Monday, July 14, 2008

Nintendo Back to Old Tricks


Nintendo has announced the add-on Wii Motion Plus, a small dongle that attaches to the end of the Wii remote and promises to deliver a true 1:1 motion gaming experience.


The timing of the announcement is curious. Rumor has it that Microsoft will soon be releasing a motion sensing controller for the Xbox360. If the gaming message boards are any indication, it looks like Nintendo just stole a lot of the wind from Microsoft's sails (or should I say "sales"?).

I'm certainly looking forward to Nintendo's press conference tomorrow.


3 comments:

SuiginChou said...

Amazed you chose not to touch on FF13; you were the only one who I thought might. Guess I'm lucky I randomly checked Kotaku today.

As for the Wii, I'm happy but confused because Nintendo previously stated that 1:1 correspondence would not be what we wanted, claiming that a truly 1:1 experience would require programmers to do one of two things:
1) require gamers to make precisely the right hand motion otherwise it's not counted as a correct attempt, or

2) design the games in a way that nerfs the 1:1's presence, i.e. make it so that whether a kid waves the Wiimote wildly or an elderly man precisely-but-slowly moves it around the same goals is achieved (i.e. what we currently see in our non-1:1 Wii gaming experience)


To give you an example of what I mean, a lot of people (self included) dreamed of 1:1 for a lightsaber game, but both Nintendo and LucasArts stated that that would be disastrous because in such a game (where 99% of us have no fucking clue on how to properly use a sword) our inputs to the game would result in us dying 99 times out of 100 in lightsaber duels to the impeccable AI. You could say, "Well Ryan, they're not dumb, they'll program it so you hit no matter what," but that's precisely Nintendo's and LucasArts' point -- why do we need 1:1 hardware if it's going to be circumvented at the software level?

Jay said...

Meh, Final Fantasy bores me. I thought this was more exciting (admitted nintendo fanboy here)

Unknown said...

This really just seems like another peripheral for the wiimote for people to waste money on. What's a full controller cost now? $100?

I really don't see how the casual gamers (the supposed wii main audience) would even care about this.

So far my E3 impressions are not too good.

The Too Human Demo on live is pretty good though.