CNet's Crave put together a list of the best five game controllers ever made, and while you might not agree with their rank, they hit all the important ones. Since their list charts the peaks of the controller's evolution, they disqualified the Wiimote and Sixaxis for being too new. Here's their picks and reasonings:

• #1: Atari 2600 joystick: Featuring a simple stick mechanism for moving around and a red button for firing. It's not technically a gamepad, but it's so crucial to gaming history there's no way we couldn't mention it.
• #2: SNES controller: This exercise in ergonomics is a curvy, multi-coloured, multi-buttoned evolution of the angular NES controller. This was the first controller to have shoulder buttons -- a revolution that made an arcade staple like Street Fighter II a viable proposition in the home.
• #3: Nintendo 64 controller: This is one of the most important joypads ever produced. Not only did the N64's controller feature an analogue joystick, which made playing games such as GoldenEye realistic and subtle, but it also featured a pistol-like trigger button underneath.
• #4: PS2 controller: Nintendo may have started the analogue-stick-on-a-pad idea but Sony really took it to the bank. For many gamers, the DualShock gamepad is the best gamepad ever made. ... Having two analogue sticks meant you could play games in a completely different way to anything available before.
• #5: Xbox 360 controller: It was the first wireless pad to come as standard. Its comfy, solid design offers dual analogue joysticks and two analogue trigger buttons underneath. There's also a built-in jack for connecting a headset.

I'm surprised GameCube didn't make the list, I know a ton of people who claim it's the best controller ever made for the way it curves around your hand. Although its lack of symmetrical design can be annoying depending on what games you throw at it. I thought the PS2 had the best design by far for its time, but now that others have had time to perfect it, I actually like the Xbox 360 controller slightly more than the DualShock. I still can't get used to Sixaxis's weird trigger setup, and the Xbox 360 controller's simple curves and ability to turn your console on and off makes it the industry standard in my opinion.

Looking back over all the controllers ever made, which would you pick as your favorite?

Atari Online Entertainment's Chris Bergstresser is proud not only of his last name, but also to reveal that Atari is working on an "ambitious new PS3 Home-beating community portal." It will start as a PC project offered only in America at first, with plans to take it to Europe if it's as successful as they're hoping. Set to launch this summer, Atari will give us the tools to "allow users to create their own gaming experiences." Summer? As in the season after winter? Anyone else still on spring break, but waking up to snow outside? The highlight of my day so far was seeing my neighbor shoveling snow off her flowers.

Atari is such a tease, PlayStation Home is one of the most anticipated things in gaming right now, you can't just say you're going to do something better and then not tell us what it is. Who are you, Miyamoto? I hope someone gets fired just for keeping us waiting. Oh, by the way, Atari's highly praised Bruno Bonnell just quit. Close enough, we're even now.

Sir Benjamin J. Heckendorn, Duke of all that is digital and Magistrate overseeing all mods, "Ben Heck" continues to perfect his previous Atari handheld design. It's slightly longer in width, but half the size in depth. Cut down from two inches deep to just one, this version needs four AA batteries to run, and lasts for about three hours of gameplay, so he recommends rechargeable batteries. Here's the officials specs: 

• Size: 7″ x 4.381″ x 1.08″
• Batteries: x(4) AA
• Display: 3.5″ diagonal TFT active matrix LCD, LED backlighting
• Color scheme: Saddle shoe

His target asking price for this version is $300, crazy expensive for a handheld with no new game releases on the way. I'm tempted to imply that this is still a better buy than a PSP, but that's a fight I definitely couldn't win. If you're big on old school gaming though, contact Ben Heck at this email, or read the full article here,  and he'll hook you up with his hand made handheld.

Thanks to Anthony, Curtis and Matt from VGH for the tip! My heart goes out to you guys, give it a few shocks and send it back in one piece. Check out the examples pictures below:

Your shirt moves in Atari admiration. What better way to show off your old school gaming love for Pong then to bring the game as close as healthily possible to your heart? I doubt Ralph Baer and Nolan Bushnell ever intended for Pong to involve nipple controls for an animated shirt, but I like the direction this is taking the industry in. Instead of seeing Girls Gone Wild appear on television late at night, I now look forward to seeing a Gamers Gone Wild show that focuses on fornicating with gaming themes. Tetris Sex, Super Mario Sisters, Bubble Bobble Blowjobs, Microsoftcore, Nintendykes - the possibilities of porn are endless. Much like Girls Gone Wild, this shirt runs for hours, and it's only 25 bucks for its glow in the dark pixelated prowess. It also takes two AAA batteries to run and can be safely washed by removing the animated decal - a shirt that tells you when to take a shower, now that's something useful. You can buy it here, but I suggest checking out these other gaming shirts first.

The stop motion project that brought us the Space Invaders and Pong recreations is back for another artistic audience masterpiece. This time Guillaume Reymond returns with Namco's 1982 Atari racing game Pole Position. This game went on to be the best seller in 1983, but the closest most of you probably came to playing this classic was on one of the countless TI-83 calculator remakes. It probably didn't take as long as the Space Invaders video to make, but turning out the lights for a night drive was a cool twist. My favorite part is still the unenergetic human made sound effects, next gen games lack lethargic explosions. This retro crew is running out of possible pixelation ideas though, I'm not sure what to expect next from them.

