Welcome to Freshman Year

This week Apple unveiled the iPad.  I’ll get to that in a later rant, but first I need to trash third party peripherals for a second.  Third party peripherals are those things made primarily by a company called “Mad Catz” that sells shitty controllers for game consoles.  I’m not sure if Mad Catz kept getting worse as Nintendos progressed or if I just became more and more aware of how much they sucked as a function of being older and wiser.  Because I remember back on the SNES I preferred one controller over the other, but I was so younger then that I would forget which one I didn’t like since they looked almost identical (and I’m talking back in kindergarten when I couldn’t read).  Sometimes I’d sit down and start playing and after a while I’d be like, “something’s wrong, I think I like the other controller better” and then I’d switch.  Then the n64 hit and I remember actually wanting a Mad Catz because it had a turbo button and they introduced the transparent controller before nintendo did which was just awesome.  It wasn’t a horrible experience… But I know that after a while it started shitting‑the‑bed after some extreme abuse it took in 1080° Snowboarding.

By the time my group of friends had moved on to Bond, it was at the point where nobody wanted to use it because you’d just spin in circles to the left unless you held the stick all the way to the right.  It was such a disadvantage that in the summer of 1997 we’d always give that controller to Liz Minton because she was a girl and she wasn’t going to win anyways, n00b. (I wish we actually had that term back then. No. Wait. No, I don’t).  After that we decided that if someone used that controller then they were allowed to be Oddjob just to help balance it out (this was the only exception, otherwise, fuck you if you pick Oddjob.  Or the moonraker chick).  Actually at that same time I also had a Mad Catz steering wheel and my younger brother, ipa diapa, figured out that you could use that to play Bond.  He actually found it easier to play with the steering wheel: turning the wheel left and right to look left and right, and the gas and break was forward and backwards (respectively).  Triggers behind the steering wheel were aim and fire, and the face of the wheel had A, B, and C-directional.  It was a shitty set-up for sure, but the fact that he preferred that over the shitstick Mad Catz says a lot.

Then the Game Cube came out and I opened it christmas morning and we played through a few hours of Rogue Leader, Super Smash Bros Melee, and SSX Tricky.  SSX Tricky was the first game since NFL Blitz that my older brother Josh was ever interested in and he really go into it.  So much so that he wanted to play ME in it two-player, but we only had one controller.  So on December 26 we headed to the closest place possible, the FYE about a mile away (I think it was still a Strawberry Tree back then) and we checked out the controllers.  I actually remember Josh specifically warning me NOT to buy a 3rd party controller (although I can’t remember if he used that language per se) because they always suck.  But Mad Catz had gotten really good at replicating the originals at this point, and looking at the controller in the vacuum sealed packaging I literally couldn’t see how it could go wrong.  Unlike Mad Catz previous offerings there was no rubber grip, no special turbo button, no gimmicky translucent plastic, and no pikachu graphic on it either.  All the buttons were the same color and in the same place as the real deal, and it looked almost just like the first party black controller that was being sold for $15 bucks more (and in freshman year of high school dollars, that’s like, 3 trips to McDonalds worth of money, so that’s a lot).

Well let me tell you something.  That piece of shit was pretty much a brick straight out of the box.  It was just… Unusable.  Me and Josh (Josh and I) would have to trade back and forth every race for who got to use the regular controller and who had to use the POS.  The difference was that significant.  Whoever used the Mad Catz would lose.  No matter what.  Either his character would just suddenly veer off the course, or he wouldn’t pull of the trick combo, or he would be using the boost without command.  The buttons were all loose and wobbly; some of them didn’t compress all the way or some of them would get stuck down and you’d go off a jump, pull a nose grab, and then just HOLD the nose grab as you came smashing into the snow.  It was bullshit.  I hate it when the player blames the hard wear, but this thing sucked ass.  I will never buy a third party peripheral for a gaming console after that (Admittedly, that’s a lie, like a year later I bought a “Gameshark” memory stick.  You couldn’t beat the price and it was just a memory stick…right?  I’m still waiting for the day that I go home and nostalgically want to play Resident Evil 4.  I’ll boot up the system and it will tell me that memory port A is empty, and I know that sitting right in memory port A will be my Gameshark memory stick filled with 64 megs of completely unusable game saves that represent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of my life).

Anway, that’s probably enough reading now, so I’ll cut it off. Check back on Monday for a mega-rant about Apple and the iPad. You’re not gonna wanna miss that.

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