Thursday, July 17, 2008

Wii MotionPlus: The Wiimote works now

It appears to be the case that Nintendo finally made the Wii do what they said it would do in the first fucking place:

The real stand-out of the three games was Swordplay, which has you wielding a two-handed sword in bouts to knock either an AI-controlled mii or a friend off the raised platform you're fighting on.

The precision of the controls was, in a word, astounding. I found that I could move the tip of the sword around in tight figure eights, an old training exercise from my fencing days. I also didn't have to rely on broad swings from either side and above to hit my opponent. The controller was able to sense thrusts as well.

The game had a little trouble keeping up with fast attacks, but if I slowed my attacks down a bit it was easy to direct and land attacks and parries.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

While I agree Nintendo should have done this in the first place, I can't fault them for doing as they have done. Technology evovles. Finished products rarely come that way out of the gate.

On top of that, with an unfinished product, Nintendo was still able to take a massive market share out of the gate while making money in the process. Seems, their business model is working just fine.

_J_ said...

This was the realistic way to do the Wii. Release something that functions enough to sell the console and improve upon it later.

What I'm interested in is how this will affect arguments. Adam and I said the Wii "Replaced 'Press A' with 'Waggle stick'." and others argued that the Wii was more than that, for reasons unknown.

Now that Nintendo has seemingly made the Wiimote more than an elaborate waggling device; now that the Wiimote really can replicate motion within a 3D space to nearly a 1:1 ratio...it will be interesting to see if any apology cards flow our way.

But that's just something that happens with technology. Someone bitches about present generation technology and improvements that need to be made, the Greg #5s of the world say that those improvements will never be made, then those improvements are made and the Greg #5s of the world get selective amnesia.

_J_ said...

Also, per this post, Adam now has to eat his hat:

"If the game's controls let you swing a saber in a 1:1 sort of way, then I will eat my hat, and any other hats you may have available (limit 10)."

I shall donate 4 hats to this cause.

Unknown said...

Lol. I agreed with you and Adam at the time that they did replace waggle stick with press A. This was the gimmicky phase. That phase has passed. I have bought 4 games recently for the wii:

FFCC: MLAAK
Smash Brother's brawl
FF Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon
Boom Blox

none of which use those gimmicky controls, outside of an outside shot of FFCC: MLAAK, which requires you to shake the wiimote to build something, but that isn't something done extremely often. Chocobo's dungeon uses a wiimote shake to sort items in the bag, but that is it.

Brawl doesn't even use the motion detection controls, and BoomBlox is one of the few games that uses the motion sensory well.

I think you just shot it down before you gave developer's a chance to get over the gimmick phase.

Unknown said...

Oh, and I have some hats to donate to the cause.