02 August, 2008

Wii Motion Plus Skepticism

There's a YouTube video of a Wii Motion Plus demo on Kotaku. I'll still reserve judgment until I get my hands on it at PAX, but I'm currently of the mindset that this peripheral will still only be for casual games.



Watch the bit where he's swinging the sword (about two minutes in). Look at the picture in picture which shows the user and the screen at the same time. Notice the lag? Sure, it's fine for swiping at slow moving beach balls, but I like my games with some actual speed. Even worse is the motion recognition segment (about four minutes in). He has to fully complete the motion before the Wii recognizes it, which means your character won't start to do the move until you've completely finished it.

I need to cut a swath as a blur of steel and fury. I need to parry madly to hold off attacks from two or three opponents at once. I need to reflect blaster fire. A good design around the lag could compensate. Maybe the player is a slightly ponderous giant. (I'm still waiting for my first person giant monster with eye lasers game.) Maybe the player's character has a heavy sword. Maybe the game takes place under water. But good design teams aren't working on the Wii, for the most part. But now I'm drifting off topic. Let's get back to the point.

In a demo with no AI and paltry amounts of sound, physics, and graphics processing to do, the controller lags. I still want to futz with it at PAX, but I'm expecting to be able to tell in the first ten seconds that it won't really change anything for the Wii.

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