Today’s rant is a rather short and simple one (and I apologize in advance to the majority of readers, this one’s for the PS3 owners).

Have you experienced your controller just randomly locking in one direction for a couple/few seconds? For me, it’s typically Left. I’m not sure if there’s some functional reason it locks left, but it does. When it does, no other buttons or inputs work at all until it’s over and it lasts for 2-3 seconds (which seems an eternity as Ratchet walks closer and closer to a ledge, leading to his unavoidable death as you yell “Hey, my controller… HEY CONTROLLER?!?!” Fortunately for me, the game has unlimited lives… but I’ve had it happen in Warhawk before to a much less pleasant end. I must’ve looked like a real genius there running in circles as I was killed at point blank range by a guy that actually stood there a good few seconds (I’m assuming he was trying to figure out what I was doing… a rain dance? Was I on fire? Whatever he was thinking, there’s yet another anonymous person on the internet convinced I’m an idiot.)

I’ve gone weeks without this happening (and all jokes aside, I play my PS3 almost daily) yet playing through Ratchet & Clank Future, I experienced this “issue” maybe a half a dozen times throughout the first 12 hours of play. I wondered if it was wireless interference somehow causing a problem. One time I actually couldn’t get my controller to respond at all and saw that it had turned off. I figured the battery was low, but when I turned it back on and checked the charge, I had three bars. That’s happened once in the entire year that I’ve had my PS3, but it almost goes along with the wireless interference theory. If you take your SIXAXIS controller outside of the normal wireless range (which works reliably as far as I can go in my house and still see the TV; ~30ish feet) it will eventually realize that the PS3 is unreachable and turn off. So theoretically, if there is some wireless interference that interrupts the signal long enough, it’s not unreasonable to expect it to turn off. For the record, I do have a wireless network in my home (that is only in use by my PSP and DS).

My biggest fear is that this is an issue with the PS3 and/or its antenna. I can live with it being a controller issue as I plan on buying a DualShock 3 controller when they’re released in the US anyway. But the one little thing that bothers me is that the FCC leaks of the newer PS3 models indicated an update or change in the internal antenna inside the PS3, and if this was done to “fix” the problem, I may be stuck with it forever.

So to the PS3 owners out there that read this, have you ever experienced your controller “wigging out” or losing connection when it still has plenty of battery charge? And if you’ve never had this issue, let me know which model PS3 you have and roughly when you purchased it.

Tweet This