Thanks to recent game controller innovations, I've been in geek heaven these past few months. Force feedback joysticks, mice that work using a tiny camera to sense movement, mice that use a tiny laser to sense mouse ball movement, vibrating mice, wireless input devices... what more could a geek want? Well, my initial answer to that wouldn't have been “a joypad you can tilt to control things with” but the Gravis Destroyer Tilt let's you do just that. Here's what I thought of it after giving it a spin (no pun intended).

While Gravis aren't the first to release a joypad that lets you tilt the unit itself to control the action on screen (Microsoft beat them to it by a number of months) this is the first time I've given such a controller a good testing. So what's it like? Well, it's… interesting. The Destroyer Tilt packs 4 regular buttons and two trigger buttons on the top. It also has a regular 8 way D-pad which either works like a joystick hat when the Tilt function is in use, or becomes the regular control method at the press of a button (the little toggle button in the middle of the pad, in fact). The 6 buttons are all nicely responsive although the D-pad is quite the opposite. Pressing in a given direction hardly moves the D-pad at all and while it always registers presses in each direction, it simply doesn't feel right. Me? Picky? You bet. Of course, if Gravis have done their job with the Tilt feature though, you shouldn't have to touch the D-pad much at all.