Moga Pocket Controller

Smartphone and tablet gaming has advanced considerably, but only to the point of being able to play some of the better games of previous console generations. You still need a physical controller to really enjoy those games despite their touch screen support, but the fact that you can run games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Jet Set Radio on an Android device is still pretty great. The Moga Pocket Controller offers just what you need to play those games and a large handful of others. This $49.99 (list) gamepad has two analog sticks and several dozen good games available through its first-party app, but to really get the most out of it, you need a third-party driver that's surprisingly easy to set up. If it had a direction pad as well, it would be a thoroughly excellent gamepad.

Small Controller
The Moga Pocket Controller is fairly small for a gamepad, measuring about 5 inches wide by 3 inches tall. It's mostly flat, with only a slight curve on the underside to give it an Xbox 360 controller-like grip and provide slots on either end of the gamepad to hold the two AAA batteries that power it. A large plastic arm that cuts through the middle of the controller hides the power switch and flips up to hold a smartphone in its foam-padded, telescoping grip. It can hold large smartphones including the Samsung Galaxy Note, but it isn't quite big enough to hold 7-inch tablets like the Google Nexus 7?or Kindle Fire HD.

The controls are simple, comfortable, and slightly lacking. The Pocket Controller sports two analog sticks in an Xbox 360 controller configuration (the left analog stick on the same level as the face buttons, the right analog stick below the face buttons), plus four face buttons labeled A, B, X, and Y, two shoulder buttons, Start and Select buttons, and a logo/Home button that lights up to indicate when the controller is pairing or connected. The sticks are very similar to the analog pad found on the Nintendo 3DS; they slide around a small area, but don't tilt like full-sized controller analog sticks. They still feel comfortable, though, and allow for precise input. The one thing it's missing is arguably the most important for anyone who wants to play classic games: a direction pad. There's no digital direction pad like the one found on nearly every game controller since the Nintendo Entertainment System, and that's a big omission. The larger Moga Pro Controller, incidentally, includes a direction pad and has full analog sticks. The more expensive SteelSeries Free Wireless Mobile Controller features dual analog sticks and a direction pad, but it suffers from lackluster support, both first- and third-party, compared with the Moga controller.

Moga Pivot Library
The Moga Pocket Controller requires the free Moga Pivot app to work, according to the manufacturer. It's certainly the easiest way to get the controller working, and offers access to a library of over 50 games through its own online store. The app itself lets you download Pac-Man for free when you pair a controller, and the controller comes with a code for Sonic CD. However, once you use the code, you can't readily re-download it to another device. The most important aspect is that it automates pairing and configuring the controller, a process that requires only a few steps.

The Pivot app has a small but solid library of games, including Sonic CD, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Jet Set Radio, and The Bard's Tale. Every game available through the Pivot app is compatible with the Moga Pocket Controller. This is one of the few cases of an Android focus instead of iOS focus, like the Ion Audio iCade, ThinkGeek iCade 8-Bitty,?and?Discovery Bay Games Duo Gamer?(the former two of which has a large but incomplete selection of classic arcade games and the latter of which is focused overwhelmingly on Gameloft titles). However, compatibility outside of games in the Pivot app's library is less consistent. That's where some minor hacking comes in.

Third-Party Driver Support
The most useful aspect of the controller doesn't come from the first-party app and its games. Instead, the third-party Moga Universal Controller app, a free driver and configuration tool, lets you set up the controller to work with any game that accepts physical button mapping. It opens up the controller for use as a general input device, and if you root your smartphone or tablet, you can even use the analog sticks as analog inputs and not digital directional inputs (without root access, the driver detects stick inputs as simply up, down, left, or right). Several third-party drivers let users play with different Bluetooth controllers, including the Sony PlayStation 3 controller. However, the Moga Universal Controller app and the Moga Pocket Controller offer the easiest and simplest way to integrate a controller into additional games, even without rooting.

I played Sonic CD with the Moga Pocket Controller, and it was smooth and responsive with no noticeable lag. The buttons felt firm and "clicky," and the left analog pad triggered Sonic's running quickly. The only problem was the lack of a digital direction pad; the analog pad played well enough, but side-scrolling action games like Sonic the Hedgehog were made for direction pads, and the difference between tapping a direction and sliding a pad in that direction slightly threw off my gameplay.

Out of all the different smartphone and tablet controllers I've reviewed so far, the Moga Pocket Controller is the best, but only by a bit. Like most Bluetooth controllers it only gets useful if you tinker with third-party drivers, but it's designed well and worked with everything I threw at it. It also importantly offered several very good non-arcade games on its compatible games list, which many controllers (like the iCade and Duo Gamer) tend to lack. Sure, they're previous-gen games from the PlayStation, Dreamcast, and Sega CD age, but they're still much better and worth the couple bucks they cost than the same-y, generic shooters and action games that plague the Google Play store. Most importantly, you can use it flawlessly with the third-party driver. If it had a digital pad it would certainly be our Editors' Choice, but that omission holds back this otherwise excellent tablet gamepad.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/XSGTwml1xso/0,2817,2417314,00.asp

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