Nintendo has a strange habit of forgetting to put the right buttons on their portable consoles, for instance, the two face buttons missing from the Gameboy Advance (which made a whole lot of sense given that half the console's library consisted of SNES ports). Thing is, many GBA developers found ways to creatively map controls to get around the lack of buttons, but there's really not much you can do when a whole analog stick is missing, as is the case with the Nintendo 3DS.
Thankfully, Nintendo of America has just announced on Twitter that gamers can pre-order the Circle Pad Pro accessory from Gamestop. Can somebody please tell NOA this sort of news shouldn't be treated as a fun announcement? Nor should it be branded as an awesome GameStop exclusive(!).The existence of this ridiculous thing is a tacit admission that one of your major product lines is fundamentally flawed, and can only be fixed by jamming an awkward bulky piece of plastic onto the side of the device. This is the sort of news you should be working like hell to bury.
Either way, feel free to head on over to GameStop's page and pre-order a device that as of writing, has no compatible software available for use. Yeah boy!
