If you’ve been following the sillyness around here, you know about the Circle Pad Pro add-on for the 3DS. It isn’t mandatory, and from the sounds of things from developers, it’ll only be really used as another control option, instead of the only option. Even the game that it is coming bundled with, Monster Hunter 3G, can be played without it. But still, it’s interesting to hear that the upcoming (in March) Kid Icarus: Uprising will support it, but not in the way you think. The game director Masahiro Sakurai has told ONM about it:
The way we are using the Circle Pad Pro in the game is to provide support for left-handed gamers. We’ve made it possible to use the right Circle Pad in place of the left one.
Alright, that’s neat. I mean that’s only like 10% of the population, and the left-hander I talked to has just adapted to control schemes that require stylus and analog stick usage, not that there are many games that use that. My question was why they weren’t using it in replacement for the stylus control, as I’ve not found it works all that well, though they did a decent job on Kid Icarus: Uprising from what I’ve played. The answer?
I didn’t know the specs of the Circle Pad Pro, or what it looked like, until Monster Hunter 3G was announced, so we weren’t able to do anything big with it in the time we had. Even if we had known about it from the start, I don’t know whether we would have used both Circle Pads in that way.
This would end up being just the same as controls on other platforms and I think the quick aiming possible with the touch panel suits the game best.
Which is, for a first party publisher, astonishing. This is a team within Nintendo working on a big release on a new system that they were, at the time, struggling to sell. The fact that the producer of the title didn’t know almost anything about the peripheral before everyone else did back in September is ridiculous. How quickly did they throw this thing together? From reports it feels and works just fine, which shouldn’t be surprising because of how simple it really is, but this means one of three things to me. Either Nintendo doesn’t really see the Circle Pad Pro (I hate that name already and it hasn’t even been released in North America.) as something to really use in many titles, their internal communication between teams is horrid (which has been hinted at before), or they threw the thing together in a huge hurry after they were given some kind of ultimatum. The latter wouldn’t surprise me, given how big Monster Hunter is in Japan. Either way, a bit interesting/surprising, no?
