Greetings and welcome to LGR Oddware where we're taking a look at hardware and software that is odd,
forgotten, and obsolete - and, do you remember the days when Nintendo made PC gaming peripherals?
Because I sure don't. In fact, I had no idea that this existed until recently but here it is and it is actually an
official Nintendo licensed product, this is the Nintendo 3D1.
That is a PC Gaming controller - from the 90s.
And yes, I do consider this to be Oddware of course,
joysticks in and of themselves are not, but this one in particular is very much because of its
obscurity and some of its features, and I mean it's a Nintendo joystick for the PC,
so I say it counts. But anyway, let's dive into this thing.
Alright, let's take a closer look at
this
Nintendo NJS-3D1: that's the model number.
The marketing tended to refer to this as the Nintendo 3D1, simply.
Or, is that the Nintendo 3D to the first power?
I'm not entirely sure, 90s marketing was a bit silly - and also, big thank you to Chris for donating this joystick!
Even though it doesn't have the box and the other stuff that I normally like to show. It's fine. This is awesome!
I'd never seen this before. He sent my way, so thank you very much.
Anyway, this was created in cooperation with the Laral Group of Farmingdale, New York.
And it retailed for $69.99 in July of 1997.
Not a very cheap joystick for what you're getting here, but it was very clearly made for the PC.
In fact, this is the only - as far as I can tell -
Nintendo joystick made specifically for computers, and the Laral Group said as much in their marketing
with the press release for this thing stating that "The revolutionary NJS-3D1 is the only PC computer joystick
on the market good enough to wear the Nintendo name and it is marketed exclusively by Laral".
Who the heck is laral and why do they have a nintendo license?
I mean, this is a confusing thing and if you look around on the internet
there's a lot of confused posts over the years of fans trying to figure this thing out.
Even N64.com was confused about this product saying that
"Your guess is as good as ours", as to why this thing exists.
They even asked a Nintendo representative to verify the information
and - they did, but they didn't have a reason for its existence either.
They said, actually, "There's got to be a good reason behind it,
but the licensing department is the best place to answer that question."
and as far as I can tell, there was never any follow up. So who knows exactly what went down to make this happen.
Either way - it did, and Laral Group also planned a lot of other Nintendo related products.
Only one of them was actually released as far as I know,
these Nintendo branded infrared wireless headphones with "Audiophile Stereo Sound."
Which retailed for $60 and also featured that 3D "N" Nintendo branding.
By all accounts though, very few units of these sold, especially the joystick.
By late 1998 into 99 the price had already dropped to $25
and it was getting pretty bad reviews on joystick aficionado websites of the time.
Which meant that Laral Group was not impressed and they, uh...
Well, they generously gave back the license to Nintendo in 1998,
according to them anyway - that's what happened.
And then they focused on their Unwired product line after that.
Actually ended up doing pretty well will wireless tech over the years,
including making more infrared headphones, just sans any Nintendo branding.
It did so well that they renamed themselves Unwired Technology in 1999,
and focused on wireless automobile entertainment systems for years
eventually they were bought by Delphi Automotive of Gillingham, Southeast England in 2014.
So who knows maybe your current automobile has some sort of very loose tie to this odd Nintendo
joystick from 1997 at least in terms of the people who made it back in the day.
But anyway, let's look again at a photo of the box for this Nintendo 3D1.
It's just a wild to see a Nintendo sanctioned product say made for Windows 95, 3.1, and MS-DOS PC games.
Nintendo barely ever even touched the PC market and certainly weren't doing so in 1997 to any real degree
It's just a strange mashup of PC and console design of the time, or rather
PC 'computers' of the time as it says: "For use with PC computers only," which is redonkulously redundant.
Or, maybe they just mean politically correct computers, and in that case this fits right in with the current climate.
It's also just crazy to see this Nintendo 64 style color scheme and
the buttons going on, on a PC peripheral like this.
I mean you got like A, B, and C right here, which are these little clicky micro switch buttons, they're actually quite nice.
You have these yellow, like, C button style things, you have a hat right here, red trigger right here,
and then another red button right there. Little throttle, which is kind of crappy feeling, and it actually twists,
and then of course there's this ridiculous giant guard or whatever,
for, I don't know it's like - it's like plastic knuckles. Not brass knuckles. It's stupid.
I don't know why it's so wide and huge back here, but that is a thing.
And then, along the bottom there is a switch here for three different modes.
I don't know exactly what these do yet, because I haven't actually tested this out, but we will find out momentarily.
But anyway, let's plug this thing into a Windows 98 PC and see how it functions with some games.
Just want to show you the setup here, because I have it plugged in and it's ready to go, however
it didn't come with any driver disks or anything like that.
No software, and as far as I can tell from the website it never did.
So what it recommends is actually going in here to select one of the joystick options,
such as the CH Flightstick Pro, and it says that should work.
Alright, so the calibration was successful,
and yeah, we've got full movement there. We have a throttle right there, and then the rudder left and right.
