Best Controller

Best Controller

(This suggestion from @SephyTheThird)

have you done best controller yet?

No, I haven’t. Thanks for your question!

Oh, you’re still here? You want me to tell you the best controller, not just say if I’ve done it already? You should have said.

The Best Controller

I’m going to make some limits, otherwise this would be a longer and even more tedious series of blog posts than that ridiculous Alphabest thing: console controllers only, keyboard and mouse don’t exist, handheld consoles have controllers built in so don’t count, guitars/drums/bongos are out, and joysticks will be excluded because reasons. OK? OK.

NES Controller
Defining, but boxy.

Without going into too much detail, a fair few controllers can be binned straight away. The NES/Famicom, Master System and PC Engine pads may have sufficed at the time, and the NES one in particular is undeniably iconic, but they’re uncomfortably rectangular. Function over ergonomics was definitely a thing back then.

The PlayStation 1, 2 and 3 pads in their various Dual Shock and Sixaxis forms are also kicked into the skip. The sticks on those with sticks are hilariously inaccurate, poorly positioned and have ridiculous dead-zones. The buttons are nonsensical shapes which even to this day I can’t remember the layout for (which makes QTEs impossible), and the shape of the pads don’t fit my hands. Also: convex triggers on the PS3 controllers? Who thought that would work?

PS4 Controller
Finally a decent Sony pad!

The PS4 controller goes a very long way to rectifying some of these issues, with a better shaped pad and much improved sticks and triggers, but is still let down by Sony’s shape buttons. It’s a great controller apart from that, but it’s off the list anyway. Numbers or letters Sony – sort it out.

Both original Xbox pads – the big ‘ol fat one and the later S model – are pretty clumsy. The S is better, but it’s still not quite comfortable enough to come close to being “best”. The 360 pad (which I’ll come back to) is a much improved evolution.

The Dreamcast pad is colossal, partly because it has to accommodate the VMU, and is pretty heavy. It also suffers from only having one analogue stick at a time when two was really necessary for many games. The comparable 3D pad for the Saturn is also dropped for similar reasons, and while we’re here, the original western Saturn pad had terrible L and R buttons and a bizarrely lumpy d-pad, so it is out too.

Saturn Pad
The original Western Saturn pad. Look at that silly d-pad.

What does that leave us with?

The Mega Drive pad is great, but the later 6-button revision is better. The Japanese Saturn controller is very similar and just as good. The SNES pad was perfect for most games at the time but having to use L and R in Street Fighter II rather than the missing C and Z buttons was difficult. I wouldn’t complain, but that game was a major selling point for the SNES over the Mega Drive and Sega at least made a suitable pad to go with it when it finally came to their console.

Jaguar pod
Just look at it. It’s not a bloody telephone, Atari.

The Jaguar controller is just stupid. It is superficially like a Mega Drive pad, only with a telephone numeric keypad glued underneath. That might have been fine back in the days of the Atari 2600 and Intellivision when games would make use of them (remember those maths titles?) but on the Jaguar it was a waste, especially since so many Jaguar games were just ports of Mega Drive and SNES games that already didn’t need those buttons. At least you could have game-specific overlays on the controller, I suppose. Yay?

Borrowing from the SNES pad in many ways was the CD32 controller. A similar layout, but a different shaped unit. If you thought the PlayStation button symbols were bizarre though, you’ll love the easy to remember “Arrow Pointing Down Onto Line”, “Square”, “312” and “Snake Chasing Its Own Tail” of the CD32 controller!

CD32
The CD32 pad. Why is the red button almost imperceptibly larger than the others?

Another failed console was the 3DO, and its controller is very much like a Mega Drive pad. It even came in a 6 button version primarily for Street Fighter II. I prefer the Mega Drive one to use, but the 3DO did come with a unique but mostly useless feature: player 2’s pad plugged into player 1’s, rather than into a second port on the console. Great if you’re sat next to your mate, less great when they’re P1 and “accidentally” disconnect you.

The N64 pad was a monstrosity which was often described as a sex toy, and didn’t make any sense until you actually used it. At first glance it appears you’d need three hands to operate it, but in fact it’s designed to be two controllers in one, with your left hand on the left “prong” operating the digital d-pad or on the centre prong controlling the analogue stick and trigger, depending on the game you were playing. In reality, very few games needed the d-pad at all, so as nice as the pad was (and it was perfect for Mario 64, which is the only thing that matters) it was all a bit pointless.

Having said all of this about all of those controllers so far, there’s one thing that I could have stated that would have immediately wiped almost every one of them off any potential best controller list. Wireless.

It’s impossible to understate how important a wireless controller is, and how difficult it is returning to older consoles that don’t have them. Sure, there were wireless pads for the NES and Mega Drive, but they all used infrared, requiring you to point them at a receiver to work. All of them were crap.

It wasn’t until the Gamecube’s Wavebird controller that the game changed. Sure, it gave up rumble (making Mario Party impossible to play) to provide better battery life, but no more did cables exist to trip over. Microsoft had tried to solve this problem with “breakaway” cables on their original Xbox – the cable actually separated if tugged, preventing Junior from pulling a seven ton console on his head (which still actually happened, apparently). A better fix was to get rid of the cable completely, which Nintendo did using RF signals instead of infrared – much more reliable.

It clearly caused a stir because the next generation of consoles that followed the Gamecube all had wireless pads. The Xbox 360 had an option for either, but it was clear that wired was on the way out. Since then, only third party controller manufacturers have taken the wired route.

If the best controller is therefore wireless, what are we left with? The Wavebird and the 360 pad, I’ve already mentioned and Sony’s controllers have been discounted earlier. The Xbox One, the Wii, and the Wii U are pretty much all that remain.

Comparing them to each other, the 360 pad is slightly better than the Xbox One pad (in my hands, anyway), and the Wii remote isn’t great for anything much apart from pointing at the screen and swinging around, with the Wii Classic Controller and the Wii U Pro controller bother being better – the Pro pipping the Classic, because it has immense battery life (40+ hours, easily) and doesn’t need to be plugged into a Wii remote.

The Wii U gamepad is great, but lacks analogue triggers, and the L and R buttons are quite a stretch from the ZL and ZR buttons – you can’t access both sets at the same time like you can with L1/2 and R1/2 on other pads. It’s also a bit heavy for long use, unnecessarily so if the game doesn’t use the screen, and the battery life is very short at around four hours.

I think this leaves the final trio as the Wavebird, the 360 and the Wii U Pro controllers, so how do they compare?

The Wavebird uses the same layout as the excellent standard Gamecube pad, but big clicky analogue triggers and the best ABXY arrangement with a big fat A button and smaller BXY buttons in orbit around it. However, it lacks rumble, and has a near useless (due to position) d-pad. It also has a strange single Z shoulder button – why not one on each side?

Copying the layout (sticks above d-pad and buttons on both sides) of the Wii U gamepad, the Pro controller removes the screen and drastically improves the battery life, but the stick positions mean ABXY are somewhat low down, and awkwardly so.

Which leaves the Xbox 360 wireless controller. It has a terrible d-pad (again, due to position more than anything), but everything else is pretty much perfect. If only it had A swapped with B, and X swapped with Y so the buttons were all the correct way round!

Winner!

The Xbox 360 controller
The Xbox 360 controller

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  1. Pingback: The Atari Jaguar Controller - deKay's Blog

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