Playstation Move - Hardware review

So, last year around this time, I won a Playstation Move package that came with Singstar Dance, two Move controllers, a Playstation Eye and all of the necessary cables. I picked up one of the small hand held control sticks to compliment the Move controller as well.

I am going to breakdown my impressions of the hardware, some of the games, and then just my overall impressions of the game lineup and offerings to date.

So, let's start with the hardware, which overall is pretty good. The build is excellent - the durability is quite sound as my kids have managed to drop the controllers several times and I have yet to notice any sort of negative impact on the performance. The appearance of the controllers is a bit odd - my son compared it to a glowing snow cone. I was not a fan of the button layout. The Playstation Dualshock controller has buttons laid out in a diamond shaped pattern, and the Move controller uses a square shaped one. I would have much preferred they stuck with the diamond shape surrounding the "Move" button.

The setup is quite easy, though my PS3 has somewhat limited USB ports, and the eye did use one of those up.

The off-hand control stick I picked up was decent as well, also having been dropped on its head a few times but never failing to operate. Not many games seem to use that controller currently (think shooter games and movement controls mostly), however. Both this device and the Move controllers hook up to the USB to mini-USB and charge just like a Dualshock controller would, and sync up to the system in the same way. Overall, I like that design, but having had one controller of about two years' age no longer holding a charge, I would be concerned that .this could happen here prematurely.

On to the Playstation eye - this is in most senses the least impressive piece of tech in my opinion. It looks nice enough, but the image quality is very, very poor. It responds well to the Move controllers themselves - I found the accuracy of the unit to be incredibly good in most instances, but the camera itself is of such poor quality that in games like Eyepet it was almost jarringly bad.

I heard a lot of concerns about the lighting, but honestly I did not have too many of those. Most lighting conditions in our living room allowed the device to work just fine, even if there was a semi-open window where the camera was pointing. The sometimes limited range of the Playstation Eye itself was sometimes more of an annoyance. Without the ability to 'adjust' the sweet spot on the camera, it was sometimes a bad 'fit' to my living room. I know the idea is to get people up off of their couches at times, but some games were lengthy and being able to sit on the sofa would be nice, but the Eye could not track properly because I was a foot or two away from the sweet spot. Another game, Eyepet, had a very specific distance you needed to sit in order for it to operate properly.

Overall, the hardware is very well-made. The controllers are durable and light, they track very well, and except from some particulars with the Playstation Eye itself, I found it to be very accommodating to our living room. I would score the hardware components as an 8 out of 10.