A joystick too loose for good use

Say you're a gamer who bought an Xbox 360 for Pac-Man: Championship Edition. You're likely the only person in America who bought the system based on a Pac-Man update. You happen to be typing this very sentence. And you quickly realize that your gaming is suffering from the same problem as every Pac-Man port after the poorly coded mess that was the Atari 2600 version: you lack a joystick.

Pac-Man was made for twitch movements that you simply cannot perform with your thumbs, no matter how many times you've punched out Mike Tyson. With that in mind, you've one of two options to play speedier Pac-Man update properly: a Hori Xbox 360 Fighting Stick EX2 (retails: ~$60) or the Mad Catz Arcade GameStick (retails: ~$30).

Being the tightwad that I am, I went the Mad Catz route. And, even though I've yet to get my mitts on the Hori-branded stick, I feel as though I should've taken that left at Albuquerque.

Let's not beat around the bush; The Mad Catz Arcade GameStick is poorly designed. The main selling point, the joystick itself, is flawed. Instead of the tight, responsive, eight-directional stick one assumes this Atari 2600 look-alike would have, the joystick is actually another analog. This leads to sloppy, loose control that is simply unacceptable in a majority of Xbox Live Arcade games.

The controller itself is awkward. The joystick is in the upper left corner, the d-pad is on the lower left corner, the ABXY group is on the upper right corner and the second analog is on the bottom right corner. The concave edges of this square controller just don't feel right (especially considering the convex edges of every controller since the SNES dogbone) and it's nearly impossible to use both analogs in a game like Geometry Wars since you're gripping the left analog. Don't even try to use the shoulder buttons, as they're on the top edge of the controller. And good luck finding the Start and Select buttons without looking.

The one bright spot of the controller design, the "A button" located on top of joystick, can often get pressed when pushing in the analog for the "L3 button." Thanks to the brilliant controller layout, you're also going to find yourself bringing up the menu blades when you accidentally nail the Guide Button in the middle of the controller.

Meanwhile, you get the standard "turbo" option that you get with virtually all third-party controllers this time with three selectable speeds. You also get a 360 degree spinner that you can turn on and off, though I'm not sure how many games this will be of use. Maybe we'll get lucky and Kaboom! will see a remake.

Finally, you've the controller's shortcomings that come from simply comparing it to the standard Xbox 360 control pad. The lack of wireless control is disappointing. The lack of rumble, however, seems unacceptable.

The actual selling point, if you're able to find the controller cheap enough (I got mine for $16 on eBay), is the three redemption codes packaged with this controller. I ended up paying less for the controller than I would have for Frogger, Time Pilot and AstroPop separately (That'd be $20 for those of you keeping score at home.).

Overall, this is a terrible option for a third-party controller. It's slightly better than the standard Xbox 360 controller for Pac-Man: Championship Edition, Frogger or any other game that uses four or eight direction control and just a few buttons. But for a majority of the games you'll be playing, the Mad Catz Arcade GameStick is nothing more than another in a long line of inferior Mad Catz peripherals.