Natal v Move

Natal has one massive advantage and one massive disadvantage. The first being that it's a single 3D camera (was interesting to listen to Richard Marks' thoughts on 3D cameras in that Engadget show . he's been working with this type of thing for almost ten years), that's it, nothing else to buy, even for multiple players. The second being that I've yet to see it work, and I don't think that it's accurate enough to track everything, the XB360 simply doesn't have the CPU ummmff! Another problem is the lack of buttons, I don't think that you can gesture everything. The trouble with the Move is that for every player, you need another controller, so there is cost involved not to mention bits of plastic all over the show.
 
There is not that much stopping Move from doing Natal stuff apart from software and the 3Dness of the camera, a lot of it they already did on the PS2 with the EyeToy. The inventor of that has said that when investigating 3D cameras, they made the things that they were doing with EyeToy more robust. I think that it's easy to forget that Move uses a camera and a microphone also.
 
So I'm relaxing on a couch in a high-rise suite as a developer offers me a glimpse of its new game, still unannounced but very exciting. We get to talking about Sony's motion controller, recently unveiled. I played with it at publisher's event and as something of a Wii veteran with a firm understanding of how pointer and gestural controls work and how games should feel when they are properly finessed. I'm not impressed, I say. PS3 Move features almost no latency -- just one frame -- but that paper truth didn't seem to translate to reality as I played with the controller at Sony's event. Most of the stuff played like first-generation Wii efforts from third-parties.

Obviously, I'm not making games and I'm sure some software creators will note that with the roll of the eyes and claim that it's all too easy for me to bitch and moan from the backseat, or the sidelines, as it were. But playing the armchair role for a minute, it seems an unavoidable conclusion to me that Sony should have at least examined the very best genre-leaders on Nintendo's platform and then duplicated if not surpassed them with its own Move-controlled experiences. For instance, Medal of Honor, The Conduit and Red Steel 2 offer fantastic controls for first-person shooters. Anything less than these will be considered substandard by the informed masses -- at least those with knowledge of Wii's library. Unfortunately, Move doesn't yet compete. The company's shooter feels laggy and unresponsive as I attempt to gun down robotic targets. The boxing game is not one-to-one, but gestural-based, and slow. Nearly everything feels redone, but somehow half-baked.

The exceptions are the augmented reality games, which project gameplay graphics onto real-time views of players using Sony's camera. These are all flimsy affairs -- mini-games of the sort that sold Wii consoles three years ago, but as I watch people having fun while they shave the heads of goofy virtual monsters, I can't help but think how much my kids are going to love this stuff. It's fluffy, sure, but families will eat it up and there's just enough freshness that critics like me can't say that Sony copied Nintendo, at least not blatantly. Just as importantly, it's responsive and it feels good.

Move's hardware is more than competent and there's certainly a lot of potential, but most of it remained untapped at the event. This opinion is seconded by the developer, which is working closely with the device. They tell me that they believe it will ultimately outperform the Wii remote in responsiveness and say that their own tests are already proving that true. I ask if there is the kind of lag I experienced at Sony's demo and they say no, that it's very fast and reliable when programmed correctly. They add that it still has some calibration issues like the Wii remote, but that it's still an improvement.

Natal, though -- the motion offering from Microsoft -- not so much. The same studio rep calls Natal a big, buggy mess. "It's sh*t," he adds, saying that it just doesn't work as promised. That it's slow and that the camera is imprecise, which he notes, is causing some major development woes.

He refers to a development conference Microsoft held not so long ago in which Peter Molyneux of Fable fame (presently, creative director at Microsoft Game Studios) took the stage and attempted to demo the publisher's much-publicized Milo Natal project. Molyneux apparently called someone from the audience to the stage and asked them to interact with the virtual boy, but it didn't go to plan. Natal's camera failed to see the person accurately because he was wearing a black trench coat. After some fiddling, he was asked to remove his trench coat and -- whoops -- wore a black shirt underneath. When it still didn't work, he was invited to take his seat again.

Next, Molyneux said that Milo could interact with illustrations drawn to paper and scanned by the camera. He asked the audience for suggestions. "You could see him cocking his head and listening for the right key words, and then finally he heard something the game would recognize," my development source explains. It was a cat. So he invited someone from the audience to ascend the steps to the stage and illustrate the feline on paper. When Natal attempted to scan the horribly scribbled drawing, it instead picked up the Abercrombie & Fitch logo on the person's sweater.

I laugh at this but try to play devil's advocate. Okay, I say, so it's obvious you're not a fan, but somebody must be getting this thing to work well or it wouldn't be on the slate to ship this year. I ask if he knows of any other studios struggling with Natal.

