At E3
everything is hot. Hot machines, hot games, hot boothbabes showing off
hot product LA in the late spring is hot, and trooping around miles of
show floor makes a guy like me sweaty. So it was with great pleasure I
demoed Nykos AirFlo Controller. Nyko, always an innovator, has come up
with another great idea that seems just a touch wacky. They have put a
fan inside a controller. How is it? Read on.The AirFlo controller has
a fan in the middle of it. We just got the Xbox version for review, and
the Nyko controller for Xbox is sized somewhere between the Xtra Large
and the Xbox Small controllers, so, hell, they could have almost fit a
nice box fan inside the thing. Still, the little fan, which is very
similar to what you find in your PC case, pumps out a nice breeze. There
are molded plastic air channels that guide the air to your palms,
preventing the sweat of many hours of gaming.
How does it work? Like a charm. The AirFlo keeps those palms dry and
cool. If you do sweat a little it helps making you a bit cooler
overall and helping you line up that shot, jump, or pass. The fan has
two settings, low and high, so you can adjust for the proper gaming
fervor. But it is not a perfect system. Cooling down the palms and
keeping them dry draws attention to a problem I never really realized I
had my fingers sweat. Im sure you all havent thought about that
issue much, either. I never realized that fingers (in general) sweat,
but it makes perfect scientific sense. The AirFlo controller does not
guide the nice breeze across your fingertips, and the realization that
your palms are dry but your fingers are sweaty is more than a little
disconcerting.
Of course, all of this would be worthless if the AirFlo werent a
good controller. Fortunately, it is. The AirFlo feature the macro and
turbo settings weve come to expect on third-party controllers, and the
design is quite nice. As I wrote before, the sizing is somewhere between
the large and small Xbox controllers, which is a nice compromise. The
button orientation is a bit different than the first party controllers,
but very easy to get the hang of. My big test for any controller these
days is how easily I can whoop up at THPS, and Im happy to report that
million point combos were quickly in my reach using the AirFlo. The
analog buttons exhibit great sensitivity and both the analog joysticks
and the direction pad work like a charm. The grippy AirFlo channels add
a bit of comfort to the design, too.
At a suggested retail price of $29.99, you may as well go for the
Nyko AirFlo. Since the design and construction is so solid, it easily
compares to, and tops many, other third-party controllers, and the
pricing makes the fan pretty much free. Try out the fan and if you dont
like it you can always turn it off. My only suggestion for improvement
is that in future models the air be channeled through the buttons and
joysticks to better cool those sweaty fingers. Such is the fate of
innovation: Answering the question always leads to more questions.
Fortunately, we can always count on Nyko to keep plugging away at it.