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The Wiimote As Yoda Intended - A Lightsaber
An anonymous reader writes "So what if the Wii can't handle the awesome 'next-generation' physics engine the other consoles will enjoy when Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is released? LucasArts announced today that Krome Studios is developing a version of the game for the Nintendo console, and players will finally get to use the Wiimote for its intended purpose — as a lightsaber. 'The sword-swinging action will be exclusive to the Wii version, and even then, it will only be available in an exclusive "duel mode." The description in the release says that this duel mode will be a multiplayer affair.'"
to welcome our wiimote toting sith overlords.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Arrr! I be thinking it be more fun to have an actual lightsabre, be it plastic I don't be carin', with the Wii controller attached some way, so ye be hackin' and slashin' (and no small bit o' swashbucklin'!) to the dulcet tones of sommon bellowin' 'Hey, you could poke an eye out with that thing!'
We be needing cutlasses and some fing piratin' adventures, too. oX|P-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I have low expectations for this game, based on Krome Studios' record. But I may end up renting it depending on the reviews of the game.
It's not the size of your swartz but what you can do with it!
Will you be able to commit honorable lightsaber sepaku?
So will the rest of the game rely on poorly coded waggle controls to get by? I like the concept, but this has got to be hard to code, and if it is not handled correctly, we are only going to end up with another crappy Star Wars game. Instead of giving us Wii owners bad ports with waggle controls added, I think LucasArts has two options. 1) Make sure the controls work, and work well. 2) Stop the bad ports, and give us updated versions of classic LucasArts games, like Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, and others.
I always thought of the wiimote as REALLY intended for something way more sexually explicit...
nm
'... and even then, it will only be available in an exclusive "duel mode."' Err, isn't that a bad thing?
This is a great move, but it still treats the Wii as an afterthought, with a unique multiplayer module tacked on to the core game. I'll still be pining for a real lightsaber game.
Always someone has power over you. The thing to consider is this: Is the power good, or bad?
Wii strokin' time!
Both the nunchucks and the normal Wii remote have a motion sensor.
Sure, using the nunchuck to use the Force is a cool idea, but being able to play as Darth Maul has its attraction as well.
My prayers be answered, mateys! An' as surely as the Pirates o' tha Carribean game be flawed an' misguided, truly this will lead ya scurvy Wii-dogs to the promised land o' riches!
Militant Agnostic: "I don't know, and damn it, neither do you!"
How long before something similar could be put to use on a PC, for 3D/CG manipulation?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
A killer ap? I think so.
How do you get force feedback on those things?
You'll never know if you hit something. I'm a sword fencer (2 kg bastard sword) and the experience is much more tactile then visual. Even if you consider that light sabres are much lighter than a real sword and don't have bars to protect your hand I doubt if fencing with a light sabre wii control will live up tu the experience of real fencing - even if it's just for show.
-- Put crudely, the world is an extremely large problem instance. (Russel/Norvig Artificial Intelligence)
Ok... ignore that... Seriously - how will it handle? Any Wii owner will tell you they were very disapointed with Red Steel, so is the light saber action only going to have 3 or so programmed swings or is it going to be 100% interactive?
That is what will make this "cool".
And it sucked righteously. Let's hope they can do better.
The logistics of lightsabers always intrigued me... some possibilities:
- How fast can they turn off and back on? By timing it right you could bypass a parry but turning it off...
- Lightsabre trap... to stop others from using it, make it look like the other end is the business end.
- While most other forms seem silly (especially the two-ended staff), putting it on a long pole would be of definite advantage in some situations. But why stop there? Can you imagine a pair of light-sabre nunchuku? HOw about a garden rake with one stuck on the end? Or why not a boomerang with twin-sabre action that turns them on a few seconds after it leaves your hand, then back off when it returns... the possibilities are endless..
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Avast! I can hardly wait to smite you scallywags and keelhaul ya'.
Just ask the good Jedi how they feel about "Balance" now...
lame yoda impressions I predict
"I have something here for you. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your uncle wouldn't allow it. He feared you might follow old Obi-Wan on some damn fool idealistic computer adventure like your father did. It's your father's WiiMote. This is the weapon of a Wii Knight. Not as clumsy or as random as a Joystick, but an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. For over a thousand generations, the Wii Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times, before the PS3."
