Y'all ready for sum IGN goodness?
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"So I'm relaxing on a couch in a high-rise suite as a developer offers me a glimpse of its new game, still unannounced but very exciting. We get to talking about Sony's motion controller, recently unveiled. I played with it at publisher's event and as something of a Wii veteran with a firm understanding of how pointer and gestural controls work and how games should feel when they are properly finessed. I'm not impressed, I say. PS3 Move features almost no latency -- just one frame -- but that paper truth didn't seem to translate to reality as I played with the controller at Sony's event. Most of the stuff played like first-generation Wii efforts from third-parties.
Obviously, I'm not making games and I'm sure some software creators will note that with the roll of the eyes and claim that it's all too easy for me to **** and moan from the backseat, or the sidelines, as it were. But playing the armchair role for a minute, it seems an unavoidable conclusion to me that Sony should have at least examined the very best genre-leaders on Nintendo's platform and then duplicated if not surpassed them with its own Move-controlled experiences. For instance, Medal of Honor, The Conduit and Red Steel 2 offer fantastic controls for first-person shooters. Anything less than these will be considered substandard by the informed masses -- at least those with knowledge of Wii's library. Unfortunately, Move doesn't yet compete. The company's shooter feels laggy and unresponsive as I attempt to gun down robotic targets. The boxing game is not one-to-one, but gestural-based, and slow. Nearly everything feels redone, but somehow half-baked."
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"Natal, though -- the motion offering from Microsoft -- not so much. The same studio rep calls Natal a big, buggy mess. "It's s***," he adds, saying that it just doesn't work as promised. That it's slow and that the camera is imprecise, which he notes, is causing some major development woes."
"He refers to a development conference Microsoft held not so long ago in which Peter Molyneux of Fable fame (presently, creative director at Microsoft Game Studios) took the stage and attempted to demo the publisher's much-publicized Milo Natal project. Molyneux apparently called someone from the audience to the stage and asked them to interact with the virtual boy, but it didn't go to plan. Natal's camera failed to see the person accurately because he was wearing a black trench coat. After some fiddling, he was asked to remove his trench coat and -- whoops -- wore a black shirt underneath. When it still didn't work, he was invited to take his seat again.
"Next, Molyneux said that Milo could interact with illustrations drawn to paper and scanned by the camera. He asked the audience for suggestions. "You could see him cocking his head and listening for the right key words, and then finally he heard something the game would recognize," my development source explains. It was a cat. So he invited someone from the audience to ascend the steps to the stage and illustrate the feline on paper. When Natal attempted to scan the horribly scribbled drawing, it instead picked up the Abercrombie & Fitch logo on the person's sweate"
"I'm very interested in the platform, but I haven't entrenched myself in Natal development. Later, when I bump into a colleague, I ask them if they have heard any behind-the-scenes rumblings about development trouble with Microsoft's casual entry device. He turns to me and says that yes, he has -- that studios are telling him they're struggling to get it working."
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"What I do find very telling about both some of these public unveilings and secret murmurings, however, is just how difficult it seems to be to nail motion controls. People love to shrug off Nintendo's work. Hell, I've done it. But for all the primitive graphics surrounding the Wii Sports experience, there's some pretty fancy handiwork powering the gameplay controls -- and I think Microsoft and Sony are only now discovering just how fancy it really is"
"Speaking of Nintendo, everyone seems to be waiting for word on the company's next system. It's the go-to question in interviews. "Yes, I understand Wii sold a bazillion units in December alone, but hey -- when's Wii HD coming?" Yeah -- I'm guilty of that one, too. And it's no different when I talk to developers and publishers, nearly all of whom receive the obligatory query about new hardware -- what and when? I always resign myself to the no comment or the no idea, but at GDC I struck a bit of a niblet when a developer said Nintendo told him it would be ready to roll with Wii 2 in 2012. Anybody with a brain would probably guess as much, but it is even so always refreshing to hear so from a semi-official source."
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"Takeaways so far: Sony has made a **** that feels like a gimped Wii remote. Natal sucks. And Wii 2 is in no rush. At least, that's how it goes in pure black and white and if you believe everything you hear at this year's Game Developers Conference. Of course, if you do, then maybe you'll also believe that GameCube's fill rate is much better than Xbox's and therefore Nintendo's hardware is superior. Right?" -IGN
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