For this week, Joe and Dom consider: What is the dumbest peripheral/add-on for a video game console? As expected, both make penis jokes.

Dominick Mayer

That goddamn microphone in Hey You, Pikachu! for the Nintendo 64. In case you can’t recall, the idea behind Hey You was that you would have a Pikachu, you would talk to it through a microphone that plugged into your controller, he’d slowly learn to recognize your voice and it would be adorable. What actually happened was Pikachu got confused, if he even paid any mind to what you said, and most of the time he’d just stare at the screen, as if to taunt you. Observe:

Needless to say, in the hands of little kids, and especially little boys, Hey You, Pikachu! went terribly wrong in short order. Soon, “Come here, Pikachu” turned into “Hey Pikachu, eat my dick!”, and you’d get that same smiling, affable reaction while patting yourself on the back for living on the cutting edge of comedy. The problem is that calling Pikachu a homo while sitting alone while other 11-year-olds went out and made friends could only last for so long. After that, rage. Pure rage. And usually the disappointed look on your mom’s face when she realized that she just shelled out around $70 so you could shout at a fake thing for maybe 36 hours and forget about it forever.

Joe Anderson

I gotta go with Steel Battalion’s controller for the original Xbox. I won’t deny that it’s pretty badass (and I’m not a huge fan of mechs/giant robots) but at launch the controller alone cost $200. Considering the controller was not useable with other games except the 2004 sequel, that’s a ridiculously high total cost of ownership for a single game.

As you can see, the controller has 3 pedals. The left and right pedal controls your mech’s respective legs, while the middle pedal controls the mech’s giant robot penis. Well, not really. But that’s how I always imagined it. Fun fact: if your mech is in the process of blowing up and you failed to hit the “eject” button you would die and Steel Battalion would erase your save data.

Pretty nifty but not $200 worth of nifty.