“With Honeycomb and subsequent versions of Android, Google baked in wired and wireless controller support into the OS. NVIDIA worked with game developers to ensure proper support for these controllers made it into their games and as a result there are a number of titles available through Tegra Zone that offer support for external gamepads. Logitech’s Wireless Gamepad F710 comes with a USB nano receiver that can be plugged into the Transformer Prime’s dock,” Anand Lal Shimpi reports for AnandTech. “It’s using this controller that I played Shadowgun, GTA 3 and Riptide. Out of the three, the ability to use a gamepad made GTA 3 much more enjoyable (and it made me much better at the game as well).”
“Although many casual Android/iOS games do just fine with touch, some are certainly better suited for some sort of a controller. While controller support in Android in its infancy at best, it’s more than iOS currently offers,” Lal Shimpi reports. “I know of an internal Apple project to bring a physical controller to market, but whether or not it will ever see the light of day remains to be seen. As smartphones and tablets come close to equalling the performance of current game consoles, I feel like the controller problem must be addressed.”
“There’s also the chance that physical controls will lose out entirely with these devices. A friend of mine in the game industry once said that we are too quick to forget how superior input devices don’t always win. The keyboard + mouse is a much more precise setup for a first person shooter, but much FPS development these days is targeted at gamepads instead,” Lal Shimpi reports. “The same could eventually be true for touch based devices, but it’s too early to tell. Until then I’m hoping we see continued controller support in Android and hopefully that’ll put some pressure on Apple to do the same. It is an important consideration for the future of gaming on these platforms.”
Tons more in the full iPad (2012) review here.
MacDailyNews Take: We, too, hope for much more than just this, even though without it (or things like this and this) our old school games addiction wouldn’t exist on iPad at all. Some games – old and new – demand a physical controller.
[Attribution: MacNN. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]