In Third Person

Yesterday at the Game Developer Conference, Sony finally announced the name and some more details about their new motion controller. The controller (and sub-controller) are now known as the Playstation Move. I'm not going to go into details about how the thing works, or what games were just announced to support it, but I'll be happy to direct you to places that have that type of information.

What I wanted to do is use this announcement as a jump-off point for my current perceptions of motion control. Back in 2006, I was all aboard the motion control train. With Nintendo - my favourite game company - backing this technology, there was nothing that could go wrong, right? Wrong.

I bought my Wii on launch-day and had a blast with it. For the next few weeks that winter, every party with family and friends was a Wii party. While motion controls did bring something new to the table, Nintendo's initial stab at motion controls brought with it a number of problems.

For anyone that has played a Wii, you've figured out by now that the Wii remote doesn't translate your movements 1:1 into the game. Rather, it reads a gesture you make and then plays out the action on screen if you've done the gesture properly. What happens in most Wii games is that you end up not truly simulating the motions you try to do. Instead, the remote doesn't read your motions correctly and does something you don't want it to do, or you end up doing "short-cut motions" that work just as well as the full motion, which kills any immersion the game was supposed to provide. Flicking your wrist to throw a bowling ball works just as well as a full-body throw.

The lack of buttons, poor game translations from regular controls to "Wii" controls, games going crazy when the remote isn't pointed at the screen and a sudden shift in focus towards casual games made a lot of what the Wii was supposed to be about not that fun for me. I have tried the motion plus attachment, but having to constantly reset the controller to work properly is a pain. Within a few months of buying the Wii, I caved and bought my first non-Nintendo system since the Atari 2600 because I wanted to play games that controlled with buttons, d-pads and analog sticks. I still love me some Wii Bowling and Boom Blox, but most of my gaming time is now motion controller free.

Regardless of how I feel, the Wii has basically won this console cycle, leaving Sony and Microsoft floundering to try and capitalize on the success of motion control. Sony has taken a very "me-too" approach with the design of their Move controllers, and Microsoft is going way out in left field with the controller-free Project Natal. While they both claim to have better solutions to motion control, I have my doubts. Watching the Playstation Move in the video below only further fueled my doubts, as the person in the video punches wildly in the air and the game does nothing to respond to his movements.



I'm not even going to get into the myriad of other challenges Sony and Microsoft have specifically in trying to launch these products into the marketplace. I just want to talk about how these control mechanisms work and what it'll take for me to fully buy into them as a main form of input. I'll break it down into three key points:


1) Accuracy

In my 20+ years of gaming, I've never had problems inputting a command with a button press. The game only has to decipher whether or not the button is pressed down or not. With motion control, there are so many more variables involved, and therefore, a higher percentage of error. It's so frustrating to play games like any Wii boxing game and see your physical energy go to waste when you throw a real-life hay-maker and see that my character is standing still.

The Playstation Move looks to be better than the Wii remote, but still appears to suffer from some accuracy quirks. With the Natal, we have no idea how accurate that setup will be when it hits living rooms around the world. I know it's a lot to ask, but I will always prefer pressing a button to doing a gesture if the gesture isn't accurate enough.


2) Purpose

Very early on in the Wii's life-cycle, a lot of third-party developers thought they could cash-in on the Wii hype train by shoehorning motion controls into traditional games. Time and time again, we've seen this strategy fail miserably. Often times in the case of motion controls, developers simply substitute a button press with a gesture, which usually doesn't feel good, doesn't accurately reflect the action on the screen and takes you out of the action more than brings you in.

Motion control games need to have a clear purpose for being in the game or don't bother. Developers need to create experiences that work with the strengths and weaknesses of the interface in mind and not force the player to flail their arms to substitute a button press. Throwing a baseball at a stack of blocks in Boom Blox feels awesome. Having to draw a star on the screen to activate slow-motion in Trauma Center feels awful and makes no sense.


3) It has to feel right

While this particular point applies to all motion controllers (even you, Tony Hawk: Ride skateboard), I'm most concerned about the Natal on this one. Microsoft has hyped this up as the most natural gaming experience ever, but I don't see what's natural about flailing your limbs around to hit balls that are projected at you or driving a car by pretending to hold onto a steering wheel and pretending to hit pedals with your feet that aren't there. The big promise of motion control is the ability to give players a more realistic and immersive experience. Poor motion control implementation just feels even more awkward and out of place than any button press would.

While I am currently not much of a fan of the current implementation of motion controls in today's consoles, I'm reluctant to write them off completely. I know that motion controls are here to stay and will improve with time. By the time these things work as planned, maybe I'll warm up to them more. I'm still not sure if I'll ever be ready to let go of sitting on the couch and pushing buttons, but we'll talk about that when motion controllers finally come of age.

I'm officially 1/4 of the way through Dead Space, and there was something about the overall feel of the game that I thought was worth mentioning: the underlying sense of deja vu.

Normally, that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. And to Dead Space's credit, it does do a few good things to make the game stand out on its own, such as the emphasis on shooting limbs and everything that happens in space or low-gravity scenarios. But it's pretty clear to see that Dead Space is clearly built off of other influences.

The third-person shooting action and survival horror elements are directly lifted from Resident Evil 4. The story progression though big events or small collectibles such as audio logs came from Bioshock and Metroid Prime. Much of the space station aesthetic comes from Metroid Prime. Outside of games, Dead Space takes a ton of cues from the "Alien" series of movies.

