Third Party Wired Xbox 360 Controller Review

For years I had been looking for the adapter to use my wireless Xbox 360 controllers on my gaming PC. I'm a frequent thrift shopper, so I assumed one would pop up at some point during my thrifting adventures. I was wrong. What did appear was a third party, completely unbranded, wired Xbox 360 style controller. Perhaps the next best thing? Let's find out!

At first glance it looks like a blue Xbox 360 controller, but upon closer inspection the illusion falls apart. The main giveaway is that the center button is all chrome, with no logo or X in the center. Once plugged in the lights around the center button are a bit weak and cheap looking. The overall feel is ok, but you can quickly tell the plastic isn't up to the same quality as the official Microsoft Xbox 360 controllers.

It appears to be molded straight from the official wired Xbox 360 controller, but it just feels slightly off, maybe because I'm more familiar with the wireless controller than I am a wired one. The buttons all have a really nice tactile response like my official wireless controllers, but the triggers are where things came to a halt. Where the official triggers glide in and out smoothly, the no brand wired controller has a noticeable shift, although it doesn't seem to affect the operation of the trigger, it just feels off.

As with nearly everything I review I have to say this was used, so its condition at the time of purchase is all I have to go by and sometimes that's unfair. I will say that I've left this controller plugged into my gaming PC for quite a while now and use it for any game I possibly can. Would I prefer an official wired or even the adapter to use my official wireless controllers on my gaming PC? Yes! For now though, this thing sure beats the living hell out of the Snakebyte controller I bought a few years back!

ADDENDUM

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Recently I took this controller apart to fix the frayed wire (as seen in the picture above) and while doing so I found that both triggers had one side of the piece that holds them in place broken off. Cheap plastic? Rough usage by the previous owner? I can't tell, all I can say is that now know why the triggers are a bit wonky. Again, it's not as good as an official 360 controller but it's still a perfectly serviceable controller to use for PC gaming.

Console Headaches!

With as many video game consoles as I've played and owned throughout the years, I have to say that without question the most troublesome have been the Playstation 2 and the Xbox 360. Even with as famously unreliable the NES connectors are known to be, I've never had to do anything more than take the NES apart, toothbrush and alcohol the connector and slap it back together. The Playstation 2, however, hasn't been too bad, it's just the fact that the Playstation 2 consoles that I have (three in total) seem to eat through reading lasers like they're breakfast cereal.

You could argue that it's my own fault, since I've received all my consoles second-hand. While that is in fact true, I would argue greatly to the fact that I have received all my consoles second-hand, and have never had as much trouble from any of them as I have with the Playstation 2 and the Xbox 360 consoles. My original Xbox was given to me because the laser wouldn't read, but once I installed a replacement the console gave me years of solid service. I did replace the laser in my black PS2 slim, which gave me varying levels of service throughout four years, but ultimately it too died.

Now comes the Xbox 360, in my opinion the absolutely worst conceived console ever. Don't get me wrong, I love my 360s, when they worked, but the console's architecture was absolute garbage and planned to be disposable, either that or by a complete idiot. Even though the Xbox 360's competitor, the PS3, was known to have gremlins of its own, the Xbox 360 far and away will be known as the console that should have never been. Again, I'm not dogging the Xbox 360 as a brand, I'm simply saying that Xbox 360 was built like shit.

If I buy a console that doesn't work properly, it's a rarity, that's just a fact, and most times a console can easily be repaired with a few slight modifications or repairs. The Xbox 360, however has been a terrible case that even once repaired, there is no telling how long it will last. I was given two Xbox 360s because they were giving the RROD, and since they were free I figured I would give the towel wrap trick a try and see if I could get any signs of life from them.

Eventually I had one of them professionally repaired at a local PlayNTrade, but that only last until their warranty had expired, literally shortly after their repair warranty expired the Xbox 360 died another death. Hope wasn't all lost though as with the console being repaired it was easier to towel wrap it and reset the chips, which I did many many times. At some point after I was given a Halo edition Xbox 360, which was plagued with the RROD also. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay another $50 and have the repair only last until the short warranty expired, no, this time I opened the console myself and somehow fixed it by simply shimming the X braces, which seemingly lasted forever.

