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

Swordfighting

[Toonol]

Hasn't that been everybody's dream game for the Wii?

Re:Swordfighting

[interkin3tic]

I personally was looking forward to (and was dissapointed by a lack of) first person shooting control schemes.

With the swordfighting, one major problem is that if your on screen sword hits another sword, there's no force feedback to stop your wiimote. You'd swing through, your sword on screen would stop.

I suppose they could make it realistic and have both swords break, but people want movie sword-fighting, not real sword fighting. There are workarounds you can think of, but until nindendo comes out with a wii-motion-stops-your-hand-in-midair attachment, it's never going to feel quite right.

The FPS control scheme I don't know why it's not being used much. Lack of imagination? they don't think there's much of a market for FPS on the wii?

Re:Swordfighting

[vux984]

I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but I'm pretty sure that the wiimote isn't even close to being balanced like any real sword

So stick the wii remote into an attachment that is correctly balanced.

You could probably set something up for most swords where the wii remotes is just in front hand/gaurd, and then add weight appropriately. As a fencer, I'm confident you could get the balance right for a foil, epee, and sabre. And these are all much lighter and more delicate than a japanese sword (e.g. Katana) so it should be even easier to create something with the correct balance for those.

I'm not sure how well sword fighting itself would work, because of course their is no resistance. However, I think you could still effectively teach or at least practice the forms. And you could probably put together a sword fighting game, that while not entirely realistic, would at least be fun. A little vibration as you execute a beat attack lets you know you've knocked the blade out of line and you extend fully... a double vibration means you've beat and he has counter beat and you need to execute a parry riposte or be touched... it would have to be lenient on which parry... it would have to be simplified... but it could still be fun.

I don't really know much about Asian sword fighting, but what I've seen of Kendo is that like Sabre its mostly strike-hit. Occasionally strike-block/counterattack-hit. Very occasionally strick-block/counterattack-counterblock-strike-hit. And rarely does it go further than that. So if a game even just gave you one opportunity to block/counterblock it would be fairly realistic in that sense.

And in fencing at least blocks aren't 'feats of strength vs your opponent where you stand there blades crossed for 10 seconds grunting at each other'. They are generally brief deflections of the blade that require little strength, and simply knock the incoming blade off 'line', and the moment your opponent is off line, you riposte so its not like you are sitting their holding his blade... its just a quick 'tick' and then your counterattack.

The former feat of strength couldn't really be captured by a bit of audio and vibration feedback, but the latter probably could be, and reality (of fencing) is most the latter.

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.

The Wii MotionPlus is an expansion device

[DreamMaster]

You know.. I was all ready to hate them for not making the new sensor backwards compatible with older games, but then it occurred to me that it says that the new motion sensor hooks into the base of the existing Wiimote. It may simply be that the connection there for peripherals/nunchuks doesn't allow the new sensor to supercede the existing Wiimote movement sensors.. that may be why only new games will be able to make use of the extra information.

Of course we could then always argue that Nintendo should have re-designed the Wiimote from scratch with the new sensor embedded if that's the case. If so, I would hope that they do, because there are a lot of existing Wii games that would benefit from the extra sensitivity.

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:No plans to support older titles

[AlXtreme]

Read: It's a near impossibility to support older titles.

My first reaction was: why would that be unlikely/impossible? If the MotionPlus simply made the 'mote more accurate, then there would be no need for software support on the Wii (via a new IOS-version).

But what the MotionPlus probably does is add a second gyroscope to the Wiimote and send the data directly to the Wii. The Wii would then be able to determine the orientation of the Wiimote more accurately by comparing the data of both gyroscopes. Any other setup would automatically give backwards-compatibility (but it seems like it wouldn't work).

Can't wait for the next step: 3 BT receivers to triangulate the position of the wiimotes. I'd love to get rid of that barely-functional sensorbar setup.

Re:The Wii MotionPlus is an expansion device

[meist3r]

Actually since the MotionPlus doesn't use the IR sensors that's kinda pointless. This thing contains afaik 3 multi-axis accelerometers that are way more precise than what was possible during the launch of the Wii years back. It snaps into the Wiimote which is a good thing because they have sold 50 million Wiimotes and most people won't be too happy to spend another 200$ on new controllers just to have a sword fight with their mates. Nintendo already pissed off loads of people with their strange antics, now telling me I have to throw away my Wiimotes and buy new ones -no wai. Instead it's a 20$ addon which is much more feasible to most consumers, if you want it ... it's 20$ per controller extra instead of another 50 for a new one. Other than that, older games won't work because there is no real patching infrastructure on the Wii that I'm aware of. You would have to re-write potentially large chunks of the controls code to have your game react to the MotionPlus input correctly and why bother in the first place? The games that didn't have M+ don't need it now. Most games wouldn't benefit from simply "tacked on" MotionPlus just as they don't benefit from tacked on waggle or motion control. Now, games that are built around MotionPlus ... that's a different story.

Re:Breakthrough? Maybe not!

[KDR_11k]

And it requires a fairly large court (which you usually don't own and have to rent) and human opponents near you and doesn't come with computer assistance that can make anyone feel like a world class player.