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
So, what they are actually saying is that they are adding a tacked on, last minute, third party mode. Then they are going to point to it and say "see we gave everyone what they were yelling for" and when no one is happy with it LucasArts is going to be all smug and start talking about how it shows the Wii was not a viable platform to start with. It is no secret that LucasArts hasn't been a big fan of the Wii because of the less powerful graphics. This is more of a slap in the face than a real attempt to port it to the Wii.
I wonder how they've approached making this work. Physics of swordplay aside, sword fighting is not easy. (Hint, *real* swordfighting doesn't look like the movies, and you can't pick it up in a couple afternoons swinging sticks at your friends.) If their simulation of sword movements is true to how each player is swinging their Wiimote, I think people may get frustrated very quickly by the fact that they're going to suck. On the other hand, if the controls are simplified to allow a preset handful of attacks, I wonder how much depth they can provide to the game.
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
Search your heart, you know it to be true.
FTR: I love both Wii and Star Wars, but come on. Seriously.
You should buy lots of Nintendo stock, become chairman, and make that come true. After all, every Slashdotter is a successful investor, right? Paul the Pervert, Paul the Pervert II, and Paul the Pervert III all in the pipeline.
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in pleasure and were suddenly silenced by some mind numbing device. I fear something wonderful has happened."
or is it going to be 100% interactive?
If, as I hope it to be, it is 100% interactive, will you be able to kill your own character by tilting the wiimote towards you?
People dueling each other using the Wii remote better be prepared to stand pretty close to each other. The Wii remote range isn't that far horizontally.
The duel area wouldn't include the whole room you're playing in, which would be a really nice feature for a fun duel. In these duels, I can already visualize standing in front of the TV with a limited area in which to duel. I guess the fact it feels like you're swinging a lightsaber makes up for that but still...
Anyone else slightly disturbed how how closely the copy in TFS follows the write up at Kotaku?
I mean, it links to Next-Gen which is fine, but if your summary lifts more than 50% of the phrases word-for-word, maybe you should be linking that, too.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Yippeeee!!
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
I always thought a wiffle ball bat worked fine for a light saber. Then again, I was about 8 the last time Star Wars seemed interesting.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the wiimote essentially just a thumb rocker that you activate by swinging? So you swing in one direction and that's just the equivalent of touching a button, right? Boolean? On-Off? Press-release? Right?
What's so great about that?
It's not like the wiimote is being tracked in 3 space with 6 degrees of freedom. You can't map the game lightsaber position to the position of the wiimote as you are holding it.
It's just wiik. It is dead to the force. There is no joy in Wii.
To achieve the true coolness that I think all of you latent Jedi crave, you need a controller about a foot long or more where both endpoints are tracked to at least centimeter resolution in three-space. (To be general the controller will need a third point to measure roll orientation along the main axis... but for lightsabers you'd only need two control points.)
And then of course it needs a bunch of buttons to control foot movement, inventory management, etc.
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yoda has a thingie? i looked at his anatomy in star wars encyclopedia and didn't see a thingie in the sketch of his anatomy...
Fencing has a set of standard moves that could be modeled on the wiimote. These include the foil and epee forms that involve stabbing motions as well as the sabre form which involves cutting motions. The combination of these forms would provide a rich set of moves that would have some basis in real sword-fighting. On the downside, I have yet to figure out how to summon force lightning while fencing.
In soviet Mordor, Han used the wiimote first.
Who is John Galt?
It be what the wii was made for, nay?
SQL programmer goes to a bar. Walks up to two tables and says 'Excuse me, may I join you?'.
They just singlehandedly made 2007 a good year! :)
There was something like this in that masterpiece film Johnny Mnemonic (whose brain could carry a whopping 80 gigs of data!). The bad guy had this device the size of a ring that sits on his finger, and when he pulls out one end, it creates this laser rope that will cut through anything.
I would love to play this game with the sword tracking the Wiimote...
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
A perfect advertisement for this is to show what you might look like while playing this game.
somebody had to do it
It's a German name and simply means "black".
