How to get the Dual Shock 3 to Work with Resistance Fall of Man?

Grrr…..  Why does Sony make simple things so complicated?

I’ll start with the answer to the titular question. After firing up the PS3 with your new Dual Shock 3 (DS3) controller:

• start Resistance Fall of Man (RFoM)
• choose “Multiplayer”
• choose “online game” - the following notice will appear:

“An update to Resistance: Fall of Man is available. This update is required for online play. Download update?

• choose ‘yes’
• exit the game when the download is complete
• start it up again.

You’ll finally have 10 year old technology in your sparkly new PS3 - yeah!!!

Who came up with this clever idea? How are people that want to play the single player campaign offline supposed to know this?

Now for the back-story.

I purchased RFoM with my purchase of the PS3 about a year ago. After an hour or so of single player play, I decided I didn’t want to play it without rumble. Having followed the Sony-Immersion lawsuit on my video game law blog, I assumed that one day a dual-shock 3 controller would allow me to play the game with rumble.

The day finally arrived yesterday.

I purchased the over-priced DS3 at Best Buy ($54.99 Cdn) and returned home eager to finally play RFoM with rumble.

As almost always happens with my PS3, when I turned it on, it required an update. So, after that 25 minute oft-repeated teeth-pulling exercise, I started Resistance Fall of Man - but no rumble.  I searched around the Internet and there were vague posts about the need to download a patch for the rumble to work.

OK. unlike 360 games that automatically update themselves on start, I had to hunt down the patch. I did a few Internet searches and nothing. I looked to the official Sony rumble compatibility announcement - nothing.

Based on some earlier blog posts, my next thought was that the patch might be available in the new Playstation Store. I headed to the Playstation Store to see if there was a patch section. The store was down for maintenance. I checked back several times yesterday but the store remained down - ALL DAY!! [Update: Seems I got caught in the middle of this]

Today I tried again. I booted up the PS3 and guess what? I had to install still another fracking PS3 update - enough already!!!

So I let that download go and started up the Xbox 360 to download the new Halo 3 Legendary Map Pack - that took me all of 2 minutes to accomplish (the maps are terrific - see video demos here). After more update teeth pulling, user agreement accepting (why do I have to accept a new Terms of Service agreement on every update? - Microsoft doesn’t require this), a reboot and and still another install, I finally got into the Playstation Store. The new Playstation Store was a nice improvement over the old.  But, there was no patch to be found.  Only after another 10 minutes of Googling did I find the answer to my question in an obscure forum post here. .  Sheesh!

Sony … just copy everything Microsoft has done on Xbox Live already - I’m serious (except the regrettable Microsoft Points idea). Sony is so far behind. It really shows when little things like this are such a major pain in the behind.

I’m gathering I’ll need to solve a similar riddle for every existing PS3 game I want to work with rumble. God help me.

Related Posts:

• November 2008 NPDs – Nintendo Blowout
• Resistance Fall of Man Mini-review
• The New Playstation Store

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