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September 25, 2005

Buy Something Nintendo

Will you go out and buy a Nintendo Gameboy SP or Gameboy Micro now?

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September 23, 2005

Pop My Bubbles PS2

The giant electronic beast known as Sony is sometimes viewed as a lumbering giant - a sleeping dragon desperate to recapture it's glory days. As with most large corporations, as you grow, you become more fragmented and no matter how large you are, eventually all those micro cracks will get to you.

However, there is still one bright spot in Sony; it's advertising, especially for it's Playstation division. Exhibit A, the bus stop terminal. It looks normal enough. A giant blue awning with the Sony and PS2 brand names emblazoned each corner. So what makes this special? Check this shit out.

The whole wall is covered in bubble wrap. A large wallpaper of the 4 geometric shapes found on Sony controllers. I think it's brilliant. Who can RESIST popping bubble wrap? There's something relaxing and addicting about the activity. I wouldn't be surprised if a few people missed their ride while preoccupied with popping each and every bubble. It's maddening I tell ya, impossible to resist! MUST POP THE BUBBLES!

Posted by tranism at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | | |

September 15, 2005

This is the Revolution, Nintendo Style

So there it is, Nintendo finally revealed it's enigmatic controller for it's next generation video game console. As the news is a buzz with the imminent release of the Microsoft Xbox360, Nintendo managed to steal some of it's thunder during the Tokyo Game Show - the largest game conference in Asia.

After months of speculation, fan made concept drawings, dissing and hissing - Nintendo reveals just why it has named it's next console "Revolution", because it truly is one.

more after the jump

At first glance, you'd be hard pressed to believe that there is anything revolutionary here. The controller looks like a typical t.v. remote, but look closer and you'll see the revolutionary aspect comes from how you play; in fact, this could change the way we play video games forever.

Before I go into the controller, let me re-cap what I know about the console. First off, ITS TINY. While the Playstion 3 and Xbox360 are beasts in size and power, Nintendo has opted for a smaller compact form factor. The trade off is it might not be as powerful, but Nintendo is compensating by focusing more on innovative and unique gameplay as opposed to raw horsepower and graphics. The Revolution will also have free wireless access allowing you to play nearly 20 years of Nintendo games. You heard right, if ever you wanted to be a little nostalgic and play the original Donkey Kong or Super Mario Bros., the Revolution is for you.

Now on to the controller; it's essentially a wireless, square remote that works like a computer mouse would in three dimensional space. Imagine sticking your hand into a virtual box and having your TV understand how it's moving in there.

Main Controller Features

• 3D Pointing - Sensors understand up, down, left, right, forward and backward.
• Tilt Sensitive - Controller can be rotated or rolled from side to side using internal gyroscopes.
• Buttons - Has a trigger on it's backside, face buttons, and a D-Pad.
• Multifunctional - Has an expansion port which can be used with different types of controller peripherals. For example, an analog stick with two trigger buttons.
• Wireless - Totally wireless.
• Rumble built in - provide vibration and tactile feedback to enhance gaming sensation.

Demo #1: Point and Shoot
Like a laser pointer, the main controller was used to move a simple cursor on the TV screen and shoot square blocks for points. It was simple, merely colored lines in 2D, but effective. It was easy to get a feel for just how sensitive the device is -- it responded to all the movements quickly and smoothly. We did feel the need to use two hands, however, to steady it and improve accuracy, but that only lends to the idea of just how sensitive it is.

Demo #2: Fishing
Much more advanced than just a simple cursor, this revealed how the controller can navigate a 3D space, moving an object on the TV screen not only left, right, up, and down, but also forward and backwards with depth. Users simply use the hand cursor on the screen to pick up a fishing pole and dip its line into a pond full of fish. Like nearly all of the demos, this was very crude, so don't go imaging even fishing on the Ocarina of Time level -- this was like a coloring book with flat fish in the water. The visual medium wasn't the point, though. It was pretty intuitive to just reach forward with our virtual hand, pick up the rod, and then dip the hook into the pond and dangle it there. When a fish finally bit, the remote rumbled, which was the cue to tug back on the controller to catch it. As it was only a prototype controller, it was wired because rumble was not in the wireless versions yet.

