Things I like about the PS4 controller:
- The headphone jack is pretty useful for playing late at night without disturbing the neighbors.
- The ‘share’ button is neat, and I will have to be careful to not spam the hell out of everyone once I get around to authorizing the PS4 for Twitter.
Things I dislike about the PS4 controller:
- Comes with a charge cable that is way too short to use while playing. My chair is right next to the console and it’s short, I can’t imagine using it in the usual arrangement of the console under the TV. It seems to be a pretty ordinary USB cable on both ends, so I’ll probably be replacing it with one that’s comparable in length to the 8-10′ charge cable that came with the 360; I don’t know what the hell Sony was thinking when they decided 6′ was enough.
- Battery runs out super fast. I could get like a whole lost weekend of cordless playing on the 360, the PS4 barely lets me play for a whole day without having to recharge. (Or is it just that I never really noticed recharging the 360’s controller because the cable made it possible to seamlessly move between wireless play and charging?)
- That stupid light on it. Why does my controller need to light up the room. Games can control its color but you can’t actually see the light as it’s aimed completely away from you so it’s not as if it’s really conveying any information; supposedly it is maybe there to work with the camera, but I have a projection screen and will thus never, ever be getting a camera. You can dim it, but you can’t turn it off. I suspect this is not helping the battery issues. I stuck some tape over it; I don’t need to have an eerie blue light cast on my thighs while I’m lounging there playing games.
- The ‘options’ button (which tends to get used for pause/menus/etc) is way too close to the giant touchpad, and hard to hit quickly.
The light is there specifically for motion tracking from the PS Eye camera, yes. It’s probably never going to be used all that well, judging by how dismally the Kinect and PS Move have been accepted and supported (even on the XBone where the system came with all the required hardware as a compulsory thing for its first year of existence). Covering it up isn’t a terrible idea.
If you do ever decide to do motion tracking, the projector probably won’t interfere with it, for what it’s worth. As long as the camera isn’t directly in front of your projection screen, it wouldn’t be picking up too much from the projector itself, and games are supposed to set the controller tracking color to be maximally differentiable from anything in the background that might be confusing. (Which is why the color changes.)
But I can count the number of games that have benefited from the PS Move on a single hand, and the number of PS Move games I actually enjoyed on a single finger.
It’s not that I think projecting an image will interfere with some kind of motion tracking device. It’s that me standing up to wave my arms around and control the game casts a shadow on the screen.
I think the PS4 controller cable is an ordinary USB to micro-USB so you could order a 10′ cable from Monoprice, Amazon, Newegg, or whatever.. I was looking for a 6′ cable at Fry’s Electronics last week and spotted a few different 10′ cables there. You might even be able to find that kind of thing at CVS or Walgreens in their phone accessories section.
Yeah, it sure looks like any other USB cable. I need to try it with one of the ones I have lying around before hitting up Monoprice or whatever for a nice long one.