Atari announced today that that their action adventure shooting game Bullet Witch has finished development and is scheduled for a North American release on February 27th for $49.99. The Xbox 360 game will be set in the year 2013 with mankind nearing extinction as demons take over Earth. Pretty bland sounding, but when the game was first announced it looked really interesting, with some Silent Hill worthy creature pictures eventually revealed. The closer the game gets to release though, the more it just looks like a mindless shooting game. That worked for Lost Planet, but I'm not so sure if the Cavia makers can pull it off - the characters and enemies in the screenshots below look good, but the environments look boring and suggest that gameplay might be just as bad.

You play as Alicia and defend the human race using large weapons and the magical powers to manipulate the atmosphere around you. This picture shows how you can summon tornadoes and thunder, but it doesn't look anywhere near as in-depth as Kameo was for the 360. Atari Product Manager Jeremiah Cohn assures us that "Bullet Witch flaunts exactly what next-generation gaming is all about with more destructible environments and stunning visual effects, coupled with a captivating storyline ... Cavia has made a slew of enhancements in both the European and US versions to deliver an extremely exciting game." The destructible environment pictures do look fulfilling, but I'm more excited about the enemies - check out this obese Grudge movie actor reject. If that's not the most fucked up character outside of the Silent Hill series, then the award might go to this demon that looks like he was in a deleted scene from the animated Akira movie.

After the game launches in America, we'll receive additional Bullet Witch downloadable content on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Every two weeks a new pack will be available until all five packs have been offered. The extra content should just be new character costumes and a level revision or two, so it isn't a deciding factor for whether you should buy the game or not. I'll make sure to get the game later this month when it comes out and review it for the site and give a copy away to a random reader. I'm not usually a fan of magic games that bring guns into gameplay, and a gun game that focuses on magic might also be awkward. Hopefully it lasts longer than Lost Planet did, but I'm not too convinced. Here's some gruesome pictures to get you excited.

While we were reading Slaughterhouse Five in high school, our teacher would go koo-koo for Kurt Vonneguts every day in class, but I was too busy thinking about the novel's aliens to pay attention. With the ability to see all of the past and future along with the present, the tralfamadorians see all of life's random routes of matter as one big blur that's always in motion. Basically Donnie Darko minus the Brokeback, plus hundreds of awards for fancy metaphors. I would sit in class applying the tralfamadorian way of life to everything I could think of, and it wasn't long until I realized that they would get almost no joy from video games. With the ability to see the ending of every video game ever made, they basically are cursed with a Prima strategy guide bible stapled to their foreheads.

This would be a terrible ability to have in today's gaming world, but back in the retro days it would have been a blessing. TheBBPS found an actual example of this type of vision though in Rosemarie Fiore's online art portfolio:

"These photographs are long exposures taken while playing video war games of the 80’s created by Atari, Centuri and Taito. The photographs were shot from video game screens while I played the games. By recording each second of an entire game on one frame of film, I captured complex patterns not normally seen by the eye."

Today's games are far too big and expansive to guarantee an enjoyable over-exposed gameplay render, but the simple games of our past are pieces of art when viewed like a tralfamadorian. Tempest is by far my favorite (the picture above), but the Qix pictures would surely impregnate Piet Mondrian if he were still alive to see it. So it goes. Here's Rosemarie Fiore's work:

Ben Heck, the dude who crafted the one handed Xbox 360 controller for disabled gamers, has returned with yet another impressive homemade creation. It's actually the second one he's made this year, and even shows you step by step how he assembled it. Ben Heck is a beast among gamers ladies and gentlemen. I will now email him about seriously making the  only thing that could one-up the legendary Xbox 360 laptop, a PS3 laptop. If no one will buy my 20GB PS3 then I must get rid of the monster and let Ben Heck bring the Frankenstein to life.

SLAP! Atari's legendary founder Nolan Bushnell (who now owns a gaming restaurant franchise)has bitchslapped Sony's PS3 with some strong words in a recent interview:

"I think Sony shot themselves in the foot... there is a high probability [they] will fail. The price point is probably unsustainable. For years and years Sony has been a very difficult company to deal with from a developer standpoint. They could get away with their arrogance and capriciousness because they had an installed base. They have also historically had horrible software tools. You compare that to the Xbox 360 with really great authoring tools [and] additional revenue streams from Xbox live... a first party developer would be an idiot to develop for Sony first and not the 360. People don't buy hardware, they buy software."

Microsoft has announced their plans to release six entire atari games over Xbox Live starting in January. The famous games of our past include: Missile Command, Battlezone, Tempest, Warlords, Centipede, and Asteroids. Each game will come out in two different versions, one being the exact original, and the other getting a graphics revamp, and if you've played Geometry Wars, you know that could be quite the deal. Warlords and Battlezone will feature online multiplayer, and Battlezone will also even utilize the Xbox Live vision camera. I doubt any of the classics can get us as addicted as Geometry Wars has, but I'm still definitely going to buy them.