How to use your phone with your console controller

Touchscreen gaming is all well and good, but sometimes you can’t help but yearn for some good, old-fashioned buttons. Thankfully, if you have an Android  handset or tablet, you can satisfy that urge for physical inputs quite easily – and enjoy a whole host of retro gaming goodness to boot.

Wii Remote

The  Will has sold almost 100 million units since 2006, which means there are an awful lot of Wii Remotes in homes up and down the UK. Because Nintendo’s iconic wand-like controller uses a Bluetooth connection to communicate with the Wii console, it means you can link it up to your Android device just as easily – providing you have the right app, of course.

Ryan Frawley’s  Wii Controller IME is one of the oldest apps of its type, and one of the best, too. It not only allows you to link up to four Wii Remotes to your device, but also allows you to connect accessories such as the Nunchuk and Pro Controller. You can then map buttons and use the controllers in one of the many emulators available on the Google Play market.

Sony’s famous controller design is seen by many as the best there’s ever been, so it’s understandable that many Android-owning gamers would want to use it on their phones and  tablets. It’s not quite as easy as getting a Wii Remote to work, however – for starters, you’ll need a device that has been rooted in order to get Sixaxis controller  application to work. You also need to manually pair the pad with your phone by connecting it to your PC, which is a bit of a rigmarole but the end result is more than worth it.

Check out our PS3 Slim review here

Xbox 360 Wired Pad

To use a 360 pad, you’ll need an Android device which either has a standard USB port (like the Asus Transformer Prime) or a converter cable and a MicroUSB port with USB host support. Believe it or not, Android is able to connect automatically with wired USB gamepads, so you may discover that the dusty old PC USB controller you bought all those years ago is actually useful for something.

Something else entirely

You’re not totally limited to using existing controllers for your gaming needs – there are several bespoke options on the market which make the process even easier. The  Gametel padG works on Android and iOS and features a clamp which allows you to bolt it securely to your blower and effectively create a self-contained handheld console.

Another choice is the iControipad, which also boasts support for Android phones and iPhones and comes with twin analogue sliders. At the more costly end of the spectrum, there’s the famous iCade (and its pint-sized sibling, the iCade 8 bitty ), which is designed to work with iPads but will also support Android devices.