Skip to main content

PlayStation Move


At last, Sony's long awaited motion controller, now at last officially known as "PlayStation Move,". Here are some of our initial thoughts:

  • The controllers are light. Much more akin to the DualShock3 than the Wiimote in heft, and we're guessing that's due to Sony's continued love of rechargeable batteries.

  • The main controller does have some subtle vibration (not DualShock or Wiimote level, but present), but we're not sure yet about the subcontroller.

  • We hate to say this about "pre-alpha" software, but we're feeling lag. An on-rails shooter we tried out, dubbed The Shoot, was discernibly inferior to shooting experiences we've had on the Wii, both in precision and refresh rate of the aiming cursor.

  • The gladiator game is about as fun as it looks, we'll have video after the break momentarily. Unfortunately, while it's less of a defined experience than something like the sword game on Wii Sports Resort, you're still working through a library of sensed, pre-defined actions instead of a true 1:1 fighting game with simulated physics. Not that it isn't possible with PlayStation Move, just that it's not this.

  • The lightness of the controllers means we might be feeling less of that Wiimote fatigue, always a good thing! There's an aspect of the controller that feels a little cheap, but at the same time we wouldn't call it fragile.

  • As far as we can tell, the control scheme for Socom 4 is quite similar to dual-controller shooter setups on the Wii, with the camera moving based on your aiming cursor hitting the edge. It's hard to see this as the preferred hardcore setup, but we're told it's configurable, so we'll try and see what else is on offer.

  • The system seemed to have a bit of trouble understanding the configuration of our body in a swordfighting stance: even though we selected "left handed," it was putting our sword arm forward instead of our shield. Right-handers didn't seem to have similar problems, and we're sure this will be ironed out in time, but it certainly shows that the controllers aren't magical in their space-detection prowess.

  • As would be expected, you're supposed to stand relatively center on the TV, and at a certain optimal distance. The system is forgiving, but there's a sweet spot that users will undoubtedly have to learn.

  • Lag is less prominent on Socom 4, and we'd say we're pretty accurate with the controller already, though the framerate choppiness of this pre-alpha build obviously hampers that a bit. We did get a slight feel of being in "scene to scene" shootouts instead of a free-roaming FPS, perhaps a design choice to mitigate the limited camera movement offered by the controller, but we'll have to see more levels to know for sure.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hands-on with Mozilla’s Web-based “Firefox OS” for smartphones

Launching a new mobile OS is a difficult project since the market leaders, Android and iOS, have such  a big lead. Even Microsoft, with its near-infinite financial resources and vast ecosystem of complementary products, has struggled to gain traction. And new entrants face a chicken-and-egg problem: developers don't want to write apps for a platform without many users, while users don't want to buy a phone without many apps. Mozilla, the non-profit foundation behind Firefox, believes it can tackle this dilemma. In 2011, it announced a new project  called Boot2Gecko to build an operating system around its browser. Last year the project was  re-branded Firefox OS, and Mozilla began preparations for a major push into the mobile phone market. In February, Mozilla  unveiled an impressive initial list  of hardware and network partners. If all goes according to plan, Firefox OS phones will be available in a number of countries, mostly in the developing world, la...
Post a Comment
Read more

Google leaps language barrier with translator phone

GOOGLE is developing software for the first phone capable of translating foreign languages almost instantly — like the Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. By building on existing technologies in voice recognition and automatic translation, Google hopes to have a basic system ready within a couple of years. If it works, it could eventually transform communication among speakers of the world’s 6,000-plus languages. The company has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google also has a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller’s voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign ...
1 comment
Read more