Wii: A look at motion-controls from the past

Turok 2, Turok 3, Perfect Dark, James Bond: The world is not enough, Quake 2, Armorines, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Star Wars: Episode 1 racer, Starcraft, Resident Evil 2, Donkey Kong 64, Banjo-Tooie, Zelda: Majora's Mask....plus loads of obscure third party games I don't remember the name of right now, utilise or require the N64 Expansion Pack.

Bottom line, it's complete bullshit to say two or three games used the expansion pack, because when it was released halfway through the N64's life, it seems as if every single game that came out after it at *least* included a simple high-res mode to make use of the extra memory.

That article was so bad, I can't resist commenting on it. If the writer, Michael Walker, had actually "researched" by actually glancing at either of the scanned Power Glove related magazine pages that he included in his own article, he'd have discovered that, much to his surprise, "This first attempt at motion-sensing control technology" did NOT in fact, "[come] from none other than Nintendo themselves," but instead, from Mattel, as printed on those pages.

@vidGuy
Well I forgot about manipulating objects in Mario Galaxy that’s different, but I think the planets concept is more interesting than the controls. It would be really unique if the planets have their own orbits and you can affect them in some way.

Trespasser was the first FPS I can think of were you moved your arm around in 3d. It wasn’t a good game, and I don’t actually suggest that anyone play it, but it had the same thing as Red Steel, except that you had to hold down 3 different keys to control 3 different motion (were you arm is, which way its pointing, the way its tilting). The one cool thing in Trespasser is that to do a melee attack, you could swing your gun around with the mouse. You could swing a melee object by pressing the attack key, but you could also do it just by physically swinging it around. That’s a good example of non-canned control.

If you have the opportunity to play Trespasser though, don’t do it. It’s unique from some small technical standpoints, but the experience is similar to having large chunks of coal shoved up your nose.

#36 - I think the term you're looking for is "inverse kinematics". And it doesn't require as much processing power as you think to pose a character. The Wii might not be powerful enough to do fabric and water, but even a current gen system can do inverse kinematics.

One of the reasons those previous controllers failed was because they activated a small selection of canned animations - the character on screen never really matched your moves. With a constant flow of data from the Wii's controller, and inverse kinematics controlling a 3D rendered character, the character can closely match your own moves.

Lord Meph,

I agree with you that the PS3 controller does not have the same motion sensing capacities than the Wii remote - which has made much more noise on this than the PS3.
That said, it just confirms my point of view: if we've got to criticize the Wii's motion sensing capabilities then the PS3's ones are at least as much or more to be criticized...

One thing Sony has to be praised for: The Eyetoy and its assumed plans for bringing a new "Eyetoy 3D" along with the upcoming PS3... (http://www.exergames.com/exergames_when_exercise_m/ps3/index.html)

As you rightly pointed out, the Wii remote has more sensors... Sony might be putting sensors not exclusively on the remote/gamepad and might plan to make a combination Eyetoy/Gamepad-with-motion-sensors...

To me using multiple sources of input and sensing technologies are the right way forward: gesture recognition cameras (even Microsoft with Xbox Live Camera is getting to it), motion sensors in gamepads...
Now, each may have a better fit with some game categories...(racing, shooting, etc)

@vidguy

In your second paragraph you descibe an engine that uses "speed, mass, inertia, angles, etc." I'm almost positive the Half-Life 2 engine uses all of those and was sucessfully ported to the xbox (bad load times of course) so I don't think that physics will really be a problem on the Wii's hardware. But using those things currently to determine physics hasn't really been all that amazing. I mean sure the physics in games like Half-Life 2 are pretty good but I don't think that using ragdoll physics in a football game to determine how a player tackles is such a good idea. So unless this gen produces an entire new technique of simulating life like physics... I really don't think the Wii will have a problem.

Pressing a button is indeed a simpler action than moving a remote in 3D space. However, it is far less intuitive. As gamers, we've trained ourselves to make the seemless mental association of "Press A" to "My character jumps", but this doesn't mean that the act of pressing 'A' resembles the act of jumping at all, it's just something we've gotten used to. The Wii Remote, however, has at least the ability to simulate a 1 to 1 correspondence between what the player is doing and what the character is doing. Everyone already knows the basic motion required to swing a baseball bat, and most people even have some experience swinging one in real life. Pressing 'A' isn't anything like swinging a bat, but swinging a remote as if it were a bat is indeed very similar to swinging a bat. The big benefit of the Wii Remote is that it has the ability to support far more intuitive controls than just pressing a button, which means it's going to be easier for more people to understand how to use the controller without being overwhelmed with trying to perform actions that have no resembalence to what they're trying to make their chracter do.

Also, #29 KR, the Famicom did indeed connect to the internet. Who's ignorant now?
http://www.n-sider.com/articleview.php?articleid=258

Ok, here’s a free game that demonstrates a few things related to all this for anyone here who’s interested:
http://www.aeonity.com/ab/download/penumbra.php
It’s first person, and all though it uses the mouse it has controls that might be well suited to the Wii controller. To open doors for instance, you have to grab them by clicking, then pull them open with the mouse. Although you can play with normal mouse look, there is also a mode were you move a pointer around the screen with a mouse and push it nearly to the edges to turn. It makes the whole pushing and pulling thing easier. Sound familiar?