The good, the bad, and the ugly

The Good

The Freestyle Pro ships with a full copy of Microsoft's excellent Motocross Madness game. Good thing, too, because the Freestyle Pro is without a doubt the best imaginable controller for a motorcycle game. Using it feels perfectly natural-the next best thing to actually holding a pair of handlebars in your hand! As you turn the controller in your hands, your bike turns proportionately. As you tilt the controller forward or backward, your on-screen rider leans forward or backwards on the bike. Words cannot adequately describe how totally intuitive this is; it's akin using a real steering wheel in a driving game for the first time. It just feels right.

The Bad

While the Freestyle Pro's ergonomics encourage the user to hold it in a neutral position, it can be difficult to gauge center. A steering wheel or joystick has a very large and easily visible center position; the Freestyle Pro does not. You can usually determine what constitutes neutral by watching your on-screen avatar for the first few moments of play. It takes a bit of trial and error, and this is a very imprecise process. The tilt axes are analog and quite sensitive. This is where the tilt sensitivity and range adjustments of the Profiler come in handy, by the way!

This sort of control is reasonable for motorcycle games, but unfortunately maps very poorly to other genres of gaming. I made a stab at using the Freestyle Pro in car racing games, but I might as well have placed a large "You'd be doing a lot better with a steering wheel!" sign on my monitor in the process. As for other genres, using the analog tilt control is, at best, wishful thinking.

Also, you may find your hands getting more fatigued than usual since you must constantly be aware of and adjusting the controller's position. I personally didn't find this fatiguing after an hour or so of play, but it depends how much body English you apply.

The Ugly

Practically speaking, the Freestyle Pro's analog mode is only useful for motorcycle and racing games. So, no problem, we can switch to digital mode for those games and use the plain old directional pad, right? Well, not quite.

The Freestyle Pro's directional pad turns out to be far too sensitive, and it's difficult to determine exactly which direction you are pressing at any given time. The d-pad is made of hard plastic, with ridges in the cardinal directions, but this seems to be more of a hindrance than a help. It's easiest to see this on the Control Panel test screen for the controller-- a single firm press of the pad to the east can sometimes result in spurious northeast or southeast responses, or even multiple responses! The directional pad is also mounted at a bit of an angle, where "down" is not directly south, which doesn't help.

The imprecise digital pad control is a major problem. After all, who wants to use a controller that reduces your overall control? In certain types of games this isn't too much of a problem, since you can compensate if you accidentally pressed southwest instead of south. The worst example of this would be in a game like Frogger, where each directional jump can result in death, and the Freestyle Pro is an absolute disaster when playing this game under MAME emulation. Another example is at the team and play selection screens in NFL Blitz; it's difficult to navigate the grid before the time limit expires!