I get all the supporting stuff you’re saying, but Eye Toy was not a success. And patent or not, Sony probably wasn’t in a rush to release the controller until the Wii hit. But that presentation was specifically what I was referring to. Nintendo broke both Microsoft and Sony that gen. Sony absolutely recovered and Microsoft is still trying to get up on its feet and didn’t know if they were supposed to fight Sony or Nintendo and just flailed in all directions. But I wish I didn’t have to be in the same room as that presentation. It still makes my skin crawl with cringe. 

Even tho somethings like Move never lived up to potential. I have to say the worst is UMD. In theory, I understand the concept, but they allowed you to use Sony memory sticks and supported video formats from the moment you started using the PSP. So out of the gate, PSP UMDs were useless. Not to mention, this is a device in your pocket. People don't bring a bunch of movies with them on the Go, and if it's between a game and a movie, carrying a PSP is going to be a game. It was a case of just because you can, does not mean you should. Sony was still in that era of trying to force new physical media formats and failing. Blu-ray is the only one they ever succeeded at. PSP should have used cards like DS.


The funny thing is. When Nintendo used carts for N64 they sealed their fate. Fortunes reversed with DS and PSP. Using discs sealed PSPs. Yes, it still sold well. Still got spanked by DS. A lot of other Sony stuff was maybe a good idea but never used well. UMD's were a bad idea, period.

Best: Dual Analog
Worst: Lightbar (wtf?)

I expect DS would still have spanked PSP even without the UMD thing. The blue ocean was just that powerful that gen, with people who'd never considered getting a gaming machine before jumping on the DS bandwagon for stuff like Brain Age and Nintendogs.

Yeah Nintendo is never losing a handheld war but I didn't make it clear and had bad wording. UMD held PSP hostage for many reasons, and when it came time for Vita no BC which hurt Vita (among other things) After they stopped making movie discs, they were stuck with a format no developer wanted to support. So Sony tried to rush the PSP Go. That was a failure and PSP which had some stong years. Limped along in its final years.

With regards to games, UMD at least made sense for the "home console on the go" angle Sony wanted to achieve at the time. It offered high storage capacity for a relatively low price in 2005.

The reason the DS managed to pull through in the end with its card format though was because by 2005, compression codecs and tools were becoming cheaper and more readily available to developers. Add the fact that the DS cards generally had higher capacities than N64 Cartridges at lower prices and any storage advantage the PSP may have had ultimately never really mattered that much in the end. Flash memory was rapidly crashing in price throughout the late 2000s, rendering UMD ultimately pointless after a while, which is why PS Vita ditched the format entirely.

I actually kinda like PS Move.

The lack of an IR pointer meant it wasn't quite as snappy for aiming as the Wiimote, but it had very robust motion sensing capability, and more buttons.

I liked it a lot better than the standard PS3 controller.

The best is the dual analog. Sony was not the first to do it but they popularized dual analog and it became a standard.

PS Move was GOAT! It's a shame that it never had a real killer app though (Sony gonna Sony I guess). But the fact that the controllers carried over to PS4 with PS VR showed that there was more longevity in the concept than Kinect.

I don't know about the best or the worst, but I never quite liked the pressure-sensitive buttons on PS2. They sound fine in theory, but in practice, based on my limited experience, it requires too much effort to find the exact amount of pressure needed for what you want to do. I guess this is mostly based on Metal Gear Solid 2, and it could probably be more fun if it wasn't used for such a sensitive action (with automatic weapons, press a little to aim, press harder to shoot). I have a hard time imagining where pressure-sensitive buttons implemented like that could be very useful though, because it's too hard if it's used for something meaningful, and if it's not for anything meaningful, it's just a useless gimmick.

On the other hand, I kind of liked the motion controls of the Sixaxis. It's implemented poorly in most games, but I've seen some good implementations too. I liked it being used for balancing in Uncharted. It's not necessary, strictly speaking, but I feel like it can add a bit to the experience if implenented correctly. Sadly most developers seemed to try to shoehorn it in places where it really doesn't belong, which, I guess, is a sign of poor design of the whole functionality (good design makes it hard to use poorly).