Saitek P990 Dual Analog Game Pad

List Price: $20.99 Discount Price: $12.95

Features:

• 4 quick-fire shoulder triggers
• 8-way D-pad
• 6 responsive thumb buttons
• 2 analog joysticks with built-in buttons
• Ergonomic controls with soft touch handles increase grip and comfort

Customer Reviews:

Not so good [Posted on 2008-04-15]
The buttons and things are ok, but the most important part, the directional pad is awful.

Meh [Posted on 2008-04-22]
Amazon sent it, I ordered new but got used, the boxes where taped up in a sloppy manner with no instructions or drivers with visible oily fingerprints on the controller. They sent it a week late, presumably I got someone else's returned product since it was out of stock. No big deal though since it had no scratches or visible issues, I downloaded the drivers from the manufacturers website. I wanted the gamepad because it said it had programmable buttons which turns out to be pretty disgusting to manage. The software to program the keys comes separate from the drivers. The manufacturer makes you download a 20mb installer (which extracts who knows how many mb's) which lets you set a lot of different controls for each button, but the UI is a total mess and it comes with the drop down list of all their keyboards / gamepads / mouse products. It also installs a bunch of drivers to software you DONT HAVE like the saitek keyboard. There's no way to selectively install just your gamepad software.

It's a friggin controller. It shouldn't be eating tons of disk space. The profile editor also eats 23mb of ram. Not much, but ram you could have used instead towards improving rendering on your game.
The blue strip in the middle of the controller, which I thought was plastic or metallic by the pic, is actually a bright LED with no way to turn it off. I'd like my controller to be simple and efficient, not energy wasting and distracting at the same time. It helps kill my laptop faster on long trips. The $30 list price is just plain wrong too just so it looks like it's always discounted. It's really really hard to find it over $30.

Great until it breaks. [Posted on 2008-05-05]
My cousin and I both bought one of these several months back. The controller was the best I'd seen. The problem lies in a design flaw that you don't find until after several months of use. I was talking to my cousin and he told me his directional pad had broken off. I thought it was just a flue and that he'd been rough with his, but the same thing happened to mine about a month later. Apparently, the d-pad is held in place by thin plastic that gives way after awhile. Sad, considering it was such a great controller and now I'm limited to using the analog.

Solid pad with room for improvement. [Posted on 2008-06-16]
I got this pad to play games on my PC (obviously) and love the six face button, four shoulder trigger, two clickable analog stick layout. It's really nice. Unfortunately, the controller isn't the most comfortable thing in the world to hold. It feels a bit bulky and a bit cheaply made, though I haven't had any problems with it. The middle FPS button is nice, as I've found it just swaps the (kinda crappy) D-Pad with the left joystick, but I haven't used the button on the right yet. Finally, there's no start or select buttons! Such a natural pair of buttons to add to any controller and they've been neglected here. Not a huge problem but it just feels weird not having them there.

Anyway, this controller's layout is almost perfect. I think a few people here complained about drivers, but it's worked flawlessly through plug 'n play. Zero configuration and it's been great.

a good layout, but not without it's problems [Posted on 2008-07-03]
This controller has an excellent control layout. However, the analog controls have fairly large deadzones, and the cord is particularly short. The dpad does feel really cheap, but works fine. Unfortunately, there isn't really any other controllers out there right now with a layout like this. It works great for numerous games, from shooters like Goldeneye to platformers. However, one thing this controller is NOT good for is fighting games.

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