The Shed salutes the console control pad. All hail!!

For your consideration: the control pad – videogaming’s unsung hero. Evaluated for design and functionality, the pad is not awarded nearly enough tribute in console gaming.
Starting life as a simple analog joystick back in the days of the Atari 5200, the humble console gaming controller has come a long way. Sporting only one button, a sticky, unreliable stick and no pause function: the Atari 5200 joystick was as basic as console controllers get. More than twenty-years on the control pad has steadily evolved, gaining more buttons, triggers, shoulder buttons and more recently rumble functions, motion sensors and wireless capabilities. Yet despite all this, despite all the joy that a control pad allows the player to access, it still isn’t appreciated nearly as much as it deserves. The pad is always the first port of call for any gamer on the receiving end of an unjust in-game death or frustratingly implemented control scheme. The pad is always the thing to receive the raging abuse of the over extended gamer and as such can be subjected to – and this is from first-hand accounts – biting, scratching, stomping and of course, throwing. A good hurl of a game pad is enough to exorcise any irate gamer’s fury and remains a firm favourite among short-fused players who show no concern for their mistreated peripherals. The sad thing is almost all of us; at one time or another will have been guilty of some form of pad-abuse. Even those who show restraint when stretched to the limit during a particularly trying session, will have button-bashed or mashed at some point during their gaming lives. What we all fail to understand is that the control pad is the enabler; the key to everything the game has to offer. It serves without question and asks nothing in return. That, on occasion we treat it with such malignant disrespect is patently indefensible.

A console’s control pad becomes an extension of the player. Play for long enough with one controller and every other pad just feels wrong. Only the feel of the warm moulded plastic of your own controller feels truly right. Like a samurai’s sword, or a cowboy’s gun: a gamer’s pad is his weapon and nothing else will do. Perhaps that’s why Sony is so scared to redesign their iconic PlayStation controller, especially when their boomerang-shaped PS3 prototype pad was met with howls of derision.
With the next-generation of gaming, the pad is breaking free. Of particular note is Nintendo’s Wii-mote - an exceptionally ingenious game controller. Now, more than ever the controller is taking centre stage as the source of innovation. Throwing a pad will no longer be an easy solution to an ill-advised anger episode, but a cardinal sin, frowned upon by all.
Gatekeeper to fantastical realms, tool for expression: appreciated, but not nearly as much as it deserves: the control pad is gaming’s unsung hero and warrants recognition as such. Without them, that incredible gaming miracle machine underneath your television can serve only as an elaborate and expensive paperweight.