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Thrustmaster has been making controllers for a very long time, I first heard about their products when I got my CH Joystick for Christmas, which I played and played and was very impressed with. Thrustmaster has developed game pads before but nothing that live up to the Firestorm dual Power. Their products are a mainstay on many gamers' desktops. Their quality and innovation has been well respected in the industry -- so much that one of their competitors, Guillemot, purchased the company a while ago. They had a quiet period during the transition, but have started to surface again with some new products. Many game pads today are trying to mimic the likes of the PlayStation pads, equipped with more buttons and the feel of the console controllers. So the Firestorm is an awesome addition to their arsenal in the controller market. This pad may be one of the best gamepads on the market to date. Let's see if that comment is justified.

The Dual Power Gamepad is unique in that it doesn’t require a pin-port for installation. It uses the USB port on your computer. There are no batteries to buy, and the total installation process – which includes the Thrustmapper controller setup installation – takes mere minutes.

With most USB products, you don’t have to shut down your machine to install the unit, but the Thrustmaster’s manual recommends it. When you restart your system, Windows will recognize the product and install the appropriate drivers. However, you will still have to go into the control panels/controllers to add the Thrustmaster device.

Installation of the Thrustmapper software, allows you to test the 13-programmable button setup, and experience the vibrating feedback of the device.

It looks easy enough—you can program each button and save individual game presets. The only problem is that the software is prone to crashing. Even when the software does work as advertised, the pad will either ignore your new configurations or simply fail to respond once you are back playing the game. There's no rhyme or reason to it; NBA 2001 worked perfectly while Triple Play 2002 refused to work at all with a new configuration set.

Tony Hawk Pro skater 2 was the first sports title I tested on the FireStorm. The pad performed admirably, using the left stick to control my player and the buttons to skate around and perform various trick and stunts. There was little force feedback present in the game, but otherwise it was a good showing for the FireStorm.

The next game I tested was Nascar 4. What a blast this was, I have played with the other rumble controllers before, but after playing Nascar 4, I can tell you that the FireStorm is no Rumble pad. When the game started, the pad seemed to rumble like any other pad, but when I jammed on the throttle the vibration increased with the RPM of the motor. For my first test in the game, I rammed the car into the wall at 180MPH, and the FireStorm did a pretty good job of simulating the impact. I crashed into a few other cars on the track, and the force feedback was present in each time. When a car bumped my rear bumper, the FireStorm depicted the impact. When the motor died after a crash, the rumble seemed to stop. Lap times with this pad were par, for being a little ol' gamepad and not a wheel and pedal setup.

Playing sports games such as Madden 2001 or NBA 2001 is a real chore with this pad. If you are used to using a Gravis pad, for example, you will be greeted with a new button layout once inside the game; this forces you to either get used to the new configuration or attempt to reprogram the button layout with the pad's Thrustmapper software.

The only problem I found with this pad is its size. It's huge. It's a few centimeters wider than a standard Gamepad Pro, and the buttons are more spread out making them difficult to reach, especially for those gamers with smaller hands. When in a heated football or basketball game you need to be able to feel the buttons without having to look for them. The pad comes equipped with a wide array of buttons, 13 in all—four on its face, four on its front, two underneath the base, two analog controllers, and a start button.

The price is competitive at 30 bucks, but still I find it hard to recommend the pad to hardcore sports gamers like myself. There are other gamepads on the market that may be better suited for sports games, but I feel flight sim and racing game fans will be very satisfied with its performance. For those of you who are programming freaks, the twelve buttons on this pad should make you happy. Overall this is a decent gamepad that I would recommend to the average gamer who wants a few different features in their gamepad.