Demo #3: Shock Stick
Like the first, this was to show how you can point and move something. It was a bit like the board game Operation, only instead of navigating tweezers you navigated a rotating stick through a two-dimensional cave. The skill was to keep a steady hand, collect coins, and don't hit the walls. Small springboards on the side would change the direction of the spin of the stick, which aided in creating a strategy for navigating around things.

Demo #4: Air Hockey
This blended basic pointing with something new: twisting. As you might imagine, players hit a puck back and forth by maneuvering their "hockey sticks" with the controller. The catch was that by twisting your wrist, left or right, you could angle the stick to send the puck in another direction. Twisting, in addition to hitting was actually pretty difficult in this demo. It worked to a point, but it also lacked the intuitiveness that a real table would have. It seemed mainly aimed at familiarizing us with the notion of twisting the remote to turn things.

Demo #5: Basketball
Again, this focused on laser pointer style controls. The game was to simply move a basketball around on the court, not by bouncing it, but instead dragging it by pressing the B-trigger in back of the remote to create an indent. The ball rolled into the crevice, and you could drag it towards the hoops. Then, with the A-button, you could reverse the indent, creating a hill and pop the ball upwards toward the hoop. It was a simple two-player game, but worked to show off the sensitivity of the cursor and how it was interacting with another player in the same space. Surprisingly, it was easy to keep track of where you were on the court, allowing for blocks and steals.

Demo #6: Toy Plane
Set in the watery hub of Mario Sunshine, this demonstrated that not all controls are created equal. The remote could be held like a toy airplane, fingertips support its base, which allowed the player to tilt it forwards to dip down, back to gain elevation, and twisted left or right turn. The objective was just to steer the plane through rings in the sky. Of course the first thing that came to mind was Pilotwings, so it's easy to see how these simple applications of the controller could be grown into something more complex. It was pretty intuitive to pull off dips and quick turns. Miyamoto joked that you could have a controller peripheral shaped like a toy plane to really make it interesting.

Demo #7: Where's Pikachu?
One of the crudest demos, the screen displayed a flat map with many Pokemon characters crowded together on it. It was a spoof on Where's Waldo, the famous find-the-needle-in-the-haystack illustrated book. The controller lent the ability to look left and right by just pointing the cursor across the map, but also zooming in by moving towards the screen (or zooming back out by moving away). One can imagine how a sniper rifle in a first-person shooter might take advantage of those kinds of controls.

Demo 8: First Person Shooting
For the final demo, the one that most represented how a game might feel with the Revolution controller, Nintendo displayed what was apparently a test by the team at Retro Studios for what they could do with Metroid Prime 3. They stressed it was just a test, quickly thrown together in just a few weeks. For this, the analog control stick peripheral was used. We held it in our left hand to control the forwards, backwards, and side-strafing motions, as well as having access to triggers in back for scanning; meanwhile, the right hand used the main Revolution remote control to behave just like a mouse on a personal computer. It was a very natural application and felt pretty smooth, but since it wasn't a polished game it did feel a bit awkward at times, making us wonder what kind of things a developer could do to calibrate these kinds of controls for users. Nonetheless, the potential is huge for the FPS genre.

It's easy to imagine why Nintendo is so heavily invested in the idea. There is such great potential to do so many unique things. Playing a real-time strategy game like Starcraft would be extremely fluid and intuitive. Mario Party, we're sure you can guess, will finally be a completely new experience. What of Zelda or Mario? No word yet, but imagine swinging your sword in Zelda instead of pressing buttons. Or, in Mario, imagine having to grab blocks and build platforms. Also, since the controller flips on its side to work very much like a NES pad, it would be interesting to mix up gameplay and throw in an old-school challenge. From what I've seen, the Nintendo Revolution could quite possible tap into new markets and expand the current one even further by making games that are controlled intuitively - games anyone can play.

From a market standpoint, Nintendo is in a good place. Most households have more that one console. While Sony and Microsoft battle out who is king in the living room, Nintendo would fare well as the "