"How about Rare and Lionhead? They're just going to try to make launch and then they're going to patch everything later," he says, laughing.

I'm very interested in the platform, but I haven't entrenched myself in Natal development. Later, when I bump into a colleague, I ask them if they have heard any behind-the-scenes rumblings about development trouble with Microsoft's casual entry device. He turns to me and says that yes, he has -- that studios are telling him they're struggling to get it working.
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I came across this a few weeks ago, and your thread reminded me. I think the bloke is an editor at IGN for Nintendo, the article continues to talk about what a good job Nintendo did at launching the whole motion control thing a few years before anyone else. Here's the link:

GDC Raw: One Man's Account - PS3 Feature at IGN
 
Elvis posted this thread I think in response to my postings last night in this thread:

https://www.redcafe.net/f27/analyst-sony-ps3-win-wii-second-360-die-slow-death-288248/

From post 37 on. It's a shame that the whole video is not on YouTube or even the Web yet, as they talked with Dr Marks quite a bit about the history of what he's been doing. I have a copy of it, but it's not on the web, and the torrent is now dead. However, he was very praiseworthy of Nintendo, and when asked why Sony held back, it was mostly to do with the gyroscopes - now in Motion Plus. Anyway, Move has latency of 22ms according to Dr Marks.
 
WeasteDevil said:
How the hell is it a Wii copy? He's been fecking about with this for 10 years.
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the thing is that nintendo popularized it.

i think you remember this:

Zapper.jpg
 
It's a light gun. I had a light pen for my C64. They can't work with flat panel displays though. ;)

In any case, your idea of what Wii is seems rather of track - do you really think that the Wiimote is a simple pointing device? It's not just a pointer on the screen, and Nintendo didn't popularise that either - how many copies of Duck Hunt were sold exactly? Devices to point at the screen have appeared on many platforms over the years, but Wii isn't a simple pointer. If anything, Nintendo saw what the EyeToy did and said "Eye Too".
 
Wiki says that:

The Wii Remote can be seen as a successor to this technology, and it can be used relatively accurately with CRT, LCD, plasma, and projection screens. Like the NES Zapper, it is "bundled" with the system, but unlike traditional light guns, the Wii Remote serves as a primary controller. If coupled with the Nunchuk attachment, the Wii Remote allows for a potentially seamless union between first-person shooter gameplay and "light gun" implementation

so the light gun was a predecessor (Nintendo), then wii (nintendo) , then move (ps).

am i right ?
 
The PS3 Move looks virtually the same as the Wii remote, the internals probably differ, but as for its form factor it is pretty much a carbon copy with a bulb at the top and a PS3 logo.

What was deemed as novelty will now likely too be seen as "cool".
 
Frans said:
Wiki says that:

The Wii Remote can be seen as a successor to this technology, and it can be used relatively accurately with CRT, LCD, plasma, and projection screens. Like the NES Zapper, it is "bundled" with the system, but unlike traditional light guns, the Wii Remote serves as a primary controller. If coupled with the Nunchuk attachment, the Wii Remote allows for a potentially seamless union between first-person shooter gameplay and "light gun" implementation

so the light gun was a predecessor (Nintendo), then wii (nintendo) , then move (ps).

am i right ?
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The Power Glove would be more a Wii predecessor IMO.
 
starman said:
The PS3 Move looks virtually the same as the Wii remote, the internals probably differ, but as for its form factor it is pretty much a carbon copy with a bulb at the top and a PS3 logo.
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Like a remote control you mean? What do you expect it to look like, a banana? I'm sure that Nintendo did not invent the remote control.

starman said:
What was deemed as novelty will now likely too be seen as "cool".
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What some of us see as a novelty is not the form factor or use of the controller itself, but rather 90%+ of the software that uses it.
 
Frans said:
Wiki says that:

The Wii Remote can be seen as a successor to this technology, and it can be used relatively accurately with CRT, LCD, plasma, and projection screens. Like the NES Zapper, it is "bundled" with the system, but unlike traditional light guns, the Wii Remote serves as a primary controller. If coupled with the Nunchuk attachment, the Wii Remote allows for a potentially seamless union between first-person shooter gameplay and "light gun" implementation

so the light gun was a predecessor (Nintendo), then wii (nintendo) , then move (ps).

am i right ?
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Well, that's someone's opinion rather than a fact, but I suppose that they get around it using "can be seen". A light gun is a simple pointing device, the Wiimote is not.
 
Either way, IMO both Move and Natal are doomed to fail, as they are not the standard de-facto control schemes on their relative consoles, they are add-on peripherals. So, unless they can come up with some form of mega-hit selling 5+ million copies, there will never be enough of them out in the wild to make it worthwhile for third parties to become really inventive with the technologies. It's rumoured also that Microsoft has told developers that they will not accept ports of Wii games either.
 
