“Durp!”: Cliffy B – “Switch doesn’t have enough buttons!”

What was originally a series done by fellow Pietriot Bill Aurion now has my filthy hands all over it. Filthy Canadian hands, no less.

So let’s get one thing out of the way first; my respect for major Third Party Publishers, and their developers, who I will call out of disrespect “Thirds” is at an all-time low. I called it back in October last year that Switch’s Third support would be mired by bullshit, and lo’ and behold, it turned out I was right. In recent weeks, we’ve had some dip from THQ Nordic complain about Switch’s lack of power, despite, you know, games like Snake Pass being ported in under a couple of weeks. Then we had the creator of the Oddworld series spout these wonderful comments about Satoru Iwata. So in short, when Thirds make themselves look hilariously incompetent and they get mocked for it, I am as happy as a pig in mud because it gives me and my fellow Pietriots on our Discord server something to mock and discuss.

Yet something has to give, and it turns out a recent comment from good ol’ Cliff Bleszinski, who now heads up developer Boss Key Productions, has made it impossible for me to find a meme reaction pic worthy of how brain dead he has made me.

But first, let me use an old image from a previous piece I did. Yoshiaki Koizumi himself with two Switch Joy-Cons. Both have a Shoulder Button and Back-Trigger button (L/R and ZL/ZR respectively. And the number of face buttons and analog sticks.

So Cliffy B has a new game called LawBreakers, which can run on Switch . However, there is one major problem. From the mouth of Cliffy B. himself:

“There’s a possibility for everything and anything in this world. I think the hardest part with the Switch is the controls. Look at the game that we have right now, and we just literally by the skin of our teeth put the entire game and the control pad that the PlayStation has. That means that we could probably make it work for the Xbox One in someway, right? But if you’re looking at the Switch the base controller that’s on the unit, it doesn’t have as many buttons.”

I have a theory; either Cliffy B was looking at just one Joy-Con unattached from the Switch console and didn’t realise there was another one, or Switch has the power to make you go full dumbass. Single Joy-Con controls are meant mostly for local multiplayer. Split Joy-Cons can be used together a’la Wiimote and Nunchuk style (or in the Joy-Con grip) and have the same amount of buttons as the other guys; hell the Pro Controller is a standard game controller with gyro built into it! As you can imagine, his reasoning is not just flawed, it has gone beyond the realm of stupid. I mean, this is as stupid as a publisher putting a game like Monster Hunter on the PS4, westernizing it to the point it doesn’t look like a Monster Hunter game and completely ignoring the game people want localized on 3DS and Switch!

Oh, wait, that is a thing too. Damn.