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Brook

Brook "Vivid" Controller for Nintendo Switch Overview

Kris Randazzo
11 minute read

The "Vivid" controller from Brook offers a considerably more affordable alternative to the official Switch Pro controller, and it even comes with a few unique features to boot.

This controller is coming soon. You can sign up to be notified when it releases here: https://stoneagegamer.com/brook-vivid-wireless-co...

Transcript of the video:

Hi, everyone. Kris from Stone Age Gamer here. And let's talk a little bit about the Nintendo Switch. It's definitely become one of the most popular game systems of all time. And as such, you have a lot of options when it comes to controllers. Now, of course, striking that balance between quality and price is not the easiest thing to do. But our friends at Brook may have figured it out with this. This is the vivid controller for the Nintendo Switch, and it does a bunch of other cool stuff, too. Let's take a look. 

[00:00:28] Okay. Here we are with the vivid controller for Nintendo Switch from Brook Accessories. And this is a closer look at the box. And you can see this is compatible with the switch, which is its primary function, but you can also use it on Android, iOS and PC. More on that in a bit. Now the box is a pretty nice presentation here. Okay. You will hang that top here. Some nice images on the side and on the back kind of breaks down more or less what you can do. Improved aiming accuracy. Turbo functionality is built right in. You can use it to wake up your console. It does the whole six axis movement round gyro thing. Here's what's in the box. And of course this little QR code down here is how you get to your instructions if you want to learn about all the fancy things that it does. 

[00:01:12] So this is the box of the controller that I've been using. I've been using it for a couple of weeks now. So as you can see, there's nothing in here. But this is the rest of the packaging. It's pretty nice presentation. So let's look at the controller itself, which is this right here. And just real quick, let's take a look at what else comes in the box, and that is some pretty standard stuff. Here is your charging cable. Looks works just like your standard switch controller charging cable and all that comes with this neat little doodad. This will connect your controller to your phone, so you just kind of clip it on and put your phone up here, and then you can use it as a singular phone hand-held controller device, which is pretty darn nice.

[00:01:55] So let's take a close look at the controller itself. The purpose of this controller is to provide a switch pro like experience at a much lower cost. So this is a much more affordable option to the switch pro controller, but it doesn't feel that way. This is a very, very high quality plastic that's used here. This is a very good feeling, controller. It's got a nice weight to it. It doesn't feel overly heavy, but it also doesn't feel super light and cheap. Now it's got a bunch of different options on here, and we've got more, more buttons than there are on a standard switch pro controller. But let's see, the analog sticks themselves have a very smooth movement to them. They have really great resistance, nice, rubbery grip. They are they're quite excellent on both of them. The buttons themselves are a bit more rounded than on a pro controller, but we'll do a direct comparison in a moment. But they have a nice resistance on them as well. They feel good to press. 

[00:02:49] Here's your home button. You can do all kinds of settings and stuff. Here is your capture button for capturing video or screenshots, your start and select a plus and minus buttons. And then this is for using Turbo. You can now hold this down to assign Turbo to on and off of any buttons, which is coming pretty handy for me playing Mario party with the kids and just kind of, you know, cheating my way to victory. I'm like, Oh, I got to press the Y button real quick for this one. I just couldn't turn on my turbo. I feel a little bit about that, but not now. Too bad it's Mario Party. Anything goes. 

[00:03:22] And then you have the d-pad right here. So this is probably the biggest difference in my opinion over the switch pro controller. The D-PAD itself does have a bit more resistance than you would expect out of a D-PAD. So you do have to press a little, little bit harder on this than you do on most other d-pad for the platform. However, it does have a very nice smooth feel and the controllers aren't too poignant. So you're not going to get no crazy blisters from doing a quarter circles and stuff. You want to play a bunch of streetfighter with this and it does it. It has a nice functional d-pad that actually does not give you incorrect inputs, which is something I can't say about the switch pro controller. 

[00:04:00] On the back here we've got this which is macro and shoot and you've got these two extra buttons on the back here. You can assign them to do any number of things depending on how you want to program it and how you want to play. So if you're doing shooters or anything like that with complicated movements, you can program this controller to be like, Well, I'm going to press this button and my character's going to do like a dodge roll or something instead of like just having that be some sort of button combination. It's it is a pretty nice, a pretty nice function if you want to get that deep into things. So here we have the switch pro controller itself. As far as the actual plastic is concerned, the feel of the controller is pretty similar. Of course, this one's pretty worn down because I've used this controller a lot and this one is still pretty new. But the feel of this controller is very similar to the feel of this one. It's brand new. 