The Halo 360 lasted a long time, only occasionally needing a towel wrap to reset the chips, which seemed to work much better than it did on the first Xbox 360 I had. The original 360 would go through long periods of acting as if the towel wrap wasn't working, then mysteriously, and many months later, it would fire up as if nothing happened after yet another towel wrap trick.

The point of my rambling is that I'm clearly not the only person who has had these issues with the Xbox 360. I watch a lot of youtubers talk about how they've gone through four, five, even six Xbox 360 consoles, paying retail and still having the console crap out on them. I also know people who still use their original launch era Xbox 360, some people are only on their second Xbox 360, yet the Xbox 360 is, without a doubt, the most troublesome console in history.

Sadly none of my Xbox 360s currently work, and I am sick of having to repair them myself. I've debated buying a slim or even an E model, yet I don't want to be burned by buying a brand new Xbox 360 and having the damn thing die on me, yet again. But with what little spurts of time I've spent with my Xbox 360s, I've enjoyed greatly and have built up a collection of games for the console that I truly wish I could play, just like I do with any other console. Just turn the console on, pop the game in and not sit there for hours on end worrying that after 2-10 hours of playing the screen is going to glitch out and then worry how long it will take for the temperamental console to will itself into working again.

The Mafia Video Game Series.

Amongst the slew of open world, free to explore at your own leisure games there stands one game that set the bar at a slightly different level than all others; Mafia. At the time of it's release Mafia was sandwiched between two of Rockstars juggernaut games of the GTA franchise that seemingly inspired Mafia, both GTA 3 and Vice City. Where the GTA franchise missed a large era that would have been the perfect setting for a GTA universe, the prohibitionist 1930s, Mafia crept in and took it's rightful place as the outlet to freely explore and live a fictional life in that era through the protagonist Thomas "Tommy" Angelo.

Mafia was indeed the answer to those wanting a 1930s era Grand Theft Auto. From a random encounter with the mob, Tommy is given a chance to join the mob as an associate, which may sound cliche today, but actually turned into a great story line. Mafia was filled with twists, turns, challenges, rewards and all of the things you would want from an open world game.

That's not to say Mafia wasn't without it's flaws, the biggest of which was that the console versions felt like very sub-par ports of the PC game. Everything felt like it was slowed down to fit the controller configuration and never really felt very much like a genuine console release. The graphics weren't always the greatest, and while driving was a great portion of the game the cars were never really all that exciting to drive. For good and bad, Mafia was and I believe is still a worthwhile game to play.

For nearly 8 years the franchise sat dormant, and only those with their ears to the ground heard much about the franchise, but in 2010 a whole new experience was unleashed. With the release of Mafia II came a shift in console generations, meaning everything looked better, everything felt smoother and everything felt more alive. This time Mafia was set in the mid 1940s, following a war veteran by the name of Vito Scaletta as he returns from war and catches up with old friends, only to find the fast track to money and fame is through his old friend Joe, who has been doing odd jobs for the Mafia while Vito was away at war.

Again, this time through Vito, you are taken through the twists and turns of joining the mafia, but this time things don't feel quite right to me. Where the first Mafia was story driven, everything felt more fluid and everything seemed to link together, not the case with Mafia II. Mafia II lays out the story as if it were a book, in chapters, which left me feeling as if the story was disjointed and clunky. I'm familiar with the mission to mission grind, but the story just didn't seem to flow with all the fast forwarding and jumps the game did.

The flaws within this game don't really smother the fun you'll experience while playing it, but they are there. For instance the lack of free roam, which even the first game offered, 8 years it's senior. I honestly can't remember whether or not the first game unlocked free roam after completion or not, but I know it was there, so why wasn't free roam ever offered in it's sequel? Well, technically there is free roam, albeit in the form of a DLC pack called Jimmy's Vendetta. You won't be using Vito, the character you've grown attached to in the story mode, you'll be doing a short story line for Jimmy, but at least here you do get to access all three homes from the story mode, unlike Vito.

