Okay, the first thing you likely WILL NOT notice about the packaging is the word "mad" and/or the word "catz". Interestingly enough, you can look at the front or the back of the packaging and not see the words "Mad Catz" anywhere. The only place you'll find it is on the bottom of the packaging. I found that funny.

Now for the controller itself. While a HUGE improvement from a standard 360 d-pad, I was sorry to find that I've used better d-pads in my life. Both a standard Playstation dual shock and an SNES pad personally feel better to me. Your opinion may differ. The d-pad itself is a large and thick circular disc which has a cross shape molded into the plastic. The ends of the cross are slightly raised, which was likely done in an effort to make it easier to prevent your thumb from slipping off. The problem with this is that if you end up with your thumb directly on top of the raised section, it results in a feeling that is less than comfortable.

The buttons feel quite good for a fighting oriented controller, and I'm sure Sega fans will appreciate being able to play games with a pad that feels a lot like a Saturn pad. It has the same classic six face button layout, and also includes a couple of shoulder buttons. There's a turbo function that can be setup to use any combination of face or shoulder buttons, and it works quite well. It's a little silly that they included it, though, as it really doesn't give you much of an advantage in Street Fighter, and I'd just feel like a cheater if I used it online. I guess it would be good for "test your might" sections of Mortal Kombat games, though.

Voice chat sounds slightly worse than a standard 360 controller. It's louder, but not quite as clear. It's still not too bad, and it's way better than the old Mad Catz pad I bought for its d-pad. That pad would give constant feedback when using voice chat, and the FightPad doesn't do that at all.

As for the pad helping my game, I do feel it helped a bit. While I couldn't pull off dragon punches and hurricane kicks with quite the regularity of an SNES pad, the FightPad still helped increase my ratio of successfully executed moves by a fair amount. As for other games, I tried out the FightPad in a couple skins of Lumines, and it felt pretty good. Much more responsive than playing a puzzle game with an analog stick.

Overall I'd say if you don't want a stick but hate the d-pad on the 360 controller, then go for it. It will help a lot with fighting games, puzzle games, classic 2D style platformers, and other titles that will benefit from a good d-pad. If you already play most of those games with a PS3 pad, unless you really feel that the six face button layout would be beneficial to you, I'd just stick with a standard dual shock.

Now that I think about it, this should probably have been a blog post.  To open it up a bit more, feel free to post your thoughts on the pad, or ask any questions that I might not have covered.

Hmmm...interesting. The pad looks solid, though I ordered the SE stick. Now let's hope mine is not poorly made like many others. I hope not. I paid $80 for that bad boy.

I've been debating what to get between the Mad Catz Tournament Edition FightStick, regular FightStick, and the FightPad. I've been reading quite a few reviews of these over the past few days. Everything I've heard about the Tournament Edition FightStick is great, but I've come to the sad realization that I probably won't get my hands on it for at least a couple months due to the limited initial release (three times as many pre-orders as the # built!). I've read good (tactile feel) and bad (build quality) things about the Regular Fightstick, whick makes me kind of leary of it. This Fightpad sounds pretty solid. I think I'll pick one up with my copy of SFIV, and then grab a Tournament Edition FightStick when it becomes available.