Review of Xgaming's NES-style Wireless Gamepad

Late last week I received my new Bluetooth wireless gamepad from Xgaming. I was really excited about this new product. I've had one of their arcade joysticks for years and found it to be an excellent piece of hardware that fully lives up to the high expectations set for it on their web site. I was certain that this new wireless gamepad, a bit of a departure from their existing product line, would not disappoint me.

So, what do I think now that I've had a few days to play with it?

Let's start with my initial impressions. It was a little smaller than I had expected it to be. It doesn't really give dimensions anywhere on Xgaming's site (as far as I could tell) but the unit is only 5.125 inches wide and 2.5 inches tall. It's slightly over half an inch thick (not counting the sticks and buttons). For me, the small size makes hitting both sets of top trigger buttons awkward but maybe I just need to get used to it. Most games I play only need one set of top triggers anyway. Besides that, the position of all the buttons and sticks is excellent. It weighs only 3 ounces, but feels very solid. The buttons and D-pad are very firm and have a wonderful feel to them.

Technically, it has been functioning very well. I had no problems pairing it to my Windows 10 PC as a Bluetooth game controller, but it did seem to lose its pairing once (there are colored LED lights on the bottom which indicate things like that - flashing blue means ready to pair). I'm not sure if it was the device's fault or mine - I may have been holding down one of the settings buttons inadvertently while powering it on. I'll withhold judgement on that issue until I see if it repeats. There were no issues setting up button mappings in my emulator software either. It all worked very well.

Playing games with it has been very enjoyable so far. The button response is much better than my old SNES-style USB game controller. I honestly haven't liked a PC game controller this much since my Gavis PC GamePad.

The device is currently selling for about $45. If you love playing emulated NES and SNES games as much as I do, I believe you'll find it to be well-worth the money.

The only question left might be, does it work in web-based HTML5 games such as the 8-bit style platformer I've been working on? The answer is...maybe. Web browser gamepad support is still weird. Phaser has an API for it, but so far I've found it difficult to work with. I'll keep trying and maybe have something to report next week.

Until then, I've got more comics for you to enjoy!

Amphibian.com comic for 25 April 2015