Another issue is the tiny garage, as you're only allowed 10 vehicles, only getting more with DLC included vehicles. Since Mafia II allows the player to steal and customize just about any vehicle within the game, you would think the game would allow more than just 10 cars in a garage. For example Driver Parallel Lines allows players to store 99.9% of in-game cars (which is around 80 or more), and Saints Row offering about 50 cars. There is no need to limit the player to 10 cars, plus DLC cars, especially with the plethora of vehicles that Mafia II provides.

And finally, and simply put, the police are far too easy to escape. In almost every free roam game I've played the police are ruthless crime stoppers. From GTA to Saints Row, to the original Mafia and all the way around to the Driver series. In Mafia II the police will give chase, they will even shoot, depending on the severity of the crime, but in a moderately fast car you can easily lose them within a few city blocks, no hassle. It may sound like a nitpick but if there is no real challenge or punishment for committing a crime in a video game, there is no real fun or reason to do so.

Mafia II isn't all bad, not at all. The graphics are beautiful, the city is beautiful and fun to explore. There are many things to do within the city, magazines and wanted posters to collect, clothing stores, gun store as well as diners and bars you can go in and have a meal or a drink. You can even rob these establishments for a little bit of cash, and I do mean a little bit of cash as the highest I've taken was $300 from a gun store. Not much, but it adds a little bit of adventure to the overall exploration of the city.

Now what would an open world game be without vehicles? As I started earlier you can customize vehicles and race them around the city, although there really aren't many places you can truly max your car's horsepower, it's still fun to speed around the city. There is quite a selection of vehicles to choose from, all of them based loosely on popular real-world vehicles of that era.

One of my (oddly) favorite parts of Mafia II is that should you find a vehicle you wish to make your own you have two options; you can just be brash and smash out the window, or you can be quiet and cunningly use a lock-pick mechanic to unlock the door. The trunk and hoods of some vehicles will open up with very little use as you can't store anything in the trunk, but if your car is heavily wrecked you can pop the hood and have a fiddle around to get it working again.

I like the Mafia franchise the same I like the Grand Theft Auto franchise, and I believe they both hold their own respective places alongside each other. As GTA expands upwards and outwards I hope that Mafia continues to follow where it is headed as well. I loved the crossover mission in Mafia II that called back to the ending of Mafia, proving that Mafia has a good idea of where it's headed, and as a fan I will be along for the ride.

My History with the GTA series. Part 5: GTA 4: The Next Generation!

When I heard Grand Theft Auto 4 was approaching I was filled with hope and wonder, remembering just how amazing the first three were and imagining how much better the fourth would be on the new hardware. When I heard they were distancing themselves from the first three games, as their own universe, I was filled with trepidation and disappointment. I imagine my reaction was just like anyone else who had spent countless hours on the first three games, because when the last gen games peaked with San Andreas, the franchise had become such an amazing and diverse game.

I was hoping they would sustain the level of wonder and exploration that made San Andreas such an amazing game and expand up it, albeit in a much brighter and better looking world. I wanted to roam aimlessly in a larger, more living, vibrant city that made me feel as if I were truly walking within an inhabited city, rather than a cold, empty environment. Well, they did make it a much brighter and better looking world, but GTA 4 was destined to become a bitter sweet stain on my GTA gaming history.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed GTA 4. The protagonist was humorous, the supporting characters were humorous, but the main attraction, cars, were completely and utterly underwhelming. GTA looked more realistic than it had ever before, and rightfully so, but I also feel as if Rockstar tried to push a more realistic angle that just shouldn't have been in the game. Cars would swing and sway through corners at high speed, and understeer was a major factor in getting anywhere, even at low speeds. But the bustling city landscape and environment lived and breathed as if it were truly a city.