To be fair, if you break down 99% of anything ever made, you can find all the elements that came before it to create the final product. In Dead Space though, the game doesn't try and hide where those influences came from. If anything, I really feel like they tried hard to at least match its influences in terms of quality, if not surpass them.


Throughout my experience so far, I always feel like I'm playing a mash-up of a bunch of other people's ideas. But damn, they're executed so well in Dead Space. The overall level of polish and detail so far is spot on with what I think this game should be. It's fun, very exciting and constantly scaring the pants off of me. There is a moment towards the end of chapter 3 where you encounter something that is 10 times more insane than anything you've encountered up to that point and I almost lost it. I was actually yelling at my TV and mashing buttons during a moment that required precision because I couldn't help myself.

All of the things it borrows from other games kind of makes Dead Space a more "comfortable" experience. Not in the sense of being less scary, but being able to quickly jump into this world and have fun. It's always in the back of my head that I'm not playing something wholly new, but as long as it stays this good, that's totally fine.

After playing The Lost and Damned, I wasn't sure what to expect from The Ballad of Gay Tony. While the Lost and Damned did a lot of things to separate itself from the core Grand Theft Auto experience, I don't think all of it was worth while. I really loved the characterization in The Lost and Damned, but there was a very distinct point where the focus gets taken away from the main conflict and when you finally come back to it, the conclusion doesn't give you the payoff you were hoping for. All the while, I was struggling to get re-acquainted with the Grand Theft Auto controls.

I'm currently about 8 missions into The Ballad of Gay Tony, and it's starting off on much better footing for me than The Lost and Damned did. Controls are no longer a factor with me, now that I've had the entirety of the TLAD to get used to them. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but I'm not thinking about them any more when I play. While this game is currently lacking in innovation in comparison to TLAD, where it has it beat hands down so far are the missions. The game doesn't really have any "warm up" missions and goes straight into the crazy stuff. The second mission features you hitting golf balls on a driving range into a guy tied to the vehicle that picks up golf balls. From there, it's been increasingly bombastic and awesome.

My only gripe so far with Gay Tony is the plot and the characters. The story of Luis and Tony is probably the weakest of the three GTA IV stories, even though both characters are very likable. The main story arch is built around one person having to clean up another person's mess, which kind of has been done to death in this series. This even happened in TLAD, but it was offset by a great tension between Billy and Johnny. The antagonists in TBoGT just aren't as strong.

Thankfully, Rockstar got the missions right, which is the most important part of any GTA to me. TLAD had some missions that felt almost broken in design to me, which upset me more than anything else in that game. Everything so far in Gay Tony has been smooth as butter. I can overlook a somewhat weaker story when I'm busy driving away from a biker gang, the cops, a tank and a low-flying helicopter and throwing remote sticky explosives at them all.

Back in 2008, I was very intrigued by Dead Space. After E3, the buzz going around was that it was like the evolution of Resident Evil 4. Since that game is one of my all-time favourites, Dead Space was very much on my radar. The reviews came out great and it eventually went on to sell at least enough to warrant a greatest hits re-release.

So why didn't I pick it up back then? I don't know, really. At the time, I know I was busy with Rock Band 2, Gears of War 2 and Left 4 Dead. After I was through with those games, I would always look at that box every time I went into a game store, but never acted on it. I even saw this game brand new for $10 and still didn't buy it. For whatever reason, I just kept passing it up.

That is, until this past Christmas break. Using a gift card I received, I picked up Dead Space...and let it sit on my shelf for two months while I played through Modern Warfare 2, Assassin's Creed 2, Lego Rock Band, The Lost and Damned, Borderlands and Silent Hill: Homecoming.


I'm only about half way through chapter 1, but dude...Dead Space is kind of rocking my socks. For the few of you who aren't familiar with this game, I'll give you a quick rundown. You are an engineer who has been assigned to fix this giant space station. You and your crew crash land on the space station, and quickly realize there are aliens on it. In terms of tone, mood and atmosphere, this game is very much like the movie Aliens.

What the game is currently lacking in innovation, it makes up for in polish. Even in 2010, Dead Space graphically is one of the best games out there. Audio wise, my goodness. It has some of the most amazing sound of any video game. The ambient sound really sets the tone of the game and does a great job of freaking you out to the point where you're not sure if those creepy noises are coming from the game, or something in the other room of your house. Leading up to the release, EA was hyping up how the game doesn't have a heads-up display in the traditional game sense. Instead, information such as your health and amount of ammo in your clip are displayed on the character himself and all menus are pulled up within an in-game floating "screen" that you can look around. This is supposed to keep you immersed in the game, but I would have been fine with a regular HUD. Nice touch nonetheless.

In terms of the horror elements of Dead Space, it's about on par at this point with Resident Evil 4. The "horror" you feel mainly comes from jump scares and the tension you feel when your character is physically threatened, which is a lot. If you're looking for a more psychological horror experience along the lines of Silent Hill though, then this isn't it.


The one thing that has me tripping up at this point are the controls. Granted, I've played this game for less than two hours at this point, but some elements of the layout and how they work are taking some time to adjust to. For instance, when you're not aiming your gun, the right stick acts as an independent camera control rather than controlling where your character is looking. What this means is, you can swing the camera around so that you're actually looking at the front of your character. It's weird when I try and look around from the perspective of my character using the stick and instead it moves the camera independent of the character. I'm also not a fan of left bumper acting as the run button. Having that handled by pushing in the left stick would work much better in my opinion.