Xbox 360 Wired PC Controller Review

Performance and suitability of controls
Controllers tend to be an area of high subjectivity. What one person sees as a great controller, another may find unusable. To help make this as objective as possible, I will focus on a couple of areas which appeal to different gaming demographics.

Arcade racing (Analogue stick orientated games)
Arcade racers tend to rely on the left-hand analogue stick for navigation, and the triggers for acceleration/deceleration. During competitive play in the games GRID and TrackMania, I noted my experiences whilst using the controller. GRID recognised the controller from the get go, and even changed the on-screen instructions to match the new key mapping. The in-game performance was impressive overall. The triggers are quite precise, which was also noticeable during calibration. The analogue sticks behaved just as you'd expect from a high quality device - they were consistently accurate and there was no 'drift' when left at the origin.

TrackMania required a bit of fiddling due to the strict default settings for dead zone and sensitivity. The dead zone was so small that resting your finger on the stick would cause the car to move slightly. After a bit of tweaking, the results were spectacular! Having the ability to precisely alter the turning angle allowed me to shave seconds off previous track records. The triggers worked, however the game only supports full acceleration or no acceleration, so they weren't particularly handy.

Fighters (D-Pad oriented games)
Fighters tend to rely heavily on the D-Pad for precise movements and combos. It just so happens that I'm not much of a fighter gamer, so testing this would be difficult during a game. Instead, I opted to test the reliability via the game controller properties window. This allows me to see which directional arrow is being pressed at a particular instance. The D-Pad on the Xbox 360 controller is a single circular piece. It moves much like the analogue control, which is quite odd for a D-Pad. In fact, it tends to defeat the purpose of having one. The fluid movement between each of the four (or eight, if you count diagonals) sides will more than likely be a detriment to people who require accuracy. For instance, rapidly going from 'up' to 'right' will more than likely trigger the diagonal in-between.

Testing this hypothesis only confirmed the fact, and it was clear that without uncannily precise movements, the D-Pad is not particularly good. That being said, this will probably only affect those who require the accuracy that games such as fighters thrive on.

<< Prev. page Next page >>

Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 7. View All