Is Sixaxis a white elephant?

Derek Littlewood of Free Radical (the team behind TimeSplitters) is the Project Lead on forthcoming PS3 shooter Haze. He told us: "I think the feature itself works extremely well, but I think the implementation up until now has been somewhat haphazard. The problem with features like the Sixaxis is that there's always a lot of pressure to make use of them even if they're not right for the game.

"I think this situation is slowly changing though - the PS3 is maturing and so is the attitude of a lot of developers to the Sixaxis. They've seen what can happen when you put lazy Sixaxis support in a game and they've seen what happens when you insist on players using Sixaxis controls even when they plainly don't work so I think developers are becoming more thoughtful about their use of the Sixaxis. I think as a result you'll see fewer games supporting it but those that do using it well, which can only be a good thing.

"Anything that gives the player a different way to interact with a game is exciting to me. How many times have you ever seen a friend leaning their controller left and right whilst they attempt to steer their character in a game? That's the potential of Sixaxis, right there."

That's very true, but those friends were shockingly bad at games...


Above: Haze is looking very promising. But how will it use Sixaxis?

Justin Towell

Justin was a GamesRadar staffer for 10 years but is now a freelancer, musician and videographer. He's big on retro, Sega and racing games (especially retro Sega racing games) and currently also writes for Play Magazine, Traxion.gg, PC Gamer and TopTenReviews, as well as running his own YouTube channel. Having learned to love all platforms equally after Sega left the hardware industry (sniff), his favourite games include Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams, Zelda BotW, Sea of Thieves, Sega Rally Championship and Treasure Island Dizzy.