

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