E3 2005: Level Up
Pelican Cuts the Cords
Product: Pelican Accessories
Company: Pelican Accessories
Date: 05/26/2005
Avaliable On:

In a side room on the top floor of West Hall at E3 was the Pelican Booth. Pelican Accessories are the creators of all sorts of cool add-ons, accessories and controllers for virtually all systems in existence, even the portables. This year at E3, they were showing off a couple of their new controllers, as well as a whole line of accessories for the Sony PSP, from PSP cases to UMD protectors and UMD storage cases. They also featured a DJ playing some techno music, and a few dancing booth babes.

There were a few models of controllers on display for each of the major systems: PlayStation 2, Gamecube, and Xbox. The first controller I got to test was the Blade, a very sleek wireless controller. I tested this particular controller for each of the three major consoles, and I think that overall, it is a very nice wireless controller. It felt very good in my hands, not cheap like a lot of the other alternative controllers. The Xbox version also had a port on the wireless receiver where you could plug in a memory card, instead of mounting it on the controller. This allows the Xbox Blade controller to be a good bit thinner than a standard controller.

The other model that I managed to test was the PL-2000, which is essentially the Blade controller with a different paint job. Instead of the sleek colors of the Blade, the PL-2000 came in several color variations of camouflage.

The range given for each of these controllers was at 50 feet. While I couldn?t exactly walk out the room with the controllers, I did notice that they were very responsive even at 20 feet or so. Also, they all worked really well, even given that there were over 10 controllers all running at once in the same room ? quite an excellent feat.

Overall, Pelican had a good showing at this year?s E3, and I hope to see some more of their stuff in the future.

Z64freak aka Bret Hall

GameVortex PSIllustrated TeamPS2