If Natal works properly it could be something brilliant, but that's a big if. But you would surely not be able to play many "normal" games on it though. Call of Duty without any buttons?

It seems more of a gimic to get through the main menu's and play mini-games rather than play proper games itself. At least with Move and the Wii you can play ordinary games as well thanks to the magical use of buttons.

And i refuse to believe that the driving game would work properly with that many people around the "driver" moving about.
 
Move is like Wiii

Natal is like the eye-toy...

They are both shit and I play games because i like to sit on my arse and use a control, I dont play games to run around the house.
 
Xander45 said:
If Natal works properly it could be something brilliant, but that's a big if. But you would surely not be able to play many "normal" games on it though. Call of Duty without any buttons?

It seems more of a gimic to get through the main menu's and play mini-games rather than play proper games itself. At least with Move and the Wii you can play ordinary games as well thanks to the magical use of buttons.

And i refuse to believe that the driving game would work properly with that many people around the "driver" moving about.
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How in an FPS would you turn, move forward, move sideways, move backwards?

As for the driving, they sort of quickly patched Burnout Paradise, and then let someone have a go at it, this infamous GIF was the result:

3947809131_0c50c3a842_o.gif


I think that with work it obviously wouldn't happen, but it looks from that as if at some point it confused the two hands (basically the left became the right and right became the left) thus making the car go the opposite way.
 
Christofaux said:
Move is like Wiii

Natal is like the eye-toy...

They are both shit and I play games because i like to sit on my arse and use a control, I dont play games to run around the house.
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In theory, with both, as with the Wiimote, you should be able to sit down and use it. What is stopping the Wii running an FPS with the nunchuck for player movement and the Wiimote for pointing the gun? You just sit on the sofa.
 
They've finally put it up to watch.

The Engadget Show - 007: Nicholas Negroponte, PlayStation Move exclusive demos, Dr. Richard Marks, Joystiq's Chris Grant, and more! -- Engadget

If you are interested in the whole concept and history of motion control/gaming, the interview with Richard Marks starts around 43 minutes in. It might help those that think that Move is a Wii copy not look so silly.

For people interested in tech in general, watch the whole thing, it starts with an interview with Negroponte.

Some more:

PlayStation Move bonus round: Move Party hands-on and interview with Anton Mikhailov -- Engadget

PlayStation Move's Minority Report Controls In Action - playstation move - Kotaku
 
Project Natal needs 13 feet of free space


Natal requires you to have thirteen feet of free space to play in your lounge
Microsoft has revealed that you will need 13 feet of free space in your lounge to properly play Project Natal games.

That's four metres. Of space in your lounge. Not taking into account sofas and coffee tables and bookcases and chairs and other encumberants that might get in the way of you pretending to play a virtual game of tennis on your TV.

If you need to visualise this, four metres is around the average length of a standard family saloon car. Which is, on average, more space than most Brits (and Japanese) have available in their living rooms.

Four metre rule

The latest finding on Natal's requirements comes directly from Techflash, which claims the 'four metre' comment was made at a press event led by Microsoft Xbox division's Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie.

"To be precise, you'll want to clear an area extending at least 4 meters (a little more than 13 feet) away from the television. That's the back edge of the space to be taken into account by the Natal sensors," Techflash reports Mundie as saying.

"In terms of width and height, the field of vision naturally expands as it moves from the Natal device to that back edge, ending up a little more than 4 meters wide and 2.7 meters high (about 8 feet, 10 inches)."

We don't know many Brits with that amount of free space in their lounges, particularly amongst city-dwellers. Also, Japanese gamers (admittedly not the fastest Xbox 360-adopting population in the world) have even less free space in their living rooms that their British counter-parts.

Could the space issue be an area in which Natal might fail to take hold in Europe and Japan? It would certainly seem strange if Microsoft has not taken this into account…

Project Natal needs 13 feet of free space | News | TechRadar UK
 
Surely, the 4m thing is how far you need to be away for tracking the whole body, for example that mad ball kicking and punching thing that they showed last E3, where it needs to see your arms stretched in the air and your feet at the same time? True though, for that type of game, most people don't have that amount of space.
 
looks like a sex toy

great object to have lying around in any living room
 
WeasteDevil said:
In theory, with both, as with the Wiimote, you should be able to sit down and use it. What is stopping the Wii running an FPS with the nunchuck for player movement and the Wiimote for pointing the gun? You just sit on the sofa.
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Im still moving my arms around like a retard.

Not for me i guess.
 
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