Cast your mind back to when you first opened your shiny new Nintendo Switch.
After removing the individually wrapped controllers and clipping them onto the console itself, you delved into the box’s second layer of goodies to find the dock, the power cable… and a couple of plastic stick things.
You likely pulled them from their little pouches and quickly understood that these were the Switch equivalent of the Wiimote straps; the Joy-Con’s design necessitated a separate little ‘rail’ that the controllers clip into.
And if you’re anything like us, you promptly clipped them to the Joy-Con the wrong way round and then had a nightmare trying to prise the things off. Once you finally managed to separate the poorly designed clips, you returned them to the box and never touched them again, irritated that you might have damaged your shiny new console mere moments after unpacking it.
Images allegedly showing the new Joy-Con for Switch 2 seem to align with previous reports that they attach to the console magnetically, suggesting that perhaps we’ll soon be seeing magnetic variants of the Joy-Con Strap… although assuming they’re electromagnets, that would mean anything they attach to would need current to make them ‘stick’, which complicates things. Let’s not worry about that for the moment, but it has got us wondering how many people actually used these things in the first place.
They’re hangovers from the Wii days, of course, when motion controls were new and no television was safe from some eejit impaling a controller through the screen during a particularly vigorous Wii Tennis match. We weren’t inclined to wear them then, even with all the health and safety warnings Nintendo took care to show us, so after accidentally attaching them the wrong way and banishing the Switch variants to the box immediately, it makes us wonder how much cash Nintendo might have saved by not including two of these with every Switch sold, plus the untold millions of extra Joy-Con it’s shifted over the last seven years.
