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Nintendo Unveils Wii MotionPlus
Tim MacDonald writes "In a pre-conference announcement at E3, Nintendo has unveiled the newest accessory for the Nintendo Wii — the Wii MotionPlus. The Wii MotionPlus combines with the Wiimote's accelerometers and the Sensor Bar to give true, almost 1:1 matching of motion. More to come during Tuesday's conference." If all these battery mods and add-ons to the Wiimote continue my controller is going to start looking less like a controller and more like a quarterstaff. Looks like the wrist strap is going to have to go through another round of beefing up.
Ive owned a Wii since launch and not because I enjoy it but because its been a thing of my life to own the major Nintendo consoles on release. The current motion sensing is pretty bad, it flinches alot, it jumps around, it felt added on. If they seriously have improved on this and its a true 1:1 then maybe ill dust off the Wii again otherwise ill go back to another button smashing controller.
This reminds me of the extra 4Mb of RAM you had to purchase for the N64 to run the more advanced games. It should have come with it in the first place. I wonder if it will come bundled with the first games that require it, as they did with Starfox 64 and the rumble pack.
Either way, it'd be cool to use this so Red Steel works the way they advertised it.
One word: Lightsaber.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I've seen them 6 or more at Walmart. So they are being produced. Since Nintendo doesn't seem to have a replicating device, I expect that they can only produce so many at a time.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Having played with the Wii for a year and change now, I can say that with regard to motion, the Wiimote seems to be good at detecting motion in the middle of its range, but lacking at the ends of the range.
Case in point: putting in Wii Golf. The learning curve for putting is fairly steep, and sometimes the game got confused with such low velocities. The MotionPlus should help that.
What will be interesting is what happens with actual swordfighting. If you complete a sword swing, but your opponent blocks it, the game will have to resolve the situation by... what? It's not an impossible problem, but it'll still be something new to get used to.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
It comes down to the question of what they added to the device. If it's a second accelerometer or a gyroscope, you could see a drastically increased ability to act as a very dirt-cheap IMU, which would be incredible for precision control games. Meanwhile, the current device works just fine for everything else it was designed to do.
Nobody said it was bad to begin with. But even good can be improved on (the ontological proof being "better" and "best").
"Then any reason homebrew drivers couldn't be written to use it for sculpting in a 3d modeling program?"
Well you could, but you could also get one of half a dozen 3d mice that will work a lot better then the Wii mote.
I think Nintendo splintered there user base when the spent more time on Boomblox and Wiifit...instead of releasing more traditional shooters and adventure games.
I have a Wii, but the lack of traditional games means my 360 gets a lot more play time....
First of all, it's no surprise that it wasn't included from the get-go. It was a MAJOR risk by Nintendo to try a new type of controller. No one else had pulled anything like that off on any significant scale. In the probably 3 years it's been since the thing was initially given to game developers for beta testing they've probably made a lot of headway in how to make a more sensitive module in mass production at the price point they need.
Secondly, you're probably right about how useful it will be. Very few, if any, game developers will be able to develop games specifically for the new remote. They'll all have to be backwards compatible. It really depends on how easy/good the compatibility layer is which will likely determine how it gets used. There will be, however, a few key games which will all but require the new remote. I'm betting that a Star Wars game will be one of those. Heck, I'd be happy if Mario Kart Wii got a patch so the steering wheel would be as accurate/responsive as the nunchuck for steering.
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How does that quote go, "When facts are few, speculations are most likely to represent individual psychology"?
When the original Wiimote was announced we all dreamed of the wonderful things it would do. We'd finally have lightsaber games and true-to-life shooters and all that, because it could somehow tell what you were doing!
But that wasn't the case. It don't actually do swordfighting in any real capacity. And I don't say that to diminish what Nintendo did, I love the system and in fact the Wiimote's simplicity was probably a good idea, I just want to point out what happens when we don't know how a device operates. I mean, these statements are from a press release, so, [citation needed] y'know.
If someone can explain to me what the heck this extra doohickey actually does though then I'll perfectly happily drink the kool-aid and party all night. But right now all they say is improved tracking? What does that mean? Are we getting absolute tracking on all axes? That's what'd make me excited...
No it doesn't, not anymore.
Console makers learned this lesson long ago, I guess the memo missed Nintendo.
This controller isn't made for a specific game. As such, some people will buy it some not. Even if it has better functionality, developers will not develop for it since only a fraction of the Wii user population will own the controller. Its the same reason practically every peripheral/add-on for any game system ever sold has been a total failure. Super Scope, 32x, Sega CD etc etc ETC. The only add-ons that were successes were those that were made intentionally for only one specific game or a very small subset of specific games - DDR, Guitar Hero for example. They were considered successful only because they happened to have the "controller" packaged with the game and were never marketed as a general enhancement to the video game system. As such I wouldn't really consider them in the same category as this Wii controller.
Actually, the only REAL peripheral - i.e. those made for most/many games - that wasn't a total failure was the original Dual-Shock. The controller completely supplanted the old non-dual shock controller and the dual analog sticks were necessary to play practically every game only few months after release. In that case, Sony had a relatively small initial base before switching over, so not that many people were annoyed that their old controllers didn't work anymore. The Wii has a much, much larger user-base, and even worse, a much more video-game-ignorant proportion of owners. Try explaining to your 60 year old relatives why their new game doesn't work on their system anymore.
Point is, no developer would ever risk that happening, so no developer will ever make a game that only uses that controller. Sure, they might have a toggle option or something, but that means that game had to be built to accommodate both, and can never reach its full potential if it stuck to one control method. Imagine if on the 360 or PS3 every game had to be designed in such a way as to be playable both on the analog controls and digital controls.
Does this mean I can make short puts in Wii Golf now? One of the most annoying things of any of the motion controlled games was having to make small movements if a situation arose and the controller not quite responding to it. You could sit there moving the wiimote a good 6-7 inches and it would act like you hadn't even moved it. Move it more and it was like you were hammering it. I tried a 6 inch putt once and almost drove it back to the tee.
The only add-ons that were successes were those that were made intentionally for only one specific game or a very small subset of specific games - DDR, Guitar Hero for example.
Nunchuck.
Classic controller.
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