When you have console gaming systems, you have controllers. Controllers are often strangely shaped, angular, and may even come with long cords. As a child of the Nintendo generation, I have fond (??) memories of my mother yelling at me to wrap up my chunky rectangular NES controllers and put them away or she’ll throw them out (she never threw them out). My friends and I used to race to see who could wrap up the cord the fastest and then chuck the controller in the cabinet.

Now I’m the parent, and I see what my mom was thinking. I yell at my kids all the time to take care of the controllers and to put them away. Of course, it’s a bigger concern now that controllers are anywhere from $40 to $60 or more. These are valuable pieces of equipment in their own right. My extended family thinks I’m nuts and maybe a little obsessive/compulsive with my rules about washing your hands before you touch a controller, but then they’re not the ones that have had to buy the same controller two or three times because Cheeto slime or Diet Coke got into the analog stick of a controller and ruined it.

My point is that I am a bit of a nut when it comes to taking care of my controllers. Why, then, do I just leave them laying around all over the place?

The answer is that I never really had a good place to put them. Someone else obviously had the same concern, which must have led to the creation of the ArmoryTech controller rack.

ArmoryTech was kind enough to send a rack out for us to review. It’s hard to review a piece of equipment like this because it is what it is – it does what it does, and it does it well. There are a few faults, but overall this is something that most people with console systems need.

Let me get the negativity out of the way. The website claims “mounting hardware included”. This means two screws. The screws are, literally, the cheapest, lowest quality screws I have ever seen. When I put the screwdriver to the screw and started turning, the head sheared right off. I mean that. I was using a hand screwdriver, not a high torque powerdriver. The screw just….broke. Done. Clearly this is not a dealbreaker, because wood screws are so extremely cheap and you probably have a couple in the bottom of your junk drawer anyway. Still, I think the makers should find a new screw vendor. At any rate, in supplying my own wood screws, I was able to mount the rack with no problems.

There’s the other rub – you have to screw this thing into a wall or other surface. There is no way to mount this freestanding. It would be nice if they offered an option to make it freestanding.

At $19.99, it’s a little bit pricey to store four controllers. I was able to store six with some improvisation (two Wiimotes dangling from the bottom prongs), but in a house with multiple console systems, you’ll be spending $20 per console to store the four controllers. This can get expensive. It would be nice if it stored six for the price.

Okay, there’s the bad stuff. That was pretty painless. Now the good: It works. It holds all types of controllers. I even have a 360 Controller with a Chatpad on there, and I thought for sure it wouldn’t hold it – it does. It comes in three colors, red, white, and black. I wish they could figure out some way to hold the Wii Nunchuk, but it does hold the Classic Controller as well as Gamecube controllers (wired and Wavebird).

If you need it, you know you need it. Overall, this is a very handy thing to have.

Thanks to ArmoryTech for providing the review sample.