Read Part 1…

Back to motion control. Apparently Sony like motion control too. They’ve created the ‘Move’ which is a Wii remote with a gently glowing mood-ball stuck on the end. It uses the same technology as Wii, as far as I’m aware, but also used a camera, like Kinect, to follow the wand (or whatever it’s called) for added accuracy. This was demonstrated by a dude playing Tiger Woods, and another dude playing the single most generic fantasy wizard game I have ever seen. It seemed to work pretty well. I mean, maybe when it comes out some people who were thinking about buying a Wii for £170 might think “hmm, for just another £130 I could get a slightly more accurate version of this, with higher fidelity graphics that sit much more firmly in the uncanny valley. Oh, sweet, and I could a blu-ray player with it too, then I can watch blu-rays on my CRT television, sweet.” And maybe some bros will think “I love twitch-gaming my way through Killzone 2 sat on my couch, but wouldn’t it be great if for Killzone 3 I could stand up and hold two controllers out in front of me for the whole time.”

Am I defending the Wii? It sounds like it. The Nintendo press conference certainly reminded me why I love Nintendo. But no, I think I’m being realistic. The Wii, in terms of sales, is the dominant system of the three, but it’s certainly not the most technologically superior by a long way. What it is is the Sinclair Spectrum, the Microsoft personal computer, the Model-T Ford. These were not the ‘best’ products of their time, these were the most affordable. Nintendo made a product for the mass market. Maybe they didn’t know it at the time, maybe they were surprised by the Wii’s success, but they did. Microsoft and Sony made products for the gamer, and Sony particularly made a product for a certain kind of tech-savvy gamer, who needs high-specs whatever the cost. Surely, the people who bought PS3s and 360s don’t want Wii Sports, and the people who want Wii Sports buy Wiis.

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E3 2010, or the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or the biggest annual event on the videogaming calendar, had just finished, and I thought I’d share a few thoughts on this year’s show.

The reason this show is so important is that it is the time each year when Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony announce all the biggest upcoming games for their platforms in an attempt to get their stockholders excited. Every year there is an informal competition between the three over who can put on the best show with the best and most exciting products.

Microsoft’s press conference was the only one I managed to stream live and with friends, but this turned out to be the most disappointing. It was abysmal, a shadow of previous conferences. They opened with Call of Duty: Black Ops, a game by Treyarch which is trying to be a game by Infinity Ward (who made Modern Warfare one and two), to the point where the levels they demoed mimicked almost exactly the pacing and style of Infinity Wards original E3 demo for Modern Warfare 1 three years ago and Modern Warfare 2 last year.
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I recently read a post on the Olympics on Richard Swinburne’s blog in which he asks about why we should want to watch people “throw stuff or run fast” and why the Olympics is so concerned with physical attribution and not mental. What particularly seems to annoy him is that the closest mental equivalent is the Nobel prize, which is awarded for a lifetime’s work, and not a minute’s running.

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