Press tries Steam controller, have mixed feelings towards it

[A Black Falcon]

Good point, DJ, a mouse is good for a camera, but not for movement. You really need something which will give tactile feedback for where it is in order for movement in a game to work well, yeah. A mouse is great for a camera, but for movement it's awful! Just try a flight game with a mouse sometime, some of them allow it. It's pretty painful. Part of that is that you have to keep picking up the mouse and moving it over, of course... a big part, really... but it's also because it doesn't have the immediate tactile response that a d-pad, buttons, or an analog stick all do to tell you what you are doing at the moment.

Suffice it to say that there's a wide variety of control schemes, each tailored to a specific task. The biggest problem with modern controller design is that too many forget this and try a "one size fits all approach, as Valve has done, and end up with one that only really works in a very narrow range.

Yeah, everyone wants one controller which can do everything, but that just isn't possible. You need different control systems for different kinds of games.

I would personally prefer to have different controls to play different kinds of games, but I suppose it's not really feasible.

That said, this controller looks really, really terrible.

As I said I like that they're trying to crack the awful dual-analog-sticks- for-shooters monopoly which currently rules console/TV first and third person shooters, since the dual-analog gamepad is really pretty bad for that genre because it's so imprecise (this is why games all have auto-aim, to compensate for the bad controls), but I don't know if this is the solution for that genre or not. That remains to be seen. I also don't know how it'll work for strategy games, which of course are a key genre on the PC. It is pretty clear that it'll be a miserably awful controller for any 2d games, though, that's for sure! Puzzle, platformer, fighting, any of that kind of stuff would be really awful with Valve's controller. But that doesn't mean that it's worthless, as long as people realize that one controller can't do everything... and if it actually functions decently with shooters. Without tactile feedback I remain to be convinced, and so do most other people clearly with how lukewarm that press response was.