A Lot of Promises – What About Results?
Since receiving the Cyborg Rumble Pad, I’ve been hard at gaming, specifically titles I have became quite proficient with using my 360 controller. One of my favorites of the past couple of years is the FLATOUT racing series. So, it was an easy decision to fire up my game and see how the Cyborg compared with my 360 controller. The results were less than acceptable.
I began experiencing some frustration with the lack of response to the steering control. My configuration has the Acceleration mapped to the right trigger. The Brake/Reverse is mapped to the left trigger. The left joystick controls my steering. The Start button controls Nitro. Reset is accomplished by pressing the right bumper and camera control is via the left bumper.
What I experienced in my game was a lot of frustration with the steering not responding as quickly as I had become accustomed to. Sometimes it seemed it wasn’t responding at all. After many races in which I was finishing anywhere from 4th to last, I decided to make the swap back to the 360 controller. Keep in mind I’m already quite familiar with all the tracks in FLATOUT. So, familiarity isn’t really of any concern in this experiment. Just as soon as I began using the 360 controller, I once again was finishing anywhere from 1st to third easily.
Even more frustration awaited me when testing the Cyborg in Halo 2 for Windows. I’ve had the game for a few months now but didn’t have Vista installed.With Halo 2 installed, my first endeavor to play was with the 360 controller. With the 360 controller it was a snap to get things configured and up and fighting the Covenant in no time. Time to test the Saitek controller again with hopefully better results than before.
First of all, I use the right joystick’s movement to look up by pressing forward and down by pressing backward. The 360 controller was working flawlessly in this regard. However, the Cyborg has yet to allow me this functionality. No matter how many times I’ve used the game’s Controller Settings to swap this it reverts to the opposite once in the game. Also, the right joystick is used to turn right and left. In the native mode, the Cyborg will not let me turn right or left with the joystick. I have to press the FPS button in order to activate this feature. Apparently, doing this causes the controller to lose any other saved settings from the native mode.
The long and short of it is this: The Cyborg has become a cumbersome controller with a lot of frustration involved trying to get it to do the simple things that come almost naturally with the 360 controller.
There are also some other annoyances that need to be addressed. It appears that the Cyborg’s communication with the PC is less than stellar. Often, when making some changes to settings, the PC goes into a long active state where no input can be made with the controller. With the 360 controller, any changes are simply immediate without any pause.
On a final note, although the software installs an English Manual available in the All Program list, the PDF file it generates is totally blank. That’s 18-pages of totally white space to review if the online Help menu is invoked. See the image below:
We are not sure if this is due to us getting a reviewers sample with perhaps an unfinished CD rom image, however its worth a mention.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion:
The Saitek Cyborg Rumble Pad is a very comfortable and potentially attractive device. It promises to provide the extra precision needed by gamers to get the edge on the competition. Instead, I found it to come up far short of the promises made.
Perhaps updated software and drivers will tweak the Saitek unit to live up to the claims however as it currently stands, it is simply no match for Microsofts Xbox 360 controller. Not recommended.
Where to Buy:
GoGamer has it currently for $29.90
