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E3 Previews — Lego Star Wars Complete Saga and LittleBigPlanet
Nintendo's success has marked a refocus on games for the sake of fun, and nothing exemplifies this trend better than the Lego Star Wars series. Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga will be the first game to offer the functionality gamers have wanted since they first saw a wiimote: motion-controlled lightsaber battles. It's not dueling, but it is a lot of fun. In the same vein, with even more creativity added in, is Sony's imaginative LittleBigPlanet . With Media Molecule finally opening up a bit of the user based content-creation process to journalists, 1up offers one of the first hands-on with the game's core mechanic: "Fusing various pieces together can forge entirely new objects. Place hinges and wheels on a pile of wooden blocks and suddenly you have a makeshift jalopy rolling through the stage. With a tad more work, you can transform that car into a massive (yet ridiculous) rolling wooden dragon. We didn't have quite enough time (or experience) to bust out a run-and-jump rally to put Super Mario Bros. World 8-2 to shame, but we can't wait to get our hands on the open beta due out later this year."
The same kind of adjustment/penalty will have to apply for inertia effects of weapons for how strong your character is, & then you can use all kinds of weapons.
Get on this developers! Millions of people have the hardware, you just have to code it now!
wiggling the Wii controller back and forth has replaced hitting the 'x' button. Wiggle it up and down for the 'y' button.
So you're saying that if you coud tape the Wii controller to a paint mixer like they have at Lowes that you'd kick ass?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Thats the big question, so far everything I have seen shows more of a digital sandbox than a game. It looks great but is there a point?
My 5 year old daughter loves the GC version of the Lego Star Wars games. Actually, we bought these games, she became obsessed with them, and because of them decided to watch the movies. Unfortunately, she watched Episode I over and over again because she loved Jar Jar Binks (I guess she's his target demographic), but eventually graduated to the original trilogy. Now, she'll tend to watch Episode IV more than the others, but she's seen them all several times. Strangely, she was not impressed with the Ewoks at all.
This release will get hours of gameplay at my house, and I'm excited to see what sort of new things they have to offer, especially with the Wiimote. I would also like to see them change some of the cut scenes. Some of those had some great humor, and if they can put some different humorous ones in there as well, it would go a long way toward keeping the experience fresh.
As I discovered in a Super Paper Mario minigame a couple days ago, it turns out the controller knows what "level" is. There's a minigame where you tilt the controller left and right to control Mario (the island is what tilts as you tilt the controller) as he tries to grab things from the sky that are falling, and avoiding thwomps and other bad things that are falling from the sky. If I hold the controller perfectly horizontal to the ground, Mario doesn't move.
In addition, one of the items you can use requires an action that basically tells you to tilt the controller a certain direction. I wasn't pointing the controller at the IR devices when I tilted the controller in either case.
While Wii Carpentry probably isn't going to happen anytime soon, the controller has a good idea of what's going on around it without the benefit of the IR sensors. The IR sensors are used primarly when pointing at something on-screen. There seems to be an accelerometer inside that measures accurately how fast you're, well... accelerating the controller. And based on the above, I'm guessing the accelerometer measures tilt in 3 dimensions, so it provides an absolute reference that way as well.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
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There's a game in Zelda like that, called rollgoal. You have to roll a ball along these little blocks, like some sort of cheap game you'd buy for a kid you didn't like on a road trip, to get it from start to end. It is easily the most annoying part of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I'm not sure how they did that in the Gamecube version.
Keep getting free advertisement here.
The problem really isn't mapping where the sword should be or how it should move. Eventually someone will figure out a good way to make this possible and you'll be able to wave your Wiimote around and have the coresponding on-screen sword follow its motions very carefully. The real problem comes into play when you have another sword, or anything to deflect its blows added into the mix.
For example, I'm fighting an enemy with my sword and swing at him. He counters, meeting his blade with mine, causing both to bounce back from the force slightly or to slide against each other. However, my actual hand has met with no such resistance and has followed through as though my blade sliced through his sword, body, or anything else in the way as though it were nothing. On screen I'm locked sword to sword with my foe, but my hands suggest that I slashed through him. How is the mapping handled from here? Should the position that my hand ends up in be the new centered location for determining the swords next move, which would make further attacks awkward and unrealistic, or should the blade on the screen magically move to the position my hand suggests it's in, which doesn't make for a very realistic game.
