Is there anything sadder than a great design undone by poor manufacturing? Probably, but it’s still pretty sad, and nowhere have I seen that as clearly as in DreamGear’s Rumble Blaster, a Light Gun add-on for the Wii remote.
The Good: A Clever Design
The Blaster’s design is truly ingenious. It consists of two parts. The plastic handgun that holds the Wii remote has two triggers, a standard trigger that controls the B button and an extra trigger that ingeniously controls the A button. Another gun-like device holds the nunchuk.
You have three options for using the Blaster. If your game does not require the nunchuk, you simply use the handgun. If the nunchuk is required, you can hold one gun in each hand or you can slide them together into something that looks a bit like a machine gun.
The Blaster also has a rumble feature. Put a couple of batteries in the handle and the gun will vibrate anytime you pull either trigger.
This is all very clever, and the Blaster has a clean, somewhat futuristic look I quite like. As I played with the pieces I was reminded of a table with folding parts I once had that could be turned into a small end table or expanded into a table for poker, chess or backgammon.
The Bad: Stuff Doesn't Stay Where It's Supposed To
The problems came when I stopped admiring the design and actually tried it out on the Wii light gun game Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles.
The first, minor issue was that the trigger felt a little stiffer than I liked. This I could get used to, but I can’t say the same for the propensity of the battery cover to come off. The cover is in the back of the handgun handle, and the pressure of my hand on the handle kept sliding the cover off.
The second major issue popped up, quite literally, when I had to shake the gun, an action used to reload or dodge. The cord of the nunchuk runs through the barrel of the second gun, with a plastic hinged cover hiding the cord. Every time I shook the gun, that cover would flip open onto my thumb.
Manufacturers have been producing battery covers and click-on parts for years, so there’s no excuse for a product that fails to make such simple things work. If the implementation had been as good as the design, the Rumble Blaster would have been amazing. Instead, it just makes me sad.
