The D-pad's quality was borne out by my own feverish Tetris testing, which worked whether I rapidly tap-tap-tapped in one direction or pivoted to a crucial 'up to fast-drop' maneuver in newer Tetris games. Pressing down on any edge of the D-pad offers a full 2mm of action, and this has a satisfying sense of travel when a thumb is in its depressed, rounded center-built for the sake of neatly rocking from left to right or up to down. But unlike those offerings, 8BitDo allows its Zero 2's D-pad to protrude ever so slightly farther from its body. At roughly the size of an American dime, this small D-pad is comparable to some of Nintendo's smallest takes, like you'd find on a GameCube controller or a Nintendo 3DS console. To my pleasant surprise, 8BitDo starts this gamepad off with a crucial emphasis on its D-pad. Seriously, 8BitDo? Who in the world do you think would play games with one of these? 2mm of travel?! Nice After receiving and unboxing my very own 8BitDo Zero 2 gamepad (the newest model, introduced one month ago to retailers), I laughed incredulously. At 73mm long and 36.5mm wide, it's barely bigger than an adult's thumb and dwarfed by an average GI Joe figurine. That's probably why people photograph the 8BitDo Zero series next to tiny objects for scale.

Hence, if you see a Zero gamepad in a photo by itself, you may wonder what's so special about it. You won't find a much better maker of unofficial gamepads made for classic consoles' ports (NES, Genesis, Super NES), and those models also come in Bluetooth-equipped flavors, ready to run on modern consoles and PCs.īetween its classic and modern gamepads, 8BitDo clearly favors the SNES' controller as an archetype, and that goes for the company's 'Zero' series as well.

Over the years, we've become frequent users of 8BitDo game controllers, particularly the company's 'legacy' line.

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