After months of talk and a few name changes, Sony finally announced the PlayStation Move at GDC 2010. When I first saw Sony's motion controller I was kind of excited. Hearing how disappointed a lot of my Wii owner friends were about the lack of precision the Wii's motion controller offered, it seemed like Sony's stab at motion controllers might just fix the problem. After watching Sony's press conference at GDC 2010, I realized a few things that kind of had me scratching my head. Sony's going after the Wii?!?It's one thing for consoles to duke it out over exclusives and holiday sales but it's another thing to actually enter a console's exclusive territory and bring the fight to them. To me, that's what Sony's doing, entering Nintendo's kingdom of "motion controllidarity" - something that no other console has challenged yet since the Wii released in 2006. There are two major things that bother me about Sony's approach to it's motion controller, Move. One is that 3+ years is a long time to build an install base and we all know that Nintendo built one killer base as the Wii was practically impossible to find for two holiday seasons straight. The PS3 on the other hand was slow to get out of the gate, and while this is a marathon not a sprint, the difference in console sales makes the move to unleash the Move seem a bit late in my eyes.
The other thing that bothers me about Sony's approach to the Move is their promise to make it more than "a pointer", referring to the lack of innovative uses for the Wii's motion controller. Yet all the demos I saw where exact replicas of Wii games. Table tennis, boxing, odd party games that don't seem fun, and sword fighting games. Even adding Move support to games like LittleBigPlanet didn't seem that fun. I mean, the guy doing the demo seemed to be bored so what does that mean for us, the people who pay to play these things. I'm trying not to be too much of a downer, but I've been through enough peripheral releases to know that true third-party and innovative first-party support is hard to come by.
Look at the PlayStation 2's EyeToy - I picked one up because I thought it would be cool to be able to do all the things they showed in the demo - but it really isn't. One thing is the fact that I looked like an idiot jumping around and waving my hands in the air trying to control the character on screen, which didn't always work, and found that I wasn't really having any fun at all. I thought that with advances in learning how to develop for the EyeToy would improve games but I still only found party games being released, nothing very interesting or new.
Onto the PlayStation 3's Eye, once again I got sucked into picking this thing up, but for a different reason - there was an innovative game called Eye of Judgment that really did bring something new to the table. So much so, that the technology behind the game has moved on to other forms of media, even Hallmark has started using it. Unfortunately, Eye of Judgment was the only innovative game that was released for the Eye and nothing really new has come out since then.
PlayStation Move is poised to seemingly correct this problem, but I'm skeptical that it will actually happen. Sony can't seem to keep long term support going for the PSP (as in lack of new IPs from both first and third party developers) let alone the Eye, so why is Move going to be any different? Plus, with everything Sony showed at their press conference, it looks like I'm going to have to buy four of the main Move controllers and four of the sub-controllers just to play some of those party games. If anyone has a few extra hundred dollar bills lying around, I'll be happy to pick Move up and give it a whirl.
Okay, so now that I've got my "Bah, this is just a money sucking scheme from Sony" rant out of the way, I'll switch gears and talk a little bit about the things I do thing are going to be good and how this could change the gaming landscape. One is the Socom 4 demo (yay, they are bringing single player campaign back! Zipper's finally realized that not everyone likes to get trash talked by 12 year olds) which showed that you could use Move to play a game without waving your arms around like a mad man. It looked very precise and kind of fun. Plus, it was in HD, c'mon, we all know that Nintendo's biggest mistake with the Wii was not going High Def.
While Socom 4 is a third-person-shooter, I think FPS games would be awesome with the Move, if they could do it right. Think back to Half-Life for a second. Remember having to use the flashlight? That totally freaked me out having to go through sections in the dark, but could you imagine using the Move to control the flashlight? Then with a flick of the wrist or a click of a button, you'd swap out to your gun and start shooting away while strafing with the sub-controller (stupid name by the way, they should have gone with the Sub-Move or something). While Silent Hill did this on the Wii, I heard that accuracy and precision really ruined the game experience. Wait, isn't that what Sony's promising with the Move?
So on one hand, I think Sony's a little late to the ballgame and that they are just trying to find a way to make some more cash by sucking us dry. On another hand though, they didn't have to go this route. They could have just cranked out a bunch of sequels to their IPs and started porting them to the PSP . . . oh, they already have. But what I am saying is that they didn't have to go after the casual gaming market which shows two things - Sony realizes that they have to expand their umbrella once again to include as many people as possible and that they have an opportunity to use the opening Nintendo gave them when Nintendo went kiddy and Standard Def.
Sony has a huge opportunity here if they play the PlayStation Move card correctly. One reason why my parents are trying to talk me into letting them buy a Wii is for those party and sports games. They look fun, and they are fun in the right context. One reason why I won't let my parents buy a Wii (other than it would totally ruin the zen like Totsuko vibe I have going in the media room) is the simple fact that I don't see any real depth in the Wii. When I try to think of some more "hardcore" titles on the Wii, I come up with Zelda, Mario Galaxy, and Metroid. While all of these titles sold exceptionally well and received great reviews - they aren't enough to make me want to play the console when family and friends aren't over.
On the other hand, there's a lot of things the PS3 offers for those great solo game sessions and multiplayer frag fests. Plus, the PS3 is truly an anchor for my media room, acting not only as a gaming console and a Blu-Ray Player, but one of the main devices I use to connect with friends and family. And that is why I think Move could actually bite into Nintendo's territory a bit. But the games have to be there, it can't be just a copy and paste type situation. Sony has to come up with something new, something big, and most importantly something fun for hardcore gamers that don't like to just play sports games. This isn't going to be a console war, this is going to be a developer war - which one has the better guns and the better teams which will ultimately make the better games.
And to answer your question, yes I will be picking up my very own Move later this fall. Let's just hope that this time, Sony's new motion controller won't be stashed under my bed like all the other peripherals of old.
