Gamer Playing With Upside-Down Controller Is Blowing Minds On TikTok

What difficulty setting is this, exactly?

Mike Diver

Published 15:24 7 Jun 2021 GMT+1

We all know that journalists need their own special difficulty for beating games, right? Somewhere south of never-played-a-game before simplicity, just press X to win, that kind of thing? Good joke lads, we love it just as much on the 1,000th time of seeing it in the comments as we did the first. But jokes aside, there are some people out there who seem, at least, to make playing games difficult for themselves, above and beyond any conventional settings.

You know what I mean - from an individual streamer beating Dark Souls with a dance mat, to Twitch playing Pokémon, that sort of thing. And then there's Twitch streamer and TikTok user Roopz, who doesn't so much come at his games from a different perspective, as entirely backwards.

Since we mentioned Pokémon, just there ^, these 3D prints are just incredible...

Roopz plays with his controller - any controller - upside-down. Which, yep, means face buttons on the left (something I've not seen since the Master System's Control Stick), analogue sticks fully inverted, and triggers on the bottom. I know, I thought what you're probably thinking: yeah, right. It's a fake, nobody's brain processes games that way. But, it seems, the man's technique is legit.

Advert

Roopz posted his unusual way of playing games to TikTok, where the clip's now received over 665,000 likes and over 8,000 comments. In it, he says, "I've got something with my controller which, I have been told multiple times, makes me a menace to society." He then proceeds to "turn that sh*t right around," and showcase some FPS gaming with an Xbox pad entirely the opposite way around to how it 'should' be held.

"I know what everyone's thinking," he says. "He's playing a video. Nope. Someone's playing for him off-screen. Nope. I've been playing upside-down since I was two years old." And just to really prove he's not messing with us, Roopz has a host of videos on his Twitch channel which do show how he uses a pad the wrong way around, on games from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

Gotta say, I've been at these video game things for over 35 years now, and I've never met anyone who plays with their pad like this. But if it works for you, man, which it clearly does, more power to you. I wonder though - does Roopz's hands-to-brain-to-screen process work the same way for motion-controlled titles? Get some Wii on your streams, dude.

Check out Roopz's TikTok video below - but beware, it has some spicy language in it.