At this point, it would probably be well enough for me to say "It works fine. It’s a normal gamepad, it just lays its controls out differently in case a larger, Playstation style layout fits your hands better; it’s easily worth the $30 they charge for it." I could do that, but that’s not particularly interesting... are there any games it does very well with, or has problems in? I put the P3200 through a variety of genres to see what happened.

Third person action (Dead Rising, etc.) and first person shooters (Fallout 3, etc.): I’ll be the first to admit these sample games do not require crack reflexes, but neither is fun to play for long if the controls hurt your hands or aren’t accurate. Whether it was jumpkicking zombies and shooting on-the-move psychopaths in Dead Rising, or circle-strafing enemies in the wastes from Fallout 3, things worked well enough. The longer and looser analog sticks made things a little more sensitive than I’m used to, but in many games I was able to just adjust the game-level sensitivity to compensate, and had no serious complaints.

General ’old school’ titles (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, etc.): Probably the single biggest reason to go with the Saitek P3200 instead of a stock 360 controller would be its improved controls in older games like these. These are the sort of games that were built on the assumption you had a decent d-pad, and have trouble if you use the standard 360 controller as a result. The P3200’s d-pad is a huge improvement here, making these kind of titles much more fun.

2D fighting games (Street Fighter series, BlazBlue, etc.): Generally speaking, you’d want to play these on either a good Saturn-style clonepad, or an arcade stick. But if those are out of your budget, this controller can work for this genre, depending both on what game you’re playing and which characters you favor. Most BlazBlue characters are at least playable on the Saitek P3200, and this also seems to be the case in Marvel vs. Capcom 2; both games only really need the four face buttons and a decent d-pad (I suppose you could map Assists to your trigger and bumper in MvC2’s case) and work fairly well. Likewise you could probably get by in Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix or Street Fighter IV with most characters, though a few are problematic, such as Zangief. It’s not because of the d-pad, as I was doing standing 360 motions on it just fine, but rather it’s hard to get any good button mapping for pressing three punches or kicks at once, making it hard to do his lariats. While I would never specifically recommend a generalized gamepad for 2D fighters, the P3200 at least works in most of these games and for most but not all characters.

Next: PC use (Windows XP and Linux) and conclusion.