Hey guys,

I am having kind of a little problem. You see, some time ago I bought an used Xbox 360 Elite and it came with a controller. The controller itself is .. okayish, needing some warm up time to not randomly shutting off. Also, it feels like I am touching years of baked in sweat, which is not great considering it is not mine.

With that and wanting to play couch coop with my girlfriend I started looking for an alternative controller on amazon. After looking at like 20 different models or so, I stopped. All of them seem to be poorly made and none are even remotely pair-able with the console itself. (Without any help of an adapter or receiver)

Does someone have experience with that and could give me a recommendation for a model to look out for?

Not something I'm terribly familiar with, unfortunately, outside of the cleaning part. Isopropyl alcohol 70% works a treat for getting rid of grime on used hardware. So long as there aren't any decals, etc... because it can ruin those.

I'd go hunting for other used 360 controllers, preferably in a way that allows you to get your hands on it to get a sense of it's condition, rather than shipped. It's hard to beat original hardware.

Any reason why you're against using an adapter/receiver? Another option would be to use a more modern controller (for greater availability) and an adapter to allow it to work on the older console.

I tried cleaning used controllers with alcohol, but after a certain degree of wear it doesn´t do much anymore in my experience. :(

Trying to get my hands on genuine hardware is like wrestling it out of the scalpers hands. Even some young people who doesn´t look like they know what they are doing want like 40-80€ for an completely wore down controller. Can´t imagine that anyone is buying it for that price, I mean we are talking about germany here, the land where there is no thrift culture what so ever. You don´t want to get ripped of and want insane prices for everything used, when nobody buys what you offer nearly all people just throw away perfectly functioning stuff. That´s why I wanted to buy from a store to avoid this crazy pricing.

In the past I owned two controllers using receivers. One was an third party controller for PC and the receiver broke like one year after buying, the second one was the microsoft Xbox360 receiver for Windows. That broke like after two years just shy of two month after warranty ended. In the case of the second one it came with a battery pack and charger so the controller was still useful for 4 more years. After that I only bought genuine controllers but the Xbox360 case is really freakishly expensive. An used PS3 controller for example goes for like 5-10€. Even Gamecube controllers are around 30€.

Fun fact, when you throw something away it is considered now property of the city here, which is basically saying its state property. When you take something from the trash it is considered theft against the city/state and will be punished accordingly. :D