I've just spent a couple of hours playing with the controller. Initial thoughts...
- It's a bit plasticky
- It's a bit heavy
- The button/pad placement on the right is annoying after coming from a 360 controller, but I'll get used to it
- The haptic feedback is a bit weird. I don't get why you'd want it on the analog stick - it just feels like it's creaking
I had a play at a few games. I started out with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. This is a good choice for me, as I know the game inside out and have completed it umpteen times on PC and Gamecube. Any difficulties I have must be down to the controller as I know I'm fine with the game. The default controller map was no good, so I had to dig up a list of the controls and map them myself, which was a bit fiddly. I set the analog stick to act as a d-pad, essentially. The game only uses WASD for movement, and even when using a 360 pad on the PC it's not true analog, it's still just those 4 directions, so it's a bit clunky. I got that set up working OK. I went one step further and had a play with some faux analog stuff in terms of walking when you just push the stick a bit and running when you push it all the way, which you can do in the advanced settings. That took a bit of adjustment but it worked OK. You basically set up a ring between the deadzone in the centre and the outer ring at the full push of the stick and then you can set it so that when you're either in that ring or pushing beyond it, it adds an addiional input. So in PoP to walk you push in a direction and hold shift, so with this you set it up so that in the inner ring it thinks the shift key is being pressed along with the direction button, but in the outer ring it just gets the direction so you can run. With things set up I played for about an hour without getting too cross with it, so I figured that was a good start. It was very useful that it treats the right pad as a mouse and recognises the shoulder buttons as mouse inputs, because with a regular 360 pad when you try to use the menus you can't, and you have to use your actual mouse to move the cursor around.
I played quarter of an hour of Batman: Arkham Asylum. Again I know the game inside out and have completed it multiple times, so I can just get on with testing the controller. There were some community maps for this, so I picked up one of those. It's quite handy as it shows how many people are using which maps, so you can look for the popular ones and hopefully that is some guide in terms of quality. I found a popular one that worked OK. They'd done something with the right pad to make it work miles better than the default settings did. With that map I was able to play fairly well, though I couldn't quite rack up the high combos I'm used to. I'm hoping it's just down to the position of the buttons - my thumb kept naturally falling too far up and right, because it wanted to go where the buttons would be on the 360 pad.
I tried Burnout Paradise, but that keeps crashing on me for some reason. I'm not sure whether it's the controller or what.
I tried Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. Again, I picked up a community map. It needs some tweaking as to zoom in and out I was having to click the shoulder buttons over and over (the shoulder buttons act as mouse scrollwheel directions), but I know there's a setting in there to allow you to just hold them and have it treat it as constant input. It was a bit fiddly, and it'll take some getting used to, but I think it could work. It would certainly be interesting to try playing it with just a pad rather than a mouse.
So fairly good results so far. I'll try Shadow of Mordor tomorrow, and maybe have a stab at FEAR which I'm playing through. That will be a real test as I'll need WASD input on the analog stick and decent mouse input on the right pad, so I might copy whatever was in the Batman config I found for the right pad and see how I go from there.
