I can’t ever see a potential situation rising that would inspire me to jailbreak my iPhone in order to pair it with a Wiimote over Bluetooth in order to play retro games with mame4iPhone. But it does open the door for pairing a jailbroken iPhone to a Dualshock 3 controller, which would be awesome. More »
We saw Sony’s impressive motion control demo. You may call it a gimmick, and even Sony admits that it’s not the primary direction of the PlayStation 3. The Dual Shock will still reign as king.
The Gadget: Datel Wildfire, the first third-party PlayStation 3 controller to support a combination of Bluetooth, rumble and tilt sensitivity.
In case you’ve been disappointed by the SIXAXIS or Dual Shock 3, Datel has just released the Wildfire. Yeah, it’s a generic controller, but it’s wielding all the standard PS3 functions and then some.
Unlike Microsoft, Sony never bothered to make PC drivers for their PlayStation 3 controllers; but some Japanese programmer has bridged that fjord for you.
We’ve seen the patents and the rumours that the Sony PlayStation Portable would begin accepting the Dual Shock 3 controller. Heck, we’ve even seen those too impatient to wait who’ve modded the experience on their own. But finally, Sony has announced a new feature called PSP Plus that will allow you to play PSP (2000 or 3000 models) with your Dual Shock 3 (or SIXAXIS?) controller. But there are a few catches…
Sony’s mantra of not writing checks for exclusives–or much of anything–seems to be biting them in the arse a couple times this week. There are at least four cases where the PlayStation 3 has suffered because of Sony’s lack of willingness to open up the purse strings. We knew two of these before–backward compatibility and the DualShock 3–but we only found out about the other two during the roundtable session with Sony’s Jack Tretton yesterday.
The PSP controls are not horrible—though that analogue nub leaves something to be desired—but the DualShock is a far more comfortable controller. Now the fine citizens at AcidMods have hacked the PSP hardware to work with the DualShock. Requiring no changes to the firmware, all functions but the brightness and volume are mapped to the controller. And it seems to work perfectly:
If you like some rumble in your gaming jungle, then you’ll be happy to know that Sony has announced that their Dualshock 3 controller for the PS3 will be released in Australia for $99.95 on April 24.
As a point of interest, the US version (which is exactly the same in every way), has an RRP of US$54.99, or the equivalent of $59.37. That’s roughly $40 cheaper. Factor in the shipping and it’s still cheaper.
Sure, there are economic factors that local companies need to take into account beyond the strength of the US dollar, but $40 is a lot of money in anybody’s book. Sony’s decision to price their controller that high in Australia really will encourage a lot of people to import.
