So all of those rich, talented and just downright geeky enough have come back from E3, smug in the fact that they will have had a shot of more or less everything that us mere mortals are itching to get our hands on over the next year or so. Well, worry not young reader (well, young at heart at least) as yours truly has managed to get himself a lengthy shot on the PlayStation answer to the Wii with their motion controller system, Move. Does this really have enough potential to beat the original wand shaking console, or will it turn out to be another big gimmick aimed at grabbing money from us?
The Move controller itself is pretty much about the same size as a non-Motion Plus attached Wii Remote, although it does have this rather snazzy squash ball on the top that changes colour, a bit like those really cheap and nasty emotion rings you get when you’re on holiday that never match how you feel (blue? I’m not feeling romantic).
Anyway, it just looks funky and as it is a soft sphere it means it can prevent you from hitting something, and have a 95% chance of breaking it, which plenty of YouTube videos will show Ninty’s magic stick doing when not strapped on. It’s also relatively light, allowing for complete ease of movement and removing the chance of any arm numbing fatigue from holding it for hours. If I had to be annoyed about something it would be the size of the 4 standard buttons, which seem a bit dainty for the fingers of the more hardcore among us.
The games weren’t complete, but we were able to get a really good taste of what the controller is all about, as the Sony representative was very keen to point out. First one up was Tumble, which is like a twisted version of Jenga. You and a friend have to take turns to build, and then add to, a tower whilst making it increasingly more difficult for your opponent to place his three set blocks and still have the structure stay upright.
I know, it sounds a bit naff, but it is actually quite entertaining. What this game does in particular is show off the Move’s depth perception. What this means is that to place something onto an object that’s further into the screen, you have to move your body forward to put it on there. It does take a bit of time to get used to, but once you realise it’s there you start to get into it and the controls become more natural.
Next up was Move Party, which does move (no pun intended, although I may well be using that word a hell of a lot, to be fair) us into the more generic “party” style market providing us with several mini games which can be played as a solo effort or with up to 4 players, albeit one at a time. This is pretty much the Eye Toy stuff, but MUCH more responsive and accurate. We were shown a few of the stages available in the title, which involved such usual day-to-day activities as sweeping baby chicks into baskets using a fan, or slicing fruit with a katana blade, not to mention the Luigi’s Mansion style ghost busting, torch style. Again, playing this felt strangely reassuring. You never really felt that you weren’t doing what was on the screen.
Another impressive specialty that Move has is that people can move (dammit, there I go again) in front of you or walk past when grabbing a seat at the other end of the living room and the sensor doesn’t skip a beat, as it has so many of them trapped in that colourful squidgy squash ball tipped device that it can analyse loads in very short time periods. By the way, for those that want to know, I beat the Sony rep, so one up to the journalist.
The final main game we looked at was TV Superstars, which leans heavily towards a Buzz styled front end. All of the characters look like they’ve taken a holiday from the Scottish Gas advert, but we won’t hold that against them. The two different stages on offer in this involved catwalk skills and something more akin to “It’s a Knockout” style variety shows. This just felt like a Wii game and the Move, although very impressing on the first two demos, didn’t do enough this time round to show us anything different to what we usually have being packaged out on Mario’s machine. To be fair though, the PlayStation Move had already done enough to show me that it wasn’t just another gimmick.
What we have here is an answer to the initial questions this posed when it was mentioned to the public last year. It does work and work rather well. It also does have a rather sophisticated look about it, which is impressive and it also allowed us to realise the potential this may well have in future years. With every answer though came more questions, such as whether or not it can REALLY deliver the pinpoint accuracy we demand in games like Killzone 3 and SOCOM 4, whether the asking price of about £40–£50 for just one controller is really justifiable and whether they can give us enough games of the hardcore nature to stop us from thinking that this is Wii 1.5.
Overall though it was a reassuring demo and has us thinking that the future is pretty decent for it, but with no real look at Kinect yet and the Wii only now starting to show it’s age a little, the Sony motion package is getting a move on to show us just what it can do (and yes, that one WAS meant).
Expect more information and possible reviews later in the year.