[00:04:51] This is heavier, no question about it. This is definitely a heavier, heavier unit. But like I said before, this does not feel cheap. Now, look at the analog sticks. There's. LS the switch pro has this. Yeah. The circle on the inside of it here for for a different kind of grip. I find that this has just as good a grip. I have no issues with this at all. But this is a smooth thing and this is a rigid thing. The actual resistance on the analog sticks themselves is just about spot on. Pretty similar. The buttons. This is a big difference. These buttons are very round. So you can see the the switch pro buttons are rounded on the top, but they're pretty big and flat. These are more circle circular overall. They don't have anywhere near the the flatness to them. However, the the give on these the the action as it were when you press these in is almost identical. The amount of pressure you need to put on a button to press it and the amount of movement where the button goes in to actually create the the button presses is just about identical. So this really doesn't feel all that different functionally. 

[00:06:04] The triggers themselves are also a little different. These are much more squishy and much more analog trickery. You know, there's a whole lot more movement here. These just kind of feel like buttons that are shaped like triggers. These feel like moving triggers, and then your Eleanore buttons are just about the same. So they're really the only functionality that's different here is that the controller gives you some more programable options. I think you could change that the way the face buttons work as well. You can do Turbo. This however does not do and near field communication stuff like amiibo. So no NFC, no NFC for you, you're going to have to scan in to Meebo on your console itself instead of using it on the controller, whereas this one you can scan amiibo right on the controller itself if you so choose. So that is really the difference between these two controllers. Oh, and the vibration. You can control the vibration on this one by default. This thing vibrates like crazy, but you can adjust the vibration levels up and down. I think there's three different ways to do it, which is really nice. You can even just turn rumble off entirely on a controller level instead of having to go in to a system setting to turn rumble off if you so choose. So there you go. That's your basic breakdown. Now let's see this controller in action and show you what it can do. 

Speaker 1: [00:07:21] Okay. So the real question is, how does it actually work in practice? And let's let's show you here is Breath of the Wild. I have my brook vivid controller set up here and look at that just moves around nice and smooth. There's no noticeable input lag. I mean I press a button and link does a thing pretty much straight away. And of course the gyro aiming works like a charm, except for the fact that apparently my royal bow is badly damaged. But yeah, look at that. Just no issues at all whatsoever. So goodbye, Royal Bow. He served me well. Now let's go back to the main menu here and show you some important information about the D-Pad. 

[00:08:01] Now, if you have been using one of these guys for ages, you know, it's a pretty great controller, but that D-Pad got some problems. And let me show you exactly what we're talking about here. So we're going to go down to controllers and there we go, test input devices. I'm going to go to test controller buttons and we're going to test the controller buttons on my pro controller first just to show you what we're talking about here. So test buttons. Now, I'm going to just rotate my thumb back and forth on the d-pad like I'm playing the game attractions criteria. I'm just playing a Tetris or a megaman and take a look at those inputs. That's just me. Move my thumb back and forth. Look how many ups got thrown in there, because that's just a problem with this D-Pad is there's things that you can do to augment it or whatever, but this d-pad registers a lot of incorrect inputs which make this makes this a nightmare to use for games like Tetris. 

[00:08:58] Now, I'm going to hold this button and we're going to go back. We're going to do the same thing with this controller access to controller buttons now obsessing over the exact same thing right now, back and forth, back and forth. Just like I'm playing Tetris and look at that. No incorrect inputs. It's just reading like a d-pad supposed to, which is a pretty nice advantage of the Vivid Controller. It's got a real nice functioning D-Pad very good for playing games like Tetris or Megaman or anything where you really need those inputs to be exactly what you want them to be. 

[00:09:31] The vivid controller from Brook Accessories will be available at Stone Age Gamer dot com at a fraction of the price of an officially licensed Nintendo Switch pro controller. Ain't that something? Thanks for watching, everybody. If you like what you saw here today, please follow like and subscribe. Share it around all your friends and let us know in the comments down below what you think of this fancy new controller. Thanks again, everyone. On behalf of all of us here at Stone Age gamer, keep playing games. 

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