The deadzone does seem to be a little bit shaky,
but it's acceptable for a joystick of this period I guess. The point of view hat works, which is cool.
And then we have buttons 1, 2, 3, and 4. This is kind of interesting though, so these bottom four buttons
I thought were maybe A, B, C, and D.
Turns out they are actually toggle switches for auto fire or "turbo mode" as a lot of old controllers called it.
So we press this, this little red light comes on and then that means that the trigger is now firing in turbo, rapid-fire.
It's not the most rapid turbo I've ever seen, but it works. I guess. And so, all of these light up
with different toggles for the different buttons here.
Now that switch along the bottom, number "1" actually is emulating the CH Flightsick Pro,
Which is what it's doing now. If I switch it to "2", it will emulate the just normal
Thrust Master kind of flight stick,
which switches off the throttle and I'm not sure what else it does but
anyway,
that's what that will do if you want that.
And then switching it to "3" is what they call "Arcade Mode" and this actually swaps
the functions of these four buttons and these four buttons so now this one -
The bottom buttons are like, switches for like "Oh, it's an arcade game!"
So you can just do it with your left hand and control it this way, and then these up here become the auto-fire functions.
So now that lit up that one and this becomes a rapid-fire switch.
It's there as an options... if you want it. Kind of a neat little set of functions really, I'm kind of impressed.
Anyway, let's try it with some games!
All right first up: I'm gonna try a flight simulator, but with DOS, not Windows.
This is the setup program for LHX, one of my favorite flight sims from back in the day.
So let's just try the joystick thing,
and...
hmm...
It thinks like the twisting, like the rudder, is left and right.
Nothing goes up and down. Oh no, it thinks the throttle is up and down. That's just not gonna do at all, screw this.
Alright, well let's try an old standby here. We're just gonna go with uh...
Doom II, which has one of the most like awesomely simple, joystick things going on ever.
You just run this at the beginning.
It'll ask to center the Joystick it does the calibration right on the fly, will see.
"Press button 1" Oh it recognized it, sweet.
Upper-left corner, lower-right corner.
Nice.
Ha!
Sweet...
Awesome, this works!
[Gunshot noises]
I haven't played a, uh, FPS (like a retro FPS) with a joystick in a long time.
But I used to, I used to play everything with the joystick, man.
It was just what you did. Yeah, you can hold this and strafe back and forth, and...
I'm you know, it was a - it was a pretty decent way to control games for...
a lot of stuff really, if you got used to it.
Honestly though, Doom II is just fun regardless of what you're playing it with.
So, I don't think this is necessarily the,
like,
result of their joystick being...
good or bad. But I mean, Doom II is just awesome.
However, it works perfectly fine with that.
But, let's try something else. Maybe a little more suitable for a flight stick.
Okay, well, I thought I had Flight Simulator 98 on here,
but I guess not so I'm going to try the game Genome.
Which is a mech game that I recently reviewed and it has some flight sim type controls, so...
Yeah, you can see here. It's actually even got "Flight Sim" controls
I know they can see that, but it does. So this should be a good little test.
What the heck how funky, okay? I guess not.
[Game: "Are you sure?"] Yeah, I'm pretty sure!
Yeah after messing around with this for a while. I just, I got no clue I've tried all the configurations,
I recalibrated the joystick, set up the buttons it just doesn't like it. I don't know why that's...
Bizarre... maybe that's more the fault of Genome though. I don't know. Alrighty. Well, I give up.
I'm going to reinstall Flight Sim 98 on here and try that out.
[Airplane noise]
Airplanes!
Yeah, I'ma just go with a Cessna.
I'ma do... regional airport.
Parking brake off, let's see if the throttle works...
and it does, that's good sign. Yeah, okay, cool. So it looks like it's doing what it's supposed to here.
We have liftoff!
Sweet!
I mean this feels...
Perfectly adequate to me.
Nice!
Nice! [with Steve1989MREInfo's inflection]
Time to crash this thing!
[Crash noises]
[Chuckling]
I mean, you know, it's a flight stick. It's fine. Really. It's just kind of funky with those like buttons being all...
weird.
Like, I wasn't expecting those four to be rapid-fire.
But, it may make sense in a weird situation here and there I suppose.
And since I know someone's going to ask. Yes, It does work just fine with Mario platformers! [Chuckles]
Even if they're not official Nintendo products, like this one here, which is "Mario & Luigi" by Wiering Software,
for MS-DOS.
I talked about them a little bit before. They do some actually pretty impressive platforming games for DOS.
They're not perfect, and they're not exact recreations of any particular Nintendo Product, but
they get the job done, right?
Well that's pretty much it for the Nintendo 3D1 joystick from Laral Group.
[Chuckles]
That name man, what an unappealing brand. But anyway! I hope you enjoyed this look back at this thing.
And if you did, perhaps you'd like to check out some of my others. There's new videos on LGR every single Monday and Friday.
They're not always oddware, but usually it's something at least interesting if I have anything to do with it.
And I do, 'cause it's my channel and as always thank you very much for watching!