controlling many lives with your bare hands.

When you play games as much as I do things then to get sticky. For instance my ps3s square button has been sticking pretty bad.

How often do you take controllers apart and clean them?

Never. I'd just buy a new controller. The last time I opened a DS3, I spent an hour trying to reassemble it.

when i opened my xbox 360 controller and put it back it never did anything. that annoying song from DooM did something though...

This is a big problem for me, since I mostly play handhelds. Luckily, they are usually made of a more durable material than a typical console controller. Still, had to get both my PSP and my DS fixed at one point.

Yeah I just buy new controllers.

I wonder where the threshold is where the cost of buying a new thing is prohibitively high enough that you just clean or repair the thing you already have?

Somewhere between 'Dualshock 3' and 'House' I guess, but that's a pretty wide area.

Never. I think my purple N64 controller is the only one that's really sticky and I rarely use it.

I don't know that I've owned any controllers that ended up sticky, though my Genesis power and reset buttons are for whatever reason, but I have had ones where buttons stopped working. I still own the PS2 controller that came with my console, but the R buttons rarely work and, I believe, Triangle and Circle don't work either. I don't think opening it up will fix it, sadly. :(

Now that I think on it, my old racing wheel had a sticky brake. This was just the worst in Gran Turismo 5, because it didn't have pedal saturation options. So I was driving around with my brake partially on. My solution was to tie a rubber band around my foot and the pedal, so that whenever I lifted my foot off it would pull the brake pedal up.

In a later version of the fix I replaced the rubber band with some sponge underneath the brake. That meant it would spring all the way off and I could choose which foot I operated it with.

...Then in the end I ditched it entirely and bought a higher quality wheel.

I think my fiance may have spoiled something on it, but I took some alcohol and rubbed it on the side and mashed it a few times. I'm glad that works though so I didn't have to spend $50.

The time I opened up my DS3, it wasn't actually to clean it, but to remove something inside it that was constantly rattling. The problem with reassembling it was that i needed two fingers to hold each of the trigger button springs in place, while i also needed to use both hands to put the two controller halves together. If I only had a third hand, it would have been easy!

I thought this thread would be about the empowering feeling videogames can give you.

Instead I will tell you I will barely ever clean my controllers.

Make a thread about it.

You can clean controllers?

At least once a year. Probably more. But I have a ton of consoles and lots of additives for them. If something starts acting funny there's no way I'm gonna consider dropping fifty or more to replace when I can likely fix it myself. Never took apart a PlayStation controller though. They seem spongy enough to probably be annoying as mirage apparently found out. But I've taken apart multiple consoles as well as all the old controllers. Only taken apart third party Xbox stuff not official controllers. And had to clean some alcohol out of a Wii gamepad. But those are the most recent examples. Taken apart both PS3 and 360 though. But still mostly older generation stuff. Easy enough to fix them