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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."
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
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.