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On Fine-Tuning Wii Controls
MTV Games has a great article looking at how developers are refining Wii controls, now that they've had most of a year to work on them. The game cited is the Wii version of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance; the Wiimote is used to represent Thor's Hammer, Spidey's webshooters, and Wolverine's claws, among other things. From the article: "'Now in some cases people will do something that's not going to work right, and in that case they're probably going to have to adjust the way they do it,' said Chrzanowski, a black Wii development controller in hand. 'But that's a rare case.' He wasn't talking idly. He said a system developed by a Vicarious colleague, Jesse Raymond, a few weeks ago has been crunching the data of dozens of players who have tested the game on the Wii, analyzing the results of requests for players to do 10 swipes in a row or 10 stabs in a row, recognizing which moves the current version of the game fails to recognize as the intended gesture, tweaking the code, checking the pool of data from the gesture trials again for any new misunderstandings, repeat and recode, again and again."
I would love to see some sort of "Gesture Toolkit" for devs that lets you assemble curves with orientation and direction (Bezier vectors, you heard it here first), and a library to detect said curves from input.
OMG! Wau!
DDR nothing, I can't wait for Punchout Wii. One in each hand, REAL boxing type moves. You can block, punch, uppercut, jab, etc. That would rule. Also, have you seen the Madden video going around? Neither of those tends to be my kind of game but I'll have to try 'em out anyway.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Some will use the Wiimote in interesting ways, but all of them, no way. I wouldn't be suprised if half the launch titles turn out to be rather shitty normal-gameplay games quick&dirtily adopted to the Wiimote. For example Tony Hawk Downhill Jam only uses the Wiimote as analogstick replacement, not for anything exciting, which might mean that it actually plays worse with Wiimote then with a normal controller (Wiimote doesn't auto-center like analogstick, so controls could get pretty imprecise).
We will for sure see lots of interesting games on the Wii, but we will for sure also see a lot of bad ones. DS had its fair share of junk and the touchscreen is a lot easier to manage then a 3D Wiimote.
I can't for the life of me remember which article stated it, but I read an article talking about the differences in multi-platform games. Apparently, on the 360/PS3, you can map certain actions to certain buttons, but you never have full immediate access to all moves for all characters.
With the Wii, where every movement in a different direction is a mappable button unto itself, you have immediate access to every move for every character based on the motions.
You might want to check out MadCap Boxing in the arcade. You 'wear' 2 gloves (each has some good weight to it) and motion capture captures your moves. I played it at a local arcade here in town, and actually was sweating by the end of the game. Information about it
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel...
You could be right, but I'm inclined to think the buyers of the Wii will be the shiney-graphics be-damned type
Over the years, I've become increasingly furstrated with games. I'm getting old (well, pushing 40), and I don't have the ability to actually operate all of the button sequences and stuff needed to control a game anymore. I don't get much enjoyment out of them; they just frustrate me and make me feel I wasted my money.
I'm hoping the gameplay with the Wii will be all I'm hearing it might be. And that it comes out of the gate with a good selection of fun titles to play. If that happens, it could well make the Wii a very successful system. I've been thinking of going to a Nintendo console for a while now, and the Wii might just accelerate that move. My PS2 has already been relegated to the almost never used category, and I'd kind of like a replacement with some titles I can just pick and play for anywhere between 20 minutes and a few hours depending on my mood.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see what the initial titles look/play like, and how well received they are. Personally, I think the XBox and the PS3 are going to get the 'need more graphics' type of gamer, whereas the Wii is going to get the younger/family/casual gamer market more.
Hell, I'd take a friggin "bop the weasel" (*) game with a Wii controller, it could be fun.
Cheers
(*) And I don't mean the Slashdot naughty interpretation of bop the weasel, I mean whack-a-mole. =)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.