crackerwax

It would appear that Sony have made a massive fucking u-turn and decided to add rumble to the Sixaxis and imaginatively re-brand it as the DualShock 3. Gosh!

I’d completely forgotten about rumble, after all it’s such a last generation feature. As Sony’s Phil Harrison himself said, when he was asked if adding rumble to the PlayStation 3’s controller might be a good idea:

We have no plans to do so in the standard controller that ships with PlayStation 3. I believe that the Sixaxis controller offers game designers and developers far more opportunity for future innovation than rumble ever did. Now, rumble I think was the last generation feature; it’s not the next-generation feature. I think motion sensitivity is. And we don’t see the need to do that.

Fucking hypocrites. This is what I hate about Sony, their blatant disregard for the people who pay their wages.

We all know, well the gaming cognoscenti at least, that the whole reason they dropped rumble in the first place was that they’d refused to pay Immersion Technologies for the use of haptic feedback technology that they had patents for. In fact they didn’t just refuse to pay up (unlike the commercially savvy boys at Microsoft who paid up almost instantly) but they fought and fought and fought. They still lost.

They seem to assume we’re all slack jawed chavs, playing 50 Cent: Bulletproof while we wait for FIFA Soccer 2009. Admittedly this is probably part of the core audience for the PlayStation 2 and if I’m honest it unlikely the sort of audience Sony generally attract would ever be interested in Ico or Okami preferring to label them proper gay like but even so show us a bit of respect.

What’s more even though they’ve finally capitulated and given us rumble, they’re still fucking the UK over by not releasing it until Spring 2008 (nice and vague that) whilst Japan gets it in November. Bastards.

Of course we all know that as soon as they come out I’ll be buying one, I’m such a sucker.