When Street Fighter IV was released a few months ago, I found myself a bit annoyed by every gaming journalist informing me that I had to drop another $60-$150 on an arcade stick to fully enjoy the game. Longtime readers of 61FPS know that I'm a notoriously cheap bastard when it comes to gaming, so you can probably guess my response when these earners of a living wage stressed the importance of spending an obscene amount of money on a peripheral necessary to make a single game playable. The sad thing is, they were right; Capcom's fighting masterpiece turns into an unresponsive game of chance if you happen to be using something as poorly-designed and unreliable as the XBox 360's d-pad. But Street Fighter IV alone is not the only victim of bad controller design.
I want to make a distinction between games with bad controls and games hampered by a bad controller; for the former, that little lump of plastic in your hand is not to blame. But if you happen to be a well-meaning game that's entirely reliant on the XBox 360's d-pad, then may God have mercy on your soul.
I may be about two years late to the party on this one, but with my recent (cheap) purchase of a disc featuring quite a few XBLA arcade game, I was completely psyched to sink my teeth into Pac-Man: Championship Edition. Psyched, that is, until I realized that the only four controller inputs required (up, down, left, and right) were completely fudged by that brain-dead square of plastic known as the 360 d-pad. It's hard to get angry at Microsoft, though; Nintendo's patent on the plus-sign d-pad has made less-effective alternatives a necessity. I can only imagine how sweet Pac-Man would be with an arcade stick, but some rich relatives need to die before this dream can become a reality--and these relatives don't even exist yet.
So, 61FPSers, have terrible controllers ever taken the proverbial leak in your cereal bowl?
Related Links:
The Periodic Table of Game Controllers
Bringing Sexy Back: Retro Controllers of the Future
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