(Although it's very close to "Schwanz" which mean "dick".)
There was a time when Lucas made games of striking individuality and imagination. Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Grim Fandango. The spaghetti western shooter Outlaws. There is a generation of gamers coming of age - already of age - whose fantasies have been shaped by J.K. Rowling. The Phoenix Wand and the Deathstick.
Revving up the motorcycle using the Wiimote! And to bash foes a la Road Rash.
I hope they mean offline multiplayer. The Wiimote latency is bad enough. If I have a lightsaber I dont want it going through a plastic straw.
http://siokaos.org/
..in MP3 format, instead they force you to use their AAC aka Aggrevating Audio Control format, because it controls you, which just sucks and you can't use it unless you burn it to a CD. And they force you to pay 99c for a 3 minute song which is a total rip-off, as opposed to Kazaa where you don't have to pay anything and can just choose to support the artists you like by going to their concerts which is the only way they make money anyway because the RIAA takes all of their money its a total rip-off its rediculous the RIAA just cares about money and they want to force people to pay money every time they listen to music and force us all to listen to crap music eg Brittney Spears which is something I'd never pay money for and anyway isn't downloading music from P2P like taping off the radio its the same thing you both times end up with the same music when I was a kid sharing was something we were always taught was good but now its like you have a CD of music you bought and you choose to make copies of it for all your friends and everyone on the Internet and they call you a pirate and fine you '000s of dollars how is that pro-sharing fact is if I like music I'll buy it, but most of the music out there sucks, look at my CD collection, 90% of it was stuff I downloaded and burnt because it sucks its the same crap the RIAA is trying to force us to buy and they make you use their crappy copy protected stuff rather than MP3s which are far better I only listen to 384kbps streams and the only place I can get those is Kazaa I mean I'd pay if the quality was good enough but 99c for a song for crappy AAC that the RIAA wants to use to force you to listen to Brittney Spears with who they probably don't even pay and she has to live on what she can scrape together from concerts and stuff which is how we should support music ok maybe not the Orb and stuff like that but they need to change their business model fact is that this is the 21st century and the RIAA is still living with their out-of-date "pay for what you use" business model when there are great alternatives such as a tax on all Internet connections which the government can use to give grants to musicians which would be much fairer but no instead they use DRM and the DMCA to force us to only be able to play RIAA music we were forced to pay for on our iPods usually in crappy AAC format which doesn't work on anything but iPods and is usually crap ie Britney Spears rubbish I only ever download Britney Spears from Kazaa because its not worth buying its crap and the RIAA spends the money it gets from people buying music on putting fake britney spears music on p2p so you have to download everything fifty times to get the music you want but at least you get MP3 instead of WMV or AAC which sucks but the iTunes store only sells music in AAC and force you to pay $1 for Brittney Spears rather than 25c and they will not sell in MP3 format, instead they force you to use their AAC aka Aggrevating Audio Control format, because it controls you, which just sucks and you can't use it unless you burn it to a CD. And they force you to pay 99c for a 3 minute song which is a total rip-off, as opposed to Kazaa where you don't have to pay anything and can just choose to support the artists you like by going to their concerts which is the only way they make money anyway because the RIAA takes all of their money its a total rip-off its rediculous the RIAA just cares about money and they want to force people to pay money every time they listen to music and force us all to listen to crap music eg Brittney Spears which is something I'd never pay money for and anyway isn't downloading music from P2P like taping off the radio its the same thing you both times end up with the same music when I was a kid sharing was something we were always taught was good but now its like you have a CD of music you bought and you choose to make copies of it for all your friends and everyone on the Internet and they call you a pirate and fine you '000s of dollars how is that pro-sharing fact is if I like music I'll buy it, but m
My first thought is I wan to wield two at once. Wondering if Wii supports 4 remotes? I'm sure this isn't built into the functionality of the game, but hey it can't stop me from "dueling myself". Also I would really like the ability to kill yourself with the Wii-mote. Hari-kari anyone?
You know what they say about the Wiimote. Swinging leads to strap breaking, strap braking leads to throwing, throwing leads to Injury. I see many injuries in the future of this game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NE5elL30w4
I would buy a Wii for that.
