Death to the D-Pad

Ever since I bought my Xbox 360, a hatred for its directional pad has been festering inside me. At first it was the inability to scroll through menu systems without simultaneously changing each option as I passed it by. The problem soon evolved into difficulties navigating extraneous gameplay features. Now, with games like Street Fighter 4 and Soul Calibur, it has become a major control issue because I can't even play without feeling like I possess the fighting skills of an epileptic four-year-old.

Here's the gist of it: Sometimes, when you think you are hitting right or left, you're actually somehow also hitting up or down (and vice versa) and the harder you press, the more boners you throw. If you have any kind of capacity for applicable thinking, you shouldn't have a hard time seeing the kind of disasterous implications inherent in this flaw.

Apparently I'm not the only person who's experienced these kinds of problems with what appears to be a blunderous design cockup on the part of Microsoft. The phenomenon is so widespread that Big Brother actually revealed a new, enhanced Xbox 360 controller with "improved d-pad functionality" in what can only be described as the most halfassed response I could have possibly imagined since the new controller is a limited edition accessory released only in Europe, Asia, and Latin-Fucking-America. Thanks an assload, Bill. Thanks for nothing.

Yet, fret not, dear gamer, for Eric Qualls, About.com's "Guide to Xbox Games Since 2004" and resident mongoloid, has this to say:

"A common complaint about the Xbox 360, particularly when discussing old school games or fighters, is that the d-pad on the controller is awful and makes it harder to play these types of games. The problem comes from the fact it is one solid disc rather than split into separate buttons, which makes it hard to be precise. I don't deny this. But what bothers me about this discussion is that I don't know why everyone wants to use the d-pad anyway. ... Old habits are hard to break, but wouldn't you like to actually play games rather than just whinging [sic] about them? Use the stick."

Wait. Use the stick? That's your answer? That's your expert fucking opinion? USE THE STICK? Listen, Shitnuts, if you can hit forward, forward, forward, low kick in Mortal Kombat using the analog thumbstick and pull off whatever move that does with success, I'll eat my own dick. Telling fighting gamers to stop using a problematic directional pad is like trying to convince Palestine that Hawaii would be a much nicer place to live. 

Seriously, thanks for adding another useless result to my Google search for a REAL SOLUTION. Now, instead of actually figuring out a way to fix the fucking thing, I'm busy telling you what a dipshit you are. You live in a basement and you live off of a steady diet of rat poop and paint chips. How the hell a jackass like you got a job writing articles for a major website, I have no idea. About.com must have been desperate or owed your mom a favor.

As it turns out, there really is a solution to this problem, and it isn't some asshole geek's cockass philosophy. No, the fix is so much more simple than I can believe anyone would ever have guessed.

It's a half-inch washer.

After I finished screaming at my laptop about how much Eric Qualls reminds me of Corky from Life Goes On, I took a nap and got back to my quest for the Holy Grail. After trying the YouTube "sand down the plastic ring" trick and the more interesting but futile "spend six hours cutting up plastic" fix, my girlfriend finally gave up hope that I would ever get around to hanging out with her on her day off and I had a moment of inspiration the likes of which MacGuyver would be proud: I went to my toolbox, found a peice of metal with a hole in it, and threw it inside my controller. I said a prayer to Satan, put the screws back in, and fired up the console. To my amazement, the son of a bitch actually worked.

Here's the miracle cure I just happened to have lying around:

It's half an inch in diameter. The hole in the middle is 3/16ths of an inch. I don't know how thick it is, but it seemed to be the same as the larger washers I had, so I'm guessing it must be some kind of standard. Whatever it is, it somehow managed to be the exact size necessary to rid my d-pad of dysfunction forever. All I had to do was lift up the rubber underneath the disc and toss it in.

Notice that it doesn't fit all the way around the peg but rather rests on top of it. I still can't wrap my brain around why this solves the problem but at this point I no longer give a crap. The only thing I care about is that it works. That, and the fact that I could probably ride this donkey into Silicon Valley right now and school the bejesus out of whoever it was that designed the stupid thing in the first place.

Getting the controller open is a pain in the ass if you don't have the right kind of screwdriver, but the rest is as easy as headshotting tweens from a shopping mall rooftop. Now I can rock out the d-pad with nary a worry; while I can use as much pressure as I want without fear of suffering misfires or "false diagonals," the buttons haven't lost any sensitivity so I don't need to push hard to get a direction to register. I can finally keep my characters from leaping around the screen like coked-up monkeys, I can pull off special moves without having to tell my opponent to wait for them, and, best of all, I don't have to listen to some fucktard internet journalist telling me how much he wants us all to play with his stick.