It's actually referred to by Sony as the Directional Buttons, because it's not a pad like the ye old days Sega MegaDrive.
Sony can say that if they want, but under the hood, those four buttons are actually still a single pad. :)
That video is intense... :)
James, I actually only watched the first ~10 seconds myself, and I didn't expect anyone else to watch any more than that. . . . I just made sure that it was a good demo of the [Shift] concept applied to the control buttons.
Having watched the full video now, I gotta say, that's actually a pretty poor demonstration of Gradius V Stage 3. That guy was lucky not to die until the boss fight; he made so many stupid mistakes and poor tactical decisions, and then he got himself killed before the really rough part of the boss battle. Would it impress you if I told you that, at one time, I could easily survive that stage, plus its two predecessors in the game, without a single lost life (that's including the whole boss fight, which gets a lot more difficult)?
Of course, from the middle of Stage 4 onward, it was always just a downpour of lost lives . . . especially the soul-crushing Stage 7.
This guy does a much better job on Stage 3. He's playing Easy mode, but from a tactical perspective, he handles it better.