Sony PS5 DualSense Voted Best Controller Of All Time, But What's Your Favorite?

best controller ever
There are very few choices that you will make as a gamer that are more personal than your choice of gamepad. It's almost completely subjective—comfort is paramount to enjoying long gaming sessions, and a controller's comfort score depends almost entirely on how well it fits your body geometry.

Despite that, sweaty gamers continue to argue over which controller is better. These clashes continue despite that every game controller has basically been offering the same feature set since the sixth generation of game consoles—the PlayStation 2 era. You get two relative analog input devices, a digital pad, between eight and eleven buttons, a couple of triggers, and recently, motion controls or touchpad input on certain models.

ps5 dualsense controller
Sony's PS5 Dualsense controller was judged the winner.

Well, the silliness of these disagreements isn't going to stop BAFTA from having a shootout to figure out which game controller is the greatest of all time. The academy almost seems fully aware of the nonsensical nature of the argument—alongside the PlayStation 5's Dualsense and the Xbox Series X's Elite controller, we have such options as the Nintendo Joy-Cons, several Sega pads, a classic Atari joystick, a dance mat, a Guitar Hero guitar, Microsoft's Kinect, and even the unique mech controller from CAPCOM's Xbox exclusive Steel Battalion.

We say "almost" because the group offered such silly options, yet the winning controller in this conflict is Sony's Dualsense pad for the PlayStation 5. To be clear, the contest was simply for fun, and the results don't represent an actual award given by BAFTA; in fact, the results were picked by Twitter poll. There were no clear rules or metrics given for making the choice, so many respondents may have simply picked the DualSense controller because it is the newest and has the most features.

dualshock vs xbox elite tweet
Numerous replies expressed shock at the Xbox Elite pad losing out to Sony's aged DualShock 2 controller.

In a more serious version of this contest, we would have either stuck to modern controllers (making the list quite a bit shorter), or instead gone for a specific competition of which controller had the most market impact in its day. There are solid arguments for almost everything on the list in the latter case, but we'd probably have to go with either the DualShock or the SNES pad. In the former case, we'd have liked to have seen the Steam Pad and perhaps some third-party controllers on there.

What do you think, loyal Hot Hardware readers? Is there any justification for calling Sony's DualSense pad the best game controller of all time? If you disagree, which pad would you prefer to see in the top spot?