Jeff Hoy, American

I was playing around with the Dualshock 3 last night, experimenting with a feature I never really got much use out of.  That feature is the “pressure-sensitive” face buttons.  It was introduced with the PS2 on the Dualshock 2 controllers, and made it’s way to the Sixaxis and DS3 for the Playstation 3.  I never really paid it much mind because outside of fighting games I really couldn’t see much use for it.  I mean, it just seemed like it would be hard to have any level of finesse that makes use of it’s 256 levels of sensitivity.  All I could see was either sharp snaps on the button or slower pushes being registered as stronger hits and kicks or weaker ones.

But that all changed today while I was playing around with the Gran Turismo HD Concept demo.  Not GT5 Prologue which was released in retail stores, the original demo that was released through the PS Store not long after the PS3’s launch.  It was removed from the PS Store once Prologue was released, but if you downloaded it before it was removed you can still get it through your download list in the store.

Anyway, back on topic.  By default the GT demo has gas and brake mapped to the x and square buttons on the face, instead of the more appropriate L2 and R2 analog shoulder triggers.  I didn’t really feel like changing it as I only planned to play for a few minutes.  I was doing this very near my sleepy time and I was getting drowsy, as such I started slacking off on pushing the buttons.  It was then that I realized my car was actually going slower, but maintaining that speed.  So I put more pressure on the button and LO!  My car went faster!  Neat!  So I experimented more, and I learned just how much accuracy can be had with the face buttons in acceleration and braking in GT.  It was really quite impressive, I had no idea that this much finesse and accuracy could be attained through this method.  Admittedly it took a little more concentration and much smaller movements than using the shoulder triggers with their longer swing, but it was very much usable and I eventually got very good at this control scheme.

All that said, I don’t think it’s made me into a convert from the shoulder triggers as gas and brake.  I may experiment with some of my other racing games though to see how they work with this feature, if they work at all.  Good job Sony, I had no idea.