None of these were major issues, but an obvious departure from the high quality standards that you usually see in Microsoft hardware. Upon closer inspection it is even more suspicious – the connect button isn’t flush and is even a little offset, the rubber “foot” ring on the bottom isn’t seated perfectly and looks a little odd, and the piece of the housing where the cord goes in wasn’t seated properly. Other stickers on the unit and packaging looked a little off as well. The unit itself looked identical to the real thing save for the Microsoft logo on the front being replaced by an Xbox 360 logo and the little holographic seal sticker on the back saying “XBHD” instead of Microsoft.

Also despite some okay use of Xbox 360 and Xbox Live logos and branding style there wasn’t a single sign of a Microsoft logo anywhere on the packaging – not a good sign as Microsoft LOVES to crap their corporate logo all over everything they make. The packaging didn’t quite look up to par – while at first glance it was reasonably similar to official looking packaging, the plastic blister pack wasn’t nearly as stylized as most Xbox 360 related packs, and perhaps even more telling, it wasn’t an immense fucking chore to get into. When it finally arrived I immediately recognized it as a fake – not just some other brand, but a genuine, stereotypical Chinese counterfeit. Still, I ended up finding some eStores on Amazon that had them for fairly cheap and nabbed one.

Looking around I quickly discovered that these receivers were in shorter supply than they used to be, some places even charging quite a bit for them. I’m a big fan of the Xbox 360 controller and since I already have a couple I figured it would be easiest (and probably most economical) to go the route of buying the Microsoft Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver which simply let you use your Xbox 360 controllers with your PC. None of my other pads had anything akin to analog sticks – I mostly bought them with playing much older games in mind. After playing around with Nintendo 64 emulators with the intention of taking screenshots for some N64 games that I plan to review one of these days, I determined that it was finally time to break down and get a new gamepad for my PC.

Xbox 360 receiver driver