I was recently discussing with my brother about his initial impressions of how his newly purchased PS3 stacked up against his XBOX360 and as I was listening to some of his complaints, I found that a lot of his points were ones that I had also encountered over the years. For example, he pointed out how the convex analog sticks on the PS3 were a little awkward to control and also how after a bit of play he found that the position of the analog sticks caused discomfort in his hands. While I’ll get into more details in a future article, I did agree with many of his points and so I set out on a journey to try some third party PS3 controllers that use the XBOX360 layout. My initial journey took me to finding the Nyko Raven Wireless controller, which at $29.99 seemed like a good deal. Bringing the controller home here is what I had…

Pulling out the controller it was pretty apparent that one of the places Nyko saved some coin was with the packaging. Aside from the cord being in a thin plastic bag, exactly as you see it is exactly how it was when I took it out of the box. The controller comes with instructions, a cable for charging and a USB dongle for the wireless functions.

Now onto my initial impressions with controller itself….

My initial impression with the controller is that it’s a comfortable item to hold and is indeed very similar to the regular XBOX360 controller layout. I will admit that I do find it a bit awkward in the bottom portion of the controller (or the “raven part” if you will) where the corners of the plastic are a bit rough. The “soft touch finish” that Nyko boasts about could go either way for me. While at first I can see why the finish would appeal to some gamers, I personally find that after holding it for awhile the controller gets marked up quite easily – and I hate having to clean my controller after use.

The biggest complaint I have with my initial impression of the Nyko Raven controller is that the buttons themselves feel a bit cheap, especially in the d-pad. With the rest of the controller looking so sleek it is a bit of a letdown that the buttons are so apparently low-quality directly out of the box. However, on the flip side (ha ha) there’s a button which allows you to reverse the shoulder-buttons essentially putting the “1s” where the “2s” are, and the “2s” where the “1s” are.

In the upcoming weeks I plan on putting this controller up against another third party controller or two and I’ll report back after some use.