Thursday, October 27, 2005

My X360 Controller

I finally got my hands on a 360 wired controller today. It's a lot smaller and lighter than I though it would be, it's super thin too.

You can see the "Ring Of Light" all lit up in this picture, when connected to the PC the only time it lights up in when the controller is first plugged in. As of now there's no games or apps that use the 360 Button.
This pic show the bottom of the controller, the port shown is where you connect the headset. There's no more stupid adapter to plug in to your controller, any 3.5mm headset will work including all old Xbox headsets. So don't worry folks; the Halo 2 Headset, will work with the 360!
As you can see the top of the controller now has four buttons A-La PS2. Surprisingly these buttons are way better than the original Xbox ones. I say surprisingly because I never felt like there was anything wrong with the old ones. The "Triggers" labeled LT and RT, have a little more resistance. So now the triggers will be more dynamic, instead of the button is on or off, there's a lot of middle ground now. As in LT is only being pushed 50% or 75%, instead of the old way of 100% or 0%. The "new" (read: moved) buttons on top LB (Left Button) and RB (Right Button) replace the crippling Black and White button of the old Xbox controllers. Possibly the worst buttons on a controller to date, (except maybe the infamous Z button on the Gamecube) these new button are great. They have a satisfying click to them, they don't have squishy feel that the PS2 does.
This pic is just a close up of the buttons, specifically the 360 button. For some reason I thought the 360 button was monsterous, and as you can see it definitely is not. It's just a tad bigger than X Y B A. There are four quadrants to the "Ring Of Light" on the controller: first and foremost a section lights up to tell you what player you are. So as you can see from the pic around the button you can see 1, 2, 3, and 4. Depending on what player you are that section of the controller lights up, it a little thing but very cool. No more guess work, or tracing cords to figure it out. So your player idenification light stays on all the time until you get a message. Then your controller will flash to let you know that you are the one that got the message. So say FootlongMelman and STL Oak are playing a game of Halo 2 (On the same box) and one of them gets an invite from jayman007, they wouldn't know who got the invite until they both went to there friends list to see. Now as soon as you get the message you controller will light up to tell you, and then all you have to do is press the 360 button and that will take you right to your friends list to see the message.

Sweet headset! It doubles as ear muffs!

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