Penguin United: Wii Cross Fire Review

-Design-

The Wii Crossfire Pistol is definitely aesthetically pleasing. Button layout feels natural and accessible. Weight distribution is also good. With the battery compartment in the pistol grip, the bulk of the weight is in in the palm of your hand. Unlike most Wii gun shells which, because of the Wii remote are significantly more top heavy.

The Crossfire also has the ‘A’ button on both sides for easy thumb access, pleasing both righties and southpaws. The groove for thumb access to the ‘A’ button is also very comfortable. The ‘+’, ‘-’, ‘power’, and ‘home’ buttons are all located on the left side and easily accessible by a second hand. Also located on this side is the four blue player indicator lights which are very bright, which can be contributed to them being blue. On the back we have the d-pad, ’1′, and ’2′ buttons. They are easy to access with a thumb or second hand and the directional cross is concave making it okay to rest your thumb in the groove. The d-pad shape is also like that of cross-hairs, circle with a cross over the top. This is good for comfort but could be a problem for pressing diagonals but this is a gun not a fight pad so I can not fault them there.

The trigger is a little clickier than I would have preferred and feels sort of narrow, but I have a rather fat thumb, so it would probably feel okay to others. Unlike some gun shells the Crossfire also has a sight for precision aiming in games that allow calibration and turning off of the aiming reticule. The Wii sync button(orange dot) is located recessed in one of the faux backfire vents on the right side of the gun. The speaker is also located on the right of the gun and is much louder than the standar Wii remote speaker. All in all you will not be shamed to hold one of these.

-Performance-

Here is where the Crossfire loses significant points. One problem that will be experienced by all users immediately after connecting the Crossfire to their Wii is the over sensitiveness of the infrared camera. In games the pointer will move great distances with even the most minuscule of changes in hand position. The gun’s motion sensing technology is no where near as sensitive. Games which require certain hand gesture, such as swipes and swings will have some trouble registering them, but this could be no fault of the gun and more the fault of the hand orientation, since you hold the gun quite differently than your Wii remote. I also noticed a compatibility problem with two games. Sega’s “The House of the Dead 2 and 3″ and “Metroid Prime 3: Corruption” have trouble communicating with the Crossfires speaker. Instead of audio cues there is a constant hissing sound coming out of the speaker. I did not experience this with Wii Play but the sound of the gun firing was somewhat distorted. Its possible that Sega and Nintendo may be purposely creating incompatibilities with third party hardware.

-Durability-
The Crossfires appears to be constructed of the same shiny plastic that first party Wii remotes are composed of. This gives the gun a good feel, and belief that it could handle multiple drops and collision with nearby furniture. However the buttons with their overly clicky presses alludes to possible early failure. The Crossfire is held together with seven standard philips screws, one residing under the battery cover, lending itself to possible deconstruction by the curious and creative. This may be necessary to rectify the Crossfires failing grace, which I will speak on below.

-Value-

The Crossfire currently retails for $39.95 at www.Buy.com. This is the same price as a Wii remote.  Normally third party peripherals retail for less than what the console manufactures themselves sale peripherals for.  If the Crossfire did what its designed for and you have every Wii light gun-esque game then I would recommend this controller wholeheartedly.  Who knows, maybe this gun functions well with a one-hundred plus inch display with an infrared sensor powerful enough to be received at 50 feet and the user able to be 50 feet from their television.  I can tell you that I do have access to a 100 inch screen but I can only get about 24 feet from it and at that distance it was difficult to maintain the infrared light.

-The Problem-

After some testing and comparison to a standard Wii remote in my video below, I think I have determined the problem with the Penguin United Wii Crossfire.  On the Wii system menu for sensor sensitivity, one can definitely see that the the Crossfire’s infrared camera is detecting the two points of infrared light as being about two times as a far apart as what the first party Wii remote reports to the system.  The space between those two dots is how the Wii determines how close to your TV you are sitting and the angle/slant to which the remote is pointed.   It appears the Crossfire’s camera is zoomed in.  As everyone knows when you zoom your video/digital/film camera in, even the slightest movement of ones hand is translated into wild shakes.  The Wii is translating this data into what one can relate to as a “PC mouse set at max sensitivity”, but since the Crossfire is not on a tripod or a mouse pad the user receives very erratic motions on the Wii.  Also attributed to an overly zoomed in camera is loss of peripheral vision.  For example, in a first person shooter when you zoom in with the sniper rifle you are unable to see someone standing in front of you off to the side.

-Solutions-

One option: is to install a lens in front of the infrared camera to widen its field of view.  Option two: games could come with a sensitivity adjustment setting.  Option three: would be to program the Crossfire to halve the distance reported between the two sources of infrared light.  This would fix the ‘shakey cam’ over sensitivity but not the limited peripheral view.

-Conclusion-

I really wanted to like the Penguin United Crossfire but it fails to do its sole purpose for being constructed. It will need to be and possibly will be recalled to rectify this problem.  But from my findings it could be an easy fix.  It won’t be cheap, but nothing ever is.