Sony's Motion Sensing Still Lagging Behind?

Chris Kohler, over at Wired's Game|Life, had the chance to see an in-production PS3 game in action. He said that, for the most part everything looked great. The one thing that concerned him was the motion-sensing controller that Sony is pushing on developers. From the article: "The developers told us that although we'd be using real PS3 controllers, they didn't yet have the motion-sensing functionality built in. And not only that, although they referred to the build as 'feature-complete,' they did admit that the one feature that was not yet included was (wait for it) motion-sensing, although they did 'have some cool ideas.' There was plenty of speculation after Sony's E3 conference that the motion-sensing functionality was jammed into the controller at the last minute as a reaction to Nintendo's strategy. This was backed up by the Warhawk developers' offhand remarks that they'd implemented motion sensing 'in just a couple weeks'."

Comments

Re:The Hardware Is Irrelevant

[Osty]

But so far, most of the 3rd party controllers for consoles are cheaper imitations of the originals with BAD gimmicks (autofire). The one's I've really liked have been extremely rare... WaveBird, the NegCon....

Console controllers are just a little bit more complex than mice. Anyway, third-party controllers don't usually suck because of the gimmicks, but because the primary functionality is sub-par. The joysticks are too sloppy, or the buttons are too hard to press, or the ergonomics are bad, etc. Some third-party manufacturers like Logitech generally do a good job, but I would stay away from most others.

Also, the WaveBird isn't a third-party controller. It works because it's the standard first-party Gamecube controller (with sticks with the correct amount of resistance, and buttons that work when you hit them, and ergonomics that don't cramp your hand), with the addition of a wireless transmitter and battery compartment.

Re:$500

[Knuckles]

Just FYI, at MediaMarkt in Germany you can only preorder one that costs 600 EUR. I don't know which model it is, the ad didn't say.

Re:$599 for that?

[UbuntuDupe]

There were no crabs in feudal Japan that were as large as the one depicted in the E3 demo.

*please mod informative, please mod informative*

Re:Two things

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, while I have confidence in Nintendo they do have more moving parts and thus complexity in thier system.

There are no moving parts, it's build off of solid state MEMS accelerometers

http://www.x-arcade.com/newsletter/Wii%20Dupe.shtm l

What it really comes down to is that Nintendo is offering a complete motion sensing/pointing device that is of a reasonably mature design; and Sony has added a minor feature of limited use in extending functionality to games. Basically, Nintendo's system allows the creation of game types that have never been though of before and Sony's device allows developers to add (mostly pointless) motion sensing controls to their games.