Unfortunately for the
PX4000, it doesn't quite seem to get anything right. When I first got the controller, I was entranced by all the little doodads it had -- locking an analog stick is a fantastic feature for racing games, and the little wheel on the bottom was quite cool. But as I started to actually
play games with the
PX4000, I got more and more frustrated at its performance.
Let's get the big one out of the way -- the thumb pad sucks. It's horribly inaccurate, and playing something like AquaAqua with it is an exercise in ultimate frustration. The analog sticks are relatively tight, which mostly makes up for the atrocious thumbpad, but there are a lot of games (puzzle, generally) where I find the control of the digital pad to be much more useful than that of the analog sticks. Too bad -- with the PX4000, chances are good you'll end up having to use the analog stick.
Secondly, there's something . . . bizarre going on with the buttons on the PX4000. In AquaAqua, the controller magically flipped which buttons were which, confusing me the first few times I played it. I tried other controllers with my PS2, official and unofficial, and they all worked fine. I still haven't figured out what was going on here.
But the largest problem with the buttons is that they are simply inaccurate. I was trying to play Dance Dance Revolution with the PX4000, and it was an exercise in futility. I missed half of the beats, and was having to anticipate how long it would take me to hit the button, which completely throws off the flow of the game. With my old Dual Shock, or my new Dual Shock 2, there was no such problem. I got perfects regularly. This lack of precision can really take the fun out of hardcore gaming.
