Mad Catz Dream Pad

• Price: œ17.99

“It’s all about control – and I’ve got lots of it”, so spake Janet Jackson on her 1986 debut album,cunningly entitled “Control”, but how much of that do you get with one of these?

The first thing you notice is its slightly bulky feel compared to a standard Sega joypad. Whereas thesides of that one are almost vertical in the main part, the Mad Catz Dreampad has more of a crescentmoon shape, the extra size being used to its advantage to contain rubber patches for extra grip, not thatI’ve ever felt the Sega version falling out of my hands due to the lack of these.

The controller also comes in five colours: a standard cream-coloured pad, looking not drasticallydifferent from a Sega original, plus see-through blue, green, purple and red. It also includes thestandard slots for a VMU and vibration pack.

The main advantage with this pad is that you can reprogram the buttons to perform the functions ofothers. It’s quite simply done – press the ‘program’ button, positioned about halfway between the’start’ and ‘A’ buttons, which then turns orange, then if you want to, for example, re-map the functionof ‘B’ to be used from the ‘A’ button, press ‘A’, after which the program button will flash, then ‘B’,which will then turn off the light on the program button. However, the Dreampad is not fullyreprogrammable since neither the rear shoulder buttons, nor the analogue joystick’s functions can bealtered.

There are two extra buttons for which you can program as desired, which are labelled Z and C, toextend the choice from the standard four. Unfortunately, the positioning of these is wrong, sincecompared to a standard controller’s four (X, Y, A, B), these are placed at approximately where theDreampad has its upper four (Y, Z, B, C), which means some remapping is required to stop accidental presses of the wrong button.