Hands-on With the Wii MotionPlus

Parz writes "In June, Nintendo will be releasing a peripheral called MotionPlus. This small device attaches to the bottom of the Wii-mote and acts as a more sophisticated motion-sensor to the controller as it currently stands. Its goal is to bring greater parity between a user's movements and the animations that they bring to life on-screen. Gameplayer got some hands-on time with the device, and they are extremely impressed." The MotionPlus will only affect new games; Nintendo has said they have no plans to add support for older titles. Virtua Tennis 2009 will be the first game to support it, and Eurogamer has a look at the game both with and without the MotionPlus.

Comments

No plans to support older titles

[Drinking Bleach]

Read: It's a near impossibility to support older titles. It would be nice to head over to http://hackmii.com/2009/02/why-the-wii-will-never-get-any-better/ and find out why; specifically:

As it turns out, Nintendo chose not to have any operating system or common code at all running on the Broadway CPU. When you run a game, everything that shows up on your screen, ever, is being loaded from that spinning polycarbonate disc. And there are no mechanisms for anything else to run on that CPU: no update infrastructure, no Home Menu updates, nothing. If they ever want to have a "hypervisor" run above games, they'll need to get a new CPU with full-blown virtualization capability (or an emulator), because games assume they have direct access to the CPU and most of the hardware.

If you've been following the Wii scene, you might be thinking, "what about IOS?" Indeed, Nintendo's security and I/O Operating System runs alongside games (on a separate CPU built in to the Hollywood chipset) and it is updated as part of system updates. It includes some important bits and pieces like some peripheral drivers. However, as it turns out, Nintendo has decided that every new feature will be developed as a separate fork. Your Wii contains many IOS versions, and the older have never been updated except for security reasons (to fix our exploits). Not that they've added many new features, but if you look closely, new IOS features do not operate when you're playing older games. This includes any updates to the WiiConnect24 downloads code, and even some minor things like the "slot LED blinks when you eject a disc" feature - try it when you're playing Zelda and you'll see that it doesn't work, because it's using the very old IOS9.

Re:Swordfighting

[Bakkster]

As another fencer, I would have to disagree. There's still too many things that can't be measured with just a wiimote. Wrist angle is the most important, as the wiimote would have no way to verify the wrist was absolutely straight. Body lean, distance between the elbow and body, and foot position are also very important. Simply attempting to teach, or even practice, fencing with a wiimote could lead to poor habits that will be difficult to correct later on. The problems you would create would outweigh any benefit.

I agree with the earlier comment, leave the learning on the piste. Use the wiimote for what it is, a game. A Kendo or fencing game would be great, but a training tool is out of the question.