PS3 Mouse Style Controller - The Bannco Fragnstein

I got my PS3 last November and love it. My main complaint about game consoles like the PS3 is the controllers. They are pretty bad for playing FPS games like the Call of Duty game series and I had been thinking it would be great that there is a mouse designed for the PS3. Well, thank goodness that I accidentally learned about the Fragstein through a game review. There are other similar devices as well, but from the reviews others left on Amazon, I decided to get the Bannco Fragnstein.

I was a bit disappointed that Amazon ran out of stock and the winning bid on Ebay went as high as $122 and I am not sure if that's including tax & shipping. Fortunately I was able to purchase one from a Canadian online reseller featured on the Bannco's website and the total costs me less than $90. The item arrived less than two weeks. To my surprise, the thing works right out of the box both on PC and on the PS3. The only shooting game I have on the PS3 is Metal Gear Solid 4 and it works pretty well with the Fragnstein.

However, you may find it quite frustrating if you want to install the driver so that you can configure the device and update its firmware. I spent the whole night trying to install the driver without success. I finally emailed Bannco for support at around 4am and to my amazement, I got the reply back several hours later. The instruction is not much different than on the website. But the "Wireless MouseCombo Controller" just doesn't show up under the "Human Interface Devices". Anyway, I finally figure out the trick: unlike a regular mouse, the Fragnstein has the setup mode. All along I might have installed the driver correctly, but I wasn't really paying attention on the setup mode, that's why I only see the "HID-compliant device" under "Human Interface Devices" when I am not in the setup mode. As indicated in the instruction, to enter the setup mode, "Press and hold the dongle button for more than 3 seconds while plugging it into the USB port, now the blue LED should be on and solid." May be they should highlight this part of the instruction. You also need to be in set up mode for firm ware update & saving the configuration setting. By the way, my computer runs on Windows XP Media Edition with SP3.

By the way, since I am hooking up my PS3 with a LCD TV in my bed room and there is no table for the using the Fragnstein mouse, I used it on the “My Place Bed Desk” I bought from Bed Bath & Beyond, which is a cool product for you to use your laptop PC in bed or on the couch as well.

In all, I am pretty happy with the product and now looking forward to play the fps games on my PS3.