It occurred to me that apparently motion gaming dictates the need for asinine naming. There’s Move, Wii, and Kinect. All of which are pretty horrible. Move’s probably the best, although it would have been more accurate if the Kinect was named Move, since you’ll be doing by far the most moving with the Kinect.
Nintendo’s 4 year experiment with forging a new direction of gaming has been hit or miss. For Nintendo’s bottom line, it’s been a resounding success. For everyone else, eh not so much. The monolith of money that has been the Wii has attracted big name developers and publishers which has led to a number of big name franchises seeing the light of day on the machine. Unfortunately most of them haven’t really sold very well. Most have either sold OK, or just downright poorly. Quality has little bearing, or maybe even a negative effect, as many of the better made Wii games haven’t sold well at all. Except for Nintendo’s. But Nintendo is the exception, with the bonus that being the console maker as well, they clearly had the best idea of what you should do with it. Nintendo’s titles also clearly blur the boundary between “core” and “casual” games, as they’ve done for 25 years now.
What the Wii has proven to me is that motion controls for dedicated core games just doesn’t work. Core games, and core gamers, demand a different level or precision, a deeper level of control. There’s a reason that the 360 and PS3 controllers have 4 face buttons, 4 shoulder buttons, a directional pad, and two analog sticks. For the most part core games demand quick and responsive multitasking. Dodging an attack and countering with a combo while adjusting the camera. Strafing, shooting, while cycling through your grenade types. This is the kind of controls that motion game just isn’t built for. Not naturally anyway. That doesn’t mean that motion gaming is necessarily inferior, it’s just different, and demands a different type of gameplay. One that’s more streamlined. One that’s more accessible. Basically motion gaming, Wii style anyway, is tailored for a more casual experience.
So where are we, heading in 2011, in regards to motion gaming? The Wii, much like Nintendo’s previous two consoles, has become once again a Nintendo machine. That is, it’s line-up is dominated by first party franchises and games. Third party developers have found the most success by pumping out light casual games, while the third party core game well is drying up fairly quickly. Currently it’s identity is a casual party console with the occasional “core” Nintendo game. It’ll remain successful for a while still, and with 2011 likely being “All 3DS, All the Time”, as far as Nintendo is concerned, don’t expect to hear much about a Wii successor until 2012, giving the Wii one more solid holiday season before it really starts to quietly fade into the night.
While Nintendo’s first foray into motion gaming is on it’s last legs, it’s inspired offspring have just arrived. The Move and the Kinect present two very different strategies to the future of motion gaming.
The Move has basically said that the Wii was basically right, it just didn’t do it well enough or take it far enough. It takes the concept of the Wii, and makes it infinitely more accurate, and presents it in HD. What you get is that the Playstation 3 is now essentially two consoles (and a blu-ray player) under one roof. The Playstation 3 can now be both a “core” machine, and a “casual” one, depending on which way you want it to swing. And you can do it on the fly, no need to switch machines, or even discs perhaps, as a number of games will begin offering both Dualshock 3 and Move control schemes (a few already do).
It all works very well and honestly is a fine choice. A prospective console buyer would do well to look at it. You can get your Wii type games (which will look better and play more accurately) and your more core games together in one place. Plus you get a good blu-ray player to boot. It’s finally the complete solution to the “Wii60″, even if that’s no longer a relevant problem.
The problem is that the Move solution is also pretty safe and bland. At it’s heart it really is just adding a Wii to your Playstation 3. Gameplay wise, it has all the same problems and strengths of the Wii, even if it is more accurate. The Move is a fine Wii replacement, but that’s all it is. Nothing more, nothing less.
The Kinect is something quite different. In a way it doesn’t really fit with the Wii and the Move. The Move and the Wii pose the question “what if there was a more direct way to communicate movement in games?” What the Kinect asks is more along the lines of “what if there was a more direct way to communicate with your console?” There is no controller, and as such, you have to communicate directly with the console. The problem with the Kinect is that it sort of feels like a premature birth.
