I put a lot of weight on the quality of the D-pad when forming my opinion on a controller. Something that a surprising number of people can't wrap their head around. I know it may not be an integral part of the gameplay experience for Modern Warfare 2 or whatever, but believe it or not some games still forgo analog control and are made with with pads or joysticks in mind.

This is why I get so upset over controllers for modern-day consoles, with Microsoft taking the brunt of my hatred. Who approved that abomination? It feels bloated and mushy, and has no defined shape or decent tactile feedback. It's almost bad enough to believe it was made so intentionally, to encourage users into purchasing expensive things like arcade sticks or fighting pads, but I know that's not true because Nintendo already did that, and Microsoft is above recycling their shitty ideas. *cough*

Microsoft claims to be addressing this by releasing an updated controller with one of the most contrived and gimmicky improvements ever, Adding the ability to choose between a disc-pad or a cross-pad fixes nothing, and Microsoft should know that. Nintendo consoles have always used cross-pads, and the recent ones suck. Sony has that ridiculous broken cross D-pad and all it does is make diagonal inputs way harder than they need to be.

8-way D-pads have been around since the dawn of time, preceded only by 2 and 4-way joysticks, and spinner controls. Why can't anybody do it right? There are decades of previous examples to learn from, but the most prolific tech companies in the world that spend millions upon millions of dollars on research every single day and manufacture things that were beyond the imagination of science fiction only a few years ago, can't even create a piece of plastic that adequately manipulates 4 switches on a circuit board.