One of the biggest knocks a PC first-person shooter enthusiast can give a console FPS player is his lack of response time. It takes a person with a controller a split second more to move one finger off a button to hit another. That second of physical latency, caused by button spacing, is one of the many reasons that PC FPS players rocked 360 players for the three days that Shadowrun was cool. The guys at Acidmods may have the solution to that problem, though. Check out their new Xbox 360 controller mod pictured above.
The part of the controller you can't see is the position of the right analog stick, which has been completely moved to sit parallel with the left analog stick. It is an interesting shift, considering that it seems like a human thumb would more naturally sit on a controller in the old position. The biggest improvement is the obvious one. All of the important buttons on the controller have been moved to alleviate the need to move a finger off of a button. There is also a fancy blue LED around the guide button, instead of that cheap green one we have been staring at all of these years.
Overall, I think it’s a cool design, although it seems fairly impractical as a do-it-yourself project. I wonder if the success of actually creating a controller like this has translated to the gaming aspect. Do you think you can still take the guy that has this?
A video of the controller in action is also included. Hit the break to check it out.
[Via Gizmodo -- Thanks, Matt!]
[Via Acid Mods -- Thanks, Matt!]
Contest:
9:29 PM on 07.01.2008
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Still cool though.
FPS Master for original xbox. I had one. It was pretty sweet. I miss it.
:(
Not quite. Ron c-blogged this, a year ago. It wasn't front-paged.
Also wrong. Ron posted a different mod, though similar. It was a macro mod. This just changes the buttons.
PC gamers never owned the Xbox players because of how broken the control scheme for the PC was. It was made to be hard to play, but the developers underestimated their nerfing abilities I guess. I often plugged my xbox 360 pad into my PC and did better because it disabled a lot of nerfing crap and also added the auto aim back in.
Dammit! I thought so, too. Shouldn't have second-guessed myself.
I don't know why they don't let you remap buttons any way you want through the console interface. That would be a killer feature, if you ask me, and would open up all sorts of possibilities for new controllers. Hey, the hardware still has to be licensed anyway, so what's the beef with letting people alter control schemes?
Btw when was that overpriced, lackluster, piece of crap: Shadowrun EVER in any way cool.
Worst game i have ever bought and only one i returned.
Also, to Murumasa and any other flamers, how about you just be quiet for the rest of the trip if you're not going to say anything nice, kay?