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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.
So when's the WiiSuit going to be announced? Stick accelerometers and IR sensors all over a bodysuit and track entire body movement.
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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.
Whats the point in releasing new accessories when there are not enough Wii's available even after the console is more than an year old?
I know I can get it from ebay and all, but I want it for $250 which is the advertised prize.
Then any reason homebrew drivers couldn't be written to use it for sculpting in a 3d modeling program?
Nintendo must have a game in mind with this peripheral, otherwise I don't see why they would bother (unless MS or Sony are planning on unveiling waggle controllers that outperform the Wii Remote... which so far doesn't appear to be the case). Interestingly, Miyamoto has said that Twilight Princess would be the final Zelda game to play like it's forebears, and it is true that Nintendo has been experimenting with a first person Zelda design for some time (part of which became Link's Crossbow Training). With this new 1:1 motion capability, perfect for sword fighting one would assume, I'm lead to believe we may be looking at a major announcement of an all new Zelda title. Then again, it might just be for Wii Sports 2.
Actually it's a buck and a quarter quarterstaff, but I'm not telling him that.
One of my complaints when I first tried the Wii is that it doesn't match motion well. I assumed that over time the technology would get better and they would start making better controllers? So I hope this will become a standard part of newly manufactured Wii consoles rather than a way of nickel and diming people by first making them pay for the console then pay again for controllers that work. ~~~~
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The problem with the Wiimote is that it track motion but there is no way of tracking orientation ... It is likely that the WiiNubin tracks orientation.
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.
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Rotation
They'd be able to measure acceleration in 3 axis and derive angular acceleration in 3 axis. (And the further apart the two accelerometers are, the more sensitive it'd be to angular changes).
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And that Nintendo will tell more tomorrow ...
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Have you checked the sensitivity settings for the Wii? That seems to do what you want it to do. But yes, the Wii isn't good for close-to-the-TV gaming.
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You mean like this?
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.3333
Yes, I bought it and yes it works perfectly. I haven't had to worry about my Wiimote batteries at all since buying it.
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Aparently not.
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I have always loved Nintendo's work, but the whole peripherals thing is getting to be ridiculous. I remember when Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles was released on the Gamecube, and to take full advantage of the (actually quite fun) multiplayer required four Gameboy Advance systems and four GBA to GCN connector cables (hundreds of dollars altogether). The same thing happened with The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures.
I remember a lot of people complaining about the GCN's dependency on other Nintendo products: I thought that the Wii would address these concerns. Instead, a fully-equipped Wii has four remotes (this is fine), four nunchuk attachments (the fact that they must be purchased separately is annoying), two classic controllers, Wii Wheels, Wii Zappers, the Wii Balance Board, and now four new motion-enhancing attachments.
The only way to justify owning this ridiculous amount of white plastic would be for each peripheral to be supported by a pretty solid library of games. Instead, we see a mere handful of low-quality games making halfhearted use of them. Or (and God forbid we see more of this), we see games eschewing everything that makes the Wii unique to make use of good old GCN controllers (more plastic to keep on hand). Honestly, the classic controller is the most useful peripheral right now because it works wonderfully with most of the Virtual Console titles.
All that said, however, I still feel the need for the motion controls to be improved. They have a tendency to be very twitchy and inaccurate, even in some of the bigger games (I noticed a fair amount of this in Super Mario Galaxy). It will be interesting to see how much these new add-ons will help the issue.
What I'd really like to see instead of more and more tangible objects that I can plug into my Wii remote are games that make interesting, fun, and intelligent use of the already existing systems. There's a ton of potential for the hardware, and I'd love to see it really take off.
I don't want to know where THAT WIImote goes...
Dunno what games you're playing, but almost every one that I play on a regular basis -requires- the nunchuck.
I am no accelerometer expert, The Wii's current accelerometer is just to the left of the A button, if you were to say, Hold the remote by that point, and rotate it on that axis, it would sense nothing.
Gravity would not have shifted, and it would not have moved in any profound way, But if there were a seccond accelerometer a few inches back, that one would sense movement. With this it would be able to really know the difference between say, moving the whole remote, or swinging it in a direction.
As it stands the wiimote doesn't have any true way to detect the difference between moving the whole remote to the right, and a swing the right, But with two accelerometers one would move both accelerometers equally, and the other would move one a lot more than the other. Hence, 1:1 becomes more possible.
I really hope we see a sword fighting game.
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Since the Wiimote uses Bluetooth to communicate with the Wii, it can be used with a PC. There is some software that takes advantage of it, though if you are interested there is http://www.wiili.org/ . The site documents the Wiimote communication protocol and lists some drivers available for the Linux, Windows, MacOS X and Java.
I wonder whether the intention of using Bluetooth was to use off the shelf equipment for the Wii, to facilitate development for it or even a bit of both?
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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...
wow, that means the wii will have SIX AXIS ov motion?! That would make the wii the first next gen console to have SIX AXIS motion control! Revolutionary.
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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.
Just look at the picture.
There is clearly a nub where a nunchuck could plug in and the extended Wiimote jacket clearly has a hole in the right place to allow access.
Personally I think it should include wireless nunchuck capability. It seems rather suboptimal to have a Wiimote that will track free movement better still tied to a nunchuck.
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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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