The best idea I've ever heard for this solution is to have the controller respond with some type of feedback, a rumble, a sound, or something else, to notify the user that their blow was deflected. The user would then be unable to attack further until they managed to sync the remote position with their hand with what is displayed on the screen. Assuming the feedback is powerful enough and the player manages to learn to anticipate the deflection enough, eventually they will serve as their own feedback, stopping their swing as soon as they feel it has been deflected. To use the above example again, as soon as I were to feel a rumble from the Wiimote or hear two swords clashing, I would halt my downward motion and position the controller as though my blow had been met, allowing me to once again regrain control and continue with the battle.
While there are a lot of programing difficulties to be worked out, it still requires a lot of time for the player to become accustomed to the system and actually care to become familiar enough with it to enjoy playing the game. I don't forsee this as being something that casual players would be interested in taking the time to accomplish, and I'm not entirely sure if the hardware available now can offer all of the necessities in order for this to succeed.
And based on the above, I'm guessing the accelerometer measures tilt in 3 dimensions, so it provides an absolute reference that way as well.
Yup. The accelerometers can measure the 9.8 m/s^2 downward acceleration from gravity in order to determine which way the ground is. The Excite Truck game also uses this quite a bit, as the primary control is tilting the Wii Remote left and right like a steering wheel. It works remarkably well.
It's just waggle in Lego Star Wars. I'd be hitting the button instead of swinging all the time.
Don't worry though, apparently Mario & Sonic at the Olympics has a fencing mode... so there might be hope there.
The Baseball bat in Wii Sports actually tracks pretty accurately, it's just there's a lag to it, and if you make quick movements it glitches. There's bounding or something involved.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
It[Little Big Planet's style of play] is new to consoles to my recollection.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
the baseball bat in Wii Sports, the remote is terribly inaccurate and loses track of where it actually is
What are you talking about? The baseball bat in Wii Sports tracks incredibly well.
Viva Pinata is a child's game. But don't take my word for it. review
By the way, Halo is 'just' a bunch of polygons with pretty graphics and the same "game mechanics" Doom had in 1993.
Are you even old enough to have PLAYED Excitebike or did it just show up in your googling? You couldn't share those tracks buddy.
Actually, no. On my Wii, the baseball bat tracking in Wii Sports is spot on. When I'm batting, I even sway the Wiimote around a bit (like you do with a real baseball bat before taking a swing) and watch as the Mii batter on screen does the same thing. Oh, and the IR bar doesn't even participate in these actions; it's only used for the pointer, not the motion sensing.
However, it's funny you should mention this, because I went to a friend's house for a Wii Party and we ended up playing tennis a lot. I'm usually pretty good, but I was horrible here. The controls seemed incredibly sluggish, to the point where there was a good 1-second delay between my backhand and the corresponding action on screen. I even tried different controllers, and they were all the same.
So I'm wondering about the build quality of the Wii consoles. The first one I bought back in November had a different set of problems (the IR bar / pointer tracking was very, very jittery, and the cursor would keep disappearing). I exchanged this one for my current console, and haven't had any problems (and Nintendo tech support is ridiculously wonderful, by the way). Out of three consoles I've seen, two have had completely different problems with the communication between Wiimote and console. Is this more of an epidemic than I had thought?
-p
But I don't have to be a pilot to play Heroes of the Pacific, a skilled sharpshooter to play Rainbow Six, or a pro racer to play Gran Turismo - yet the games seem to be just following my own movements. Games are designed to let you perform relatively amateur tasks and make you believe that you are actually a professional. There's no reason a swordfighting game would be any different; it would translate the relatively wild swinging of the player into more skilled movements by the onscreen character, subtly enough to not break the illusion of control.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Check out the swords in Red Steel until you actually hit something, or the baseball bat in Wii Baseball before you actually hit the ball. Which, by the way, has got absolutely nothing to di with the IR bar. If you think pointing it to the IR bar did anything at all, you were on drugs.
yes, it is bounding, you cant knock the bat on home plate. The bats movement is restricted to a standard swing and any back and forth movement becomes a swing, with the speed of the movement determining the power of the swing.
Its not bad, but it could be better. I wouldn't mind a baseball game that allowed you to swing high or low or reach out for a pitch off the plate, but thats a bit much to ask of a tech demo like Wii sports. Heck, baseball doesn't even have base running in it. Maybe when EA gets around to making MLB for the Wii.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
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What I think pushing-robot was saying that having the game just perform two or three basic/static swings, while you are wildly swinging the controller would not feel very good. Also the impression I got from your first post was that that should be how the games handle, i.e. only a few moves. Sure there are the limitations that only using some accelerometers has is that the game wouldn't probably be able to interpret them to make the game character hold the sword in exactly the same place you do.. So realistic looks may be impossible anyway. :( But still we should "aim higher".. If only for more advanced players.
Store with salt