Many new additions made the game it's own, yet I still felt that it was lacking so much that Rockstar had built up to in the previous installments. GTA 4 started a new era, a new story line, but no matter what, we were still influenced by the previous three games we had played, and hoped GTA 4 would encompass some of those things, and not just start all over again. GTA 4 brought new characters, new story lines, new inside jokes, all of which, I'm sure, most GTA fans truly wished were in addition to what we were already accustom to.

Now I know I keep bitching and complaining that GTA 4 was such a large change from San Andreas, but I do understand that it was a smart move for Rockstar and the GTA franchise itself. Admittedly it was really getting stale to keep seeing Kent Paul and  Ken Rosenberg popping up and having a panic attack over getting himself into shady business deals he should have learned from 10 years ago. But from what I see with GTA 5, it seems as if they've left almost all of that behind, with merely 1 link from GTA 4 even in GTA 5. Which is something I believe I'll miss once I get a chance to play through GTA 5.

One good thing about GTA 4 being on the new hardware was, of course, DLC. When I originally heard about it, I thought Rockstar was going to release countless updates that we could endlessly download and keep GTA 4 fresh and new. The sad truth was that we only got two; The Ballad of Gay Tony and The Lost and Damned, after that it seemed as if Rockstar had abandoned their child to fend for itself in a harmful, unforgiving world. Even the ability to play online didn't seem to appeal to people enough to keep GTA 4 alive.

Since I prefer to own a physical copy of video games, I bought Episodes from Liberty City and finally got my chance to play both DLC packs. To be honest, they're not bad. Vehicle controls seemed to be slightly tightened up and even more vehicles were added. A pair of short, interwoven episodes of characters that we didn't even really notice while playing the Niko campaign now reveal the other side of the shady business ventures Niko happened to get himself into. Which was actually quite an interesting thing: to take control of a completely different view point of the same mission.

Overall GTA 4 brought GTA back on the map, but not nearly as long as the previous installments did. Sure GTA 4 did well and was a massively better looking game than the previous "universe", but GTA 4 is, to me, a clear sign that brighter and more beautiful isn't always the better option. GTA 4 became stale very quickly and although it did spoil me away from playing San Andreas, which I love with a passion, GTA 4 simply will never and can never make me invest as much time in it as I did San Andreas.

Crackdown

An article or two ago I mentioned that I had a case for Crackdown that was complete, except for the actual game disc. Well after a quick ebay search I tracked down a disc only auction for $3, which was as cheap as I could find a disc only copy. After the game arrived I gave it a good play though, to make sure everything worked, and after I was done I put it in its rightful case.

Crackdown was one of the first Xbox 360 games I had ever played, so I've always wanted to get a copy, it just never materialized until now. In Crackdown you play as a super cop, of sorts, and take on crime in an expansive city, rife with area to roam around. As a super cop you have the ability to jump really high, pick up almost anything and essentially pretend you're Robocop.

I'm sure it's well documented on this blog that I love open world games to explore and roam around freely, so Crackdown fits well into that niche. But Crackdown is a bit different in that the city seems to be geared more toward the special jump ability and traveling over rooftops, instead of hopping into a car and just driving from A to B. Which is slightly odd, in Crackdown I strongly loathe driving, as I've always found my ability to bound up and over buildings the more entertaining way to go.

As an initial test for the game I deleted the Demo that had been sitting on my Xbox hard drive for years and started a new game save. As I started playing I was quickly quite frustrated by the game's difficulty; nothing I did seemed to make any progress, and I simply couldn't do anything right. After a few days of frustration I was about to give up, but as I was signing in (this games jargon for loading the save file) I noticed in my haste to get through the initial setup and begin the game, I had set the difficulty on the highest level (Psychotic). After I had rectified this problem I found the game a little bit too easy, but still very much enjoyable.

Crackdown was a fun game, but it only gave me about 4 or 5 days of gameplay. Although its short, and I don't see much replay value in it, the game is still worth a play through. I'm glad I held on to the case when I found it, and I'm glad I found a disc only copy fairly cheap. Now that I've beaten the game it will end up in the stack with the rest of my Xbox 360 games, but this game was well worth the time and money invested, which sadly wasn't much in either direction.

