Desert Eagle

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Les Trois Pylônes held exclusive licenses to manufacture and distribute toy- and airsoft guns which used the likeness of some of the most well-known firearms in existence. They sold a Desert Eagle light gun under their Cyber Gun brand which was compatible to the Sony PlayStation and the Sega Saturn. Other vendors such as PowerTech and Hais also sold this gun, but they didn't bother to license it. Thrustmaster got a sub license from Les Trois Pylônes to sell a variant which was based on the translucent green model. This variant was not Saturn compatible. Later a Sega Dreamcast and a PlayStation 2 version were released. I am going to dedicate the latter an own episode in the future.

As the controller is properly licensed it sports a slew of fake engraving and branding. It looks gorgeous. The built quality of the gun is high. It is heavy, solid and feels very sturdy. The A and B buttons are distributed among the sides of the gun and are located at the top of the trigger guard. This is neither too far in the back nor too far in the front but a very comfortable position. The fake slide release lever at the right hand side acts as gun mode and fire mode selector. Normal, auto reload and auto reload plus auto fire are the available options of the latter. The auto reload behaves very strangely. Its capacity is five shots, but the gun doesn't automatically reload. Instead it waits for the trigger to be pulled a sixth time, upon which the gun reloads instead of shoots. The gun mode selector isn't very intuitive neither, because it doesn't select the mode on its own, but is just a part of an elaborate auto detect mechanism.

The hammer acts as B button. A button at the handle is redundantly mapped to A to simplify reloading. Furthermore a foot pedal can be connected to the bottom of the handle via a TS connector which is then also mapped to A. Next to the pedal socket is the On/Off switch for the force feedback. This force feedback is powered by a 9 V center negative power supply which is connected to the controller connecter. The feedback is fast, strong and feels very good. The sight picture is nice and clear. The trigger relies on a tactile push button and is pleasant to use.

In GunCon mode the accuracy is decent but the precision is bad. Sadly in this mode the gun has quite some dead zones: Narrow portions of the two sides of the screen and a large chunk of the bottom don't detect shots. Luckily the two other gun modes don't suffer this problem and don't have dead zones at all. In normal gun mode the accuracy is good and the precision is decent. In Sega Saturn mode the gun really shines. There accuracy and precision are very good. The B button acts as start in this mode.

Personally I have mixed feelings about the gun. That the G-Con support is flawed is a big deal breaker to me. On the other hand the Desert Eagle is a very good Sega Saturn gun with force feedback of which there aren't many. Furthermore the gun is very pretty and feels nice. I can recommend this controller as a show piece and for usage on the Saturn.

The box design is pretty from a distance, but it has some questionable details. All sides but the front side are sharp. There the whole area has an inadequately low resolution, which is especially notable at the letters. The choice of Egyptian pyramids for the background baffles me. The real Desert Eagle was designed in the USA and many units were famously built in Israel. I get it: There is the word "desert" in the name and Egyptian pyramids are in a desert too but I think the connection is a bit far-fetched.