rumble

A few years back Sony lost a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Immersion Corp. and in the end they had to pay some $150 million for the fact that they used vibration or "rumble" in their PlayStation and Playstation 2 controllers. Gamers everywhere were pretty skeptical when Sony announced that the PlayStation 3 was going to come out without rumble in their controllers. Instead they introduced the SIXAXIS controller that featured motion sensing instead and tried to spin all kinds of lame PR to suggest that gamers really didn't think that vibration was that important for gaming. Well au contraire, mon ami! How would you explain the fact that companies like Microsoft and Nintendo went ahead and licensed the technology from Immersion and incorporated the vibration feature into the controllers for their next-gen game consoles, the X360 and Wii? That was a pretty big load of b.s. as far as I'm concerned. Especially for the games that I like to play, driving simulators like Gran Turismo and first person or 3rd person action shooters, vibration is a big part of the game experience. It gives you tactile feedback when you hit an obstacle or get shot or something explodes near you. Once you've experienced it you don't want to play without it.

Sony finally came around and saw the light -- they signed a license deal with Immersion and in Asia they debuted the new DUALSHOCK 3 controller for PS3 sometime in November last year. No love for North America in 2007 though, the word was that sometime in Spring 2008 the U.S. gamers would get it. Some devoted U.S. gamers bought or ordered DS3s through companies that would import the DS3s from Asia.

My coworker was going on a trip to China, and he asked me what I wanted... you know where this is going. Two weeks later he's back from his trip and in my hands is the ultra-rare, made for the Chinese market, bona-fide DUALSHOCK 3. Pretty sweet, it actually doesn't weigh that much more than the SIXAXIS and has all the features of the SIXAXIS plus the vibration. And many of the popular games already support it. Rumble is back, baby!

And so I reveled in the glory that is mine, having one of the very few DS3s in the hands of a consumer in the U.S. ... until next week, it seems. There are reports that Sony is shipping DS3s all over the country to retailers and that they are about to break cover in the next week or so. Well, that's the thing about being on the cutting edge... it's thin and sometimes you fall right off. But at least I got mine for cheaper than everyone else will.