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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.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
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.
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. ~~~~
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
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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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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Blame the dollar. My understanding is that Nintendo is shifting a significant portion of what they are making to Europe due to the dollar. Why should they sell the hardware they produced for $250 when they can sell the exact same thing for significantly more in Europe. If the dollar was better, we'd see more of the stock directed here.
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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...
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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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.