Phil Harrison on the PS3 controllers

Read this.

What a load of crap. "Six axis of input"? We'll forgive the journalist for the honest mistake of spelling "axes" wrong. And I can forgive Phil for referring to "six axes" of input, when he's probably referring to the degrees of freedom in a semi-incorrect way. These would be nitpicking his points just to make him look silly, which would be ad hominem attacks on Phil and the journalist. In a cynical way, I've already made the attacks just by mentioning it, except that I say here that I'm not making the attacks. Fundamentally, the two aforementioned issues are irrelevant to the main fact at hand:

Controllers without a rumble feature suck.

Even a perfectly forensic description of the new PS3 controllers could not rescue them from the fact that without rumble, they will suck. I wrote this letter directly to Sony shortly after reading the article:

I've had a Playstation since 1998, and I got my PS2 the week it came out. I'm an avid fan of Sony's work, such as Gran Turismo and God of War. I'm also a hardcore Mac gamer, where I play lots of Quake 3 and Warcraft III.

I have read what Phil Harrison has to say about the PS3 controllers not having rumble; and he's just wrong. While the motion sensing is a very cool feature, it's not worth losing the rumble for it. He said rumble is one-dimensional... it isn't. It's two-dimensional, since there are two seperate rumblers in a Dual Shock controller. Plus it's feedback directly to the user's sense of touch, which is now missing. Tekken, Soul Calibur II, God of War, Amplitude, and many others would not be the same without rumble. Rez wouldn't even have been possible without rumble, and that's one of the finest accomplishments in the art of video game design.

I will not buy a second PS3 controller until a version with rumble becomes available. If I find out the first version of Tekken on PS3 doesn't support rumble, I won't buy that either.

I'm not the only one who's annoyed. I know several other hardcore gamers that use lack of rumble as one more reason to get an XBox 360.

I'm also a 6-year industry veteran at Ubisoft who has worked on PS2, XBox, PSP, DS, PC, among other platforms. The current PS2 controllers are the finest home console controller ever created. Please don't mess them up by removing rumble.