Plaidophile

Holy crap. For $300.00 they had better throw in a lap dance.

For $300 they last way the hell longer than 15 $20 soft pads (I've already been through six in the last two years and most of that was in just a couple months' worth of heavy play time — it's because of getting so sick of crappy soft pads that I haven't played much in the last year and a half), and work a lot better during that time too. Plus they're good enough to do doubles mode on which is a much better workout than single mode. Which is why I got two.

Man, I've spent so much money this month.

How much is shipping for that again?

*cough* $90 *cough*

Do you know of anything out there that you'd recommend as a middle ground? I'm very interested in trying this game out, but that pad is, er, a little bit out of my price range.

I figure I'll try it out with the default "soft pads" and see what I think of it before I do anything drastic, though... I'm not sure what those are like, but I'm sort of envisioning something similar to the "Power Pad" they had for the old NES. If it IS anything like that, then I figure it won't work too well on carpet and I'll have to get something at least a little better eventually.

Soft pads alone are crap (they're even thinner/lighter than the old Power Pad), but anything higher-end is a pretty major investment (better options start at $100 for the Ignition semi-soft pads). What I found works best for carpet is get a cheap soft pad and duct-tape it to one of those office chair mats (which you can get for about $2.50 at Office Max if you know where to look). That also has the benefit of keeping the pad from wearing out too quickly, so it'll last a whole THREE weeks instead of two.

There's lower-end arcade-style pads too, but most of them are crap. The least-crappy non-CF one is the RedOctane Afterburner (which is $200) but apparently it still has some pretty major build quality issues (shattered panels etc.) and it's more of an arcade feel, whereas the CF surface is smoother which lets you do more fancy fast moves. CF also sell an 'arcade conversion kit' for $24 which raise the corners and center up a bit, so with the CF you can have it both ways.

Oh, and on the CF, all nine squares are active, so it supports more games, including Pump It Up. The soft/medium pads only have the eight edge buttons active, and most of the other metal pads don't support the back corners. So that extra $100 for the CF buys you a LOT (plus a much better warranty, not that you'd ever need it since the CF can also withstand basically anything, including an SUV rolling over it).