Basically this is the big daddy of controllers. The design of this particular item has not changed much since 1995 when the first playstation came out....happy days. Apart from the introduction of the dual shock capability and the rechargeble elements, the design of this controller has never changed.

The key is that it is an ergonomical masterpiece. Back in the day when your Nintendos and Sega`s where around the contrllers were light, they introduced more buttons, brightly coloured and extra buttons on the top of the controller. But for all their design benefits, they had a big draw back. Whoever had designed them must have had hands either too big or too small, because after a couple of hours playing games with these, your fingers felt as if they were about to walk away from you in protest...seriously im
talking blisters on your thumbs.

Now im not saying you dont get that with this controller, your bound too, play one of the older Playstation 2 olympic games with the rapid fire sprinting, power bar and you will feel pain, no, im saying that on average you can play a game for hours and it will not have a massive effect on you.

The original controllers were wired and had no dual shock 'rumble' packs on them, they were extremely light and easily throwable if thats your thing. Around 1998, some bright spark had the great idea (probably from vibration packs in mobile phones) to add a vibration rumble pack to the controller and two dual sticks that can be used for movement. This mean`t that now games such as first person shoot em ups could be much more easily controlled. The left 'mushrrom' stick is normally used for pointing your head and the right one for actually moving the position of the character. This kind of functionality simply could not be caried out before.

Now with the rumble packs, you felt it , every time you gt shot, got punched, smashed your car into a wall or crashed your aircraft...it made the games more real for the people playing them and caused them be more careful and take the games more seriously..in short it helped them to connect with gaming physically, which is a rare thing in gaming.

Most gaming enviroments rely, rightly so, on atmosphere, plot, gameplay and characterisation to draw the player in on a psyhcological level. Rarely would gameplay transend that plain to the physical and it did, albeit in a small way with this controller.

If there is a drawback to these controllers it was that as the dual shock added weight, so did the introduction of battery packs...moving away form the wired controller, which could be problematic, often kids would roll the wire around the controller, its looks smarter and tidy. However, do this too many times and the wire starts to pull at the base of the controller and eventualy one or two of the inner wires will become unstuck and you will find that only some if any of your buttons work.

The other draw back is that although fairly robust, after a number of years you would see that internal 'pieces' started to rattle around inside the casing...I had no idea what they were but suddenly my top buttons started to catch on the casing and wouldnt flip right back up when pressed. This can be very annoying for a gamer. That button could mean you expend all your ammo, or use all or some of your nitrous oxide in a drag race at the wrong moment...in short, it spelt trouble.

You can pick these controllers up from amazon these days for around £10-£15 and they will work for your modern PS3. That is a hell of allot cheaper then the xbox 360 controllers !