Thrustmaster's been a long-lived producer of gaming peripherals, specializing in racing wheels and PC Flight Sticks. They also have quite a selection of PC compatible gamepads, like the Firestorm Digital 3 I carried around in my laptop bag for years. I wouldn't call many of their game pads "spectacular." In fact, a great deal of them have either been oddly shaped or poorly styled, or of dubious quality.
Their latest gamepad lineup, however, is the best I've seen from Thurstmaster in recent memory. The GP XID eschews the Playstation layout for the XBOX layout, positioning the left stick above at the top left rather the left middle. And these sticks are really nice for a third-party controller, sporting a non-slip texured rubber surface. Thrustmaster boasts their analog sticks have 2 times the precision than anything else out there, although I doubt I could tell the difference.