Kinect’s biggest problem right now is that it’s all potential, with little delivery. Of course, one could say that about most console launches, and make no mistake, that’s what Microsoft is treating this as. The Kinect has well documented problems with how your room has to be situated and how far you have to be. If these issues are not fixable through software patches this will prove to be crippling for the Kinect, as it’s just plain unreasonable to demand that your buyer “have a bigger house” in order for them to use the product. And how much and in what ways you can control with the Kinect on the dashboard is far more limited than should be or was advertised to be. And right now for all the “forward thinking” that the Kinect was supposed to be, it’s current line up is also just full of Wii replacement titles.
But it’s hard to deny that the Kinect does feel different, and progressive. This is most evident to me by the fact that there can be discussions on the merits of it without involving it’s dedicated games. The Kinect changes the way you interact with your XBox 360. It’s not great at this yet, because quite frankly the Kinect feels somewhat unfinished, unfortunately shoved out the door in order to meet the holiday deadline. It’s still neat though. It makes me think of stuff from Minority Report, and Star Trek. It feels, new and different.
Even it’s Wii-like games like Kinect Sports feels different, because you’re fundamentally interacting with it differently. Long term I don’t feel like I’ll really want to play Kinect specific games any more than I would Wii or Move specific games though, but I give it credit for being more exciting to me than anything on the Wii ever was. There’s also more opportunity here with the Kinect. I don’t think that games made exclusively for Kinect control will be any better or more fun than Wii or Move games, but unlike the Move and Wii, there’s an opportunity here for integration. Sadly, the first real tease at that, Fable 3, ended up having it scrapped, likely due to the fact that it’s probably pretty complicated to do. But it’s doable. And sooner or later will be done. And eventually done well. And that could be awesome.
Even just small stuff. Say, for instance, a first person shooter. Still played mostly with the controller, but now, you lob grenades with the Kinect. Now, you actually throw the grenade, your motion and arm speed controlling where it goes. A hard swing, you launch that sucker like a discus. Just a soft flick, you simply toss it over that fence just in front of you. As a fledgling game designer, the Kinect is a lot more exciting to me for this reason. Not because I can see myself making better Kinect specific games than Move or Wii games, but because I can see fun ways to integrate it into the more core games that I prefer making. Whereas on the Playstation 3 the “regular” and Move play modes have to be kept rigidly separate (well they don’t have to be, but who wants to just keep switching controllers during a game), there’s crossover potential with Kinect.
Using the Wii as a base, this is my opinion. The Wii has fulfilled it’s potential and will glide through a deserved one and half to two year farewell tour. The Move is one solid step forward done very well. A worthy successor to the Wii. Problem is that the Wii spent 4 years showing the limit of it’s motion control, and the Move doesn’t do anything to get past them. The Kinect is five steps forward, but done very haphazardly. Right now, a shaky evolution of the concept of motion in gaming. But if it can get it’s footing, there’s massive potential here.
As an aside: The Kinect isn’t even a new concept to gaming. Sony basically did an early version of this with the EyeToy back in 2003 on the Playstation 2. The EyeToy obviously didn’t go much farther than a few party games, and it’s PS3 successor the PS Eye floundered in obscurity until being integrated in with the Move construct. But with the PS Eye being a pretty good piece of technology it’s possible we’ll see some of these Kinect-like features on the Playstation 3 down the line. Only downside to that is that once again Sony will be playing “catch up”.
I can agree with everything said, except of course, for a few points. I like the idea of Kinect. I like the idea of the Move. Having played both, I feel as though they should coexist as one entity. I love having a controller sometimes, and the other times, not having one. Some games just need a controller, in my opinion, even if it’s for motion.
But I still have a slight bias against the Kinect though, because it angers me, that a decade later, this technology is still shit; stiff and unresponsive as it was over 10+ years ago. I’m not speaking of the PS Eye; no, when I was younger I went to the arcade and they had a machine there, where you would play a fighting game by standing in a circle, in front of a sensor and it would detect your movements. Throw a punch, and your character did, etc. It was exactly what the Kinect is now.
I understand they are two different items, from two different times, but trust me when I say this: They play exactly the same.
I’ll give it a chance of course, and wait a bit for some more worthwhile games to come out and see if it’s just these launch titles that are lackluster, and not the machine itself.