Using a wiimote as a lightsaber is cool, but I'm holding out for the upcoming Rent-a-cop game. Use the wiimote as a taser to subdue annoying college students!
I am skeptical. The biggest red flag is that this is a multi-console game with extra features tacked on for the Wii. But I also have doubts about their ability to create a satisfying light saber experience with the Wiimote. When you have only accelerometers at your disposal, you won't be able to precisely wave the light saber left and right. Instead you'll only be able to register tilts and forces. This means that while it might recognize that you are holding the Wiimote horizontally, it won't ever know the position of the saber in relation to your body, and it won't necessarily have enough information to make a smooth transition to that point. There's a reason a lot of games have glitchy Wiimote support. For things like sword fighting, it really needs some gyroscopes.
In http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Splinter_of_the_Mind's_Eye/ Luke adjusts the size of his light sabres' blade down to a credit-card thinness to use it to cut a door lock without creating destruction that would be obvious to folks walking past once he went inside.
Haven't read the book in like 15 years, but I've got a good memory.
"I see your Schwartz^H^H^H^HWii is as big as mine."
Force feedback is not necessary if you simply reward the player for "following" the movements of the lightsaber and punishing them when they don't. (This includes coming to a stop when it hits something like another lightsaber.) The reward/punishment can take the form of greater responsiveness. For example, if the player doesn't stop their follow-through when they are blocked by another lightsaber, the game could have the avatar pause for a fraction of a second. (In some Star Wars content, Lightsabers are supposed to have some sort of "gyroscopic" effect, so there is some resistance to swinging them.) Part of a character's leveling up could be an increase in the speed the lightsaber is allowed to swing. Or, you could use this as another form of feedback for the player -- the better the player "follows" the lightsaber being blocked, the faster the avatar and lightsaber follows the user's movements.
Just reward the user with greater responsiveness if they don't follow-through when they are blocked. Cause the avatar to "pause" when the lightsaber is blocked, and make the pause more pronounced when the user really gets out of sync. Conversely, give them more responsiveness the more they "play nice" or follow what is happening on screen. You can also use this technique to enforce a "speed limit" on how fast the user can swing the Wiimote around, which makes playing safer, and might even improve gameplay. Fights will be more tactical and less twitch. Raising this "speed limit" would be one way of leveling the avatar up.
Building this into the training stages will be easy, and would even improve the narrative of lots of Star Wars and fantasy genre games.
Yes please.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm not as interested in fighting another sword (tho that is sort of cool) as I am in the aspect of blocking blaster shots. I wonder what kind of UI they could give you that would allow you to do that and feel like you were really doing it. In the film world a blaster shot is slower than light (maybe even slower than a bullet) but still extremely fast.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I think you meant this game.
that's not how you "wing"!
No, I think it's you who needs to spend more time on wikipedia, reading this page...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I have a bad feeling about this.
One in a million shot, doc.
...as if millions of overweight fanboys jumped for joy and then landing very heavily all at once.
*runs*
I think you meant this game.
Bushido Blade? No, he means the earlier Die by the Sword. You know, the one that's NOT for Wapanese faggots who think everything from Japan is automatically better.
...Asajji Ventress. Supposedly the sabre set she was given by Count Dooku had an attachable/detachable cable for hot Nunchaku Sabre action. I seem to remember this showing up in one of the games.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
mod parent up - someone who actually read TFA
In the Star Wars Universe, even though a lightsaber blade has no weight, there is a strong gyroscopic effect created by the mechanism that produces the blade. Just as the gyroscopic motion of a bicycle wheel prevents it from changing orientation quickly (thereby helping you stay upright once you are moving), a lightsaber exhibits resistance when you swing it around. This gyroscopic resistance simulates the momentum that must be overcome when swinging a heavy blade.
If you'd ever handled a real lightsaber, you'd know. Duh.
If they're smart, they'll do a second controller you strap onto your other hand so you can do force push/pull/throw on things.
If they could do a package like that, with a saber and some back-of-the-hand strapon (shut up!) I'd buy it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.