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

Nearly 2 years ago I wrote about buying games for more than one console, and how I prefer not to do it unless I have no other choice, or I'm getting a good deal on the game. One of the games that I mentioned was Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, which I originally bought for the Xbox 360, and how after my 360 died I purchased the PS2 version, as I have never owned a PS3. Well the PS2 version never got much play time because it is so wildly different from the Xbox 360 version, in terms of game play and story details, that I found it difficult to jump from one to the other.

Now I can understand graphical differences, with the leap from PS2 to Xbox 360, that is to be expected. But the game play and story varies to to an alarming degree, at least for me, too much so to be a game with the same name. Another example I gave was Bully for PS2 and the Scholarship Edition for the 360, while upgrading the graphics and adding additional content, the game was still based on the same core, and was much easier to pick up and continue playing as if it were the original version.

The overall goal is the same; to be a mercenary in war-torn Venezuela, and to complete contracts to earn as much money as possible, destroy as many things as possible and to generally have a good time while doing these things. But with the transition from Xbox 360 down to the PS2, the map has gotten significantly smaller, with less area to explore and even fewer things to destroy. Also the hardware limitations cause many things to popup right in front of you, causing you to take more collateral damage than is really even necessary.

One of the main things in the game are weapons, which seem to disappear if you swap them out for something on the ground, where as in the 360 version they stick around for a while allowing me to use an RPG and swap back to the SMG I just swapped it for 1 minute ago. Also weapons crates seemed to be stashed everywhere in the 360 version, if you find a crate in the PS2 version its a most often a solid object, offering no ammo, grenades, health packets, nothing!

Don't get me wrong, I loved the original Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, which the PS2 version of World in Flames feels like a heavily modified version of, but even the original seems to have a bigger map, more things to destroy and it just all around better feeling than the newer one. Another game with the same feel was Just Cause, which is far more massive than the PS2 version of World in Flames, but the driving and walking mechanics have a very familiar vibe. It just feels more like Just Cause than it does Mercenaries.

Video Games I need more of: Bully!

After I acquired my first PS2 I did the standard "What games can I use this thing for?" research and came up with a nice little treasure trove of games that I wanted to purchase. Among them were obviously exclusives for the Sony consoles such as Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, as well as another Rockstar hit, Bully. The concept of Bully was a bit weird for me, at first, but after I purchased the game and gave it a bit of a play through it really sprouted out and became a game that my mind wished there was more of.

In the game Bully you play as Jimmy Hopkins, a 15 year old with a bad attitude, which is a slight departure from the main protagonists Rockstar is putting into their GTA series. Jimmy is sent to Bullworth Academy, a boarding school, to help him adjust said attitude. While at Bullworth Jimmy makes friends and enemies along his (mis)adventures through both the school yard and the adjacent town.

Bully plays a bit like a GTA game, but has its own environmental feel and works really well, although I always felt the overall area was just too small, as I was more familiar with the land masses of GTA games by this point. Even so, the game played great and there were plenty of story missions, side missions and many other miscellaneous things to do to keep yourself busy and entertained for quite some time. But once everything was collected, all the missions were done and all that was left was driving up and down the streets on Jimmy's moped, there was an undying desire to see a sequel.

A few years ago I acquired a copy of Bully: Scholarship Edition for the Xbox 360, which added more things to do, as well as beefed up the graphics and made everything look far more presentable and likewise appealing. Sadly, I had bought a copy of the game that had a hairline crack in the disc. When combining the need for the disc to be spun to be read, as well as the heat the Xbox 360's DVD drives are known for, the crack quickly grew to the point it would no longer boot up.

Although I got a fairly good taste of what Scholarship Edition was about, I never got the full experience, which only made me want an additional, more modern version of Bully even more, and I'm NOT a modern console gamer! I'm not sure where Rockstar would go with another installment of Bully, but I'm sure I'm not alone in this feeling of wanting to experience more. With all the improvements they've made in the GTA series, I bet another Bully would be nothing less than amazing.