Dreamcast Lukewarm Take: The Dreamcast controller is good.

[miguk]

The Dreamcast was, from my perspective at the time, the last big shining beacon of light before the world got harder to live in and adulthood had to be taken seriously instead of treated as something that will happen eventually. So I'm a bit biased in its favor. That said, I can still try to be objective about the controller.

The good: The VMU was a totally novel idea not tried outside of handhelds. (The Game & Watch was all we had for dual screen gaming.) The D-pad was more in line with Nintendo ones than previous Sega ones, which was comforting. The L+R buttons were the best on any system up to that time, as no one else had made them analog.

The bad: The wire was a bit annoying, but at least you could clip it to the back and then it was manageable. The D-pad could have used better placement a little to the right to make fighting game special moves a little easier to do. No second analog, but 3D camera control sucked in general back then because developers didn't get how to do it right, so it probably wouldn't have mattered. Two more face buttons would have given it the missing advantage of the Saturn controller. The VMUs endlessly failing batteries made it only useful as a second screen and memcard, not a supplemental portable device. Grips were only just comfortable enough, but could have been better.

Overall, I still think of it as a good controller. Flawed, but good enough for the games it was used for. I wouldn't want to use it now, even for DC games, but at the time it did its job.

 

[RageBurner]

The console itself looks so nice, but the controller feels wrong on every level. I never used it so my criticism isn't entirely valid, but I've used enough controllers in my life to have an inkling of sense when it comes to this.

 

[Trainer Red]

guess i'll give my take on it ... but everyone else said it though lol ...

given that the dreamcast had that 'windows ce' label on it was a bit of a foreshadow in a way
so when did come time to create the xbox ... yeah there's no doubt the first thing they looked at was that dreamcast controller and just redesigned the whole thing since ... as interest a gimmick the vmu was ... overall not gonna be useful in the future .... but it still was actually not that bad at the time compared to other controllers around the late 90s ...

i had a more difficult time using a n64 controller with the c buttons and all ( i mean retroarch kinda had makes it complex to map so that says a lot ! )

 

[longhairedboy]

Why does everyone hate the DreamCast controller?? It's awesome!

 

[fake-kun]

A misleading title you got there, amigo.

 

[longhairedboy]

A misleading title you got there, amigo.

I said that it is underrated which I talked about.

 

[fake-kun]

I said that it is underrated which I talked about.

You talked about Dreamcast controller.

 

[longhairedboy]

True.

Post automatically merged: Feb 4, 2025

True.

Sorry for misunderstandings, if caused

 

[kanesha]

Dreamcast - Lukewarm Take: The Dreamcast controller is good.

Not in a nostalgic way, not with a caveat, but with a period. I do not think there is anything wrong with the Dreamcast controller. The biggest complaint that i know of is the fact it has one analog stick. Purely from a modern perspective, this is hard to get used to. There indeed does feel...

retrogametalk.com

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

Dreamcast - Lukewarm Take: The Dreamcast controller is good.

Not in a nostalgic way, not with a caveat, but with a period. I do not think there is anything wrong with the Dreamcast controller. The biggest complaint that i know of is the fact it has one analog stick. Purely from a modern perspective, this is hard to get used to. There indeed does feel...

retrogametalk.com

Indeed. I'll merge them.

Meanwhile: as a console, it was VASTLY underrated. It was never gonna beat the PS2, but it could have had a picnic with the GameCube... what was Nintendo gonna do about it? Put another handle? XD

 

[TamagotchiTamaHero24's iconTamagotchiTamaHero24]

I should add: I think the controller's largest issue is hand placement. Yes, it lacks buttons and sticks, which would've hurt it for longevity, but in any context the placement of the back of your hands is uncomfortable for longer play sessions. I just did a thread on the Original XBox's Duke controller, which was clearly inspired by this pad, but that controller is way more comfy for my hands.

Perhaps the truth of the matter is that smaller hands work better on Dreamcast and bigger hands work better on XBox. Neither is fully ideal, but neither is truly as bad as we make them out to be. It's why PlayStation trounced both by having a pad that just... works. For all hand sizes.

 

[Egg (McMuffin) Man]

The Dreamcast controller is great and it was designed very well. I never heard any complaints about it (besides the cord coming out from the bottom) until these last few years, and I think those complaints are probably coming from younger gamers as they all seem to be complaints about it lacking a second stick.

But games didn't use a second stick for camera controls in 1998. In fact, the first game to use a second stick for camera controls (Alien Resurrection) released only 2 months before Sega announced that the Dreamcast was over, and that game received a lot of criticism at the time for the controls being "unintuitive". Twin-stick controls were standardized by Halo: Combat Evolved and that game didn't release until after the Dreamcast had already been discontinued. Lack of a second stick was never a problem for the Dreamcast, just as it wasn't for the Saturn or the Gamecube.

As for the cable coming out from the bottom, this is actually a clever design. Sega envisioned that you would hold the controller upright while playing in order to look at the screen on the VMU (some games displayed additional information on the VMU screen during gameplay, some just displayed an animation like Sonic Adventure does), and if the cord came from the top of the controller than there was a risk that the controller would wear out faster due to the cord getting damaged. Having the cord come out from the bottom was an easy way to solve that problem. There are are possible solutions but they would have made manufacturing more expensive.

And the hall effect stick was very forward-thinking.

My only real complaint is that the grips on the stick are plastic and not rubber but that's not a big deal. Another notable complaint I've heard is that the controller had less buttons than the Saturn, but I think Sega was trying to follow the controller layout standard set by other companies. The Dreamcast controller is largely just an upgrade of the Saturn's 3D controller (which I love).

 

[PhrawzT]

Why does everyone hate the DreamCast controller?? It's awesome!

It's great for the most part, but as someone with large hands it can cause some cramping after 2-3 hours. I picked up the Retro Fighters controller a couple years ago and haven't had that problem since.

 

[rosemarymenace]

The DC controller is great for playing V-Rally and Crazy Taxi, and if I want to play Quake III or Half Life I'm gonna do it on pc anyways, so why should I care how good it is for FPS games

 

[Ikagura]

I wish Sega made a second model for the DC pad.