In action the pad performs well. The buttons are all easy to reach and after a few minutes of use in Motocross Madness 2 I was pulling off the same stunts and making the same turns just as easily as I do with the Sidewinder joystick, the joystick I use most regularly. While the analogue pad isn't good enough for use in flight sims, joypads were never meant for these kinds of games anyway, namely console style games that require analogue controls. I played through the recently released demo of MoHo, a PC port of a PlayStation action game, and analogue control just didn't cut it as the game was designed for 4-directional digital control. I was hoping that the interesting “precision” button in the middle of the pad might fix this, which to an extent it did. While the precision button is apparently there to make slight movements to the left and right in driving games while on a straight, it also somehow made playing Moho (and I'd assume any other game designed for a digital controller) much easier but for one major fault – pressing 'up' didn't seem to work. When I took a peek at the control panel for the gamepad it turns out that it was registering as forward movement, but barely at all. Unless this was a freak fault with my particular version of the joypad it's an unfortunate mark against the Eliminator Pro. The only way to really get the d-pad to act like a digital one is by setting up the d-pad so that is works like the directional keys on a keyboard. This is particularly easy to do thanks to the excellent Gravis Xperience software, but it's a shame that the joypad doesn't offer digital style control out of the box like the Sidewinder Game Pad Pro does.

For a mere thirty bucks you're getting the best looking joypad I've personally ever seen, so if you buy peripherals for looks as much as usability you should certainly consider picking up the Eliminator Pro. It's also particularly comfortable to use for long periods of time, although if you want to use it for console style games designed for a regular digital d-pad you'll need to do a bit of configuring. Best of all, this comfortable joypad with more buttons than many joysticks comes in at a very reasonable 30 bucks. As long as you're willing to do a bit of fiddling to get it working well with games that require digital d-pad input, you'll have a hard time finding a better joypad for that price.

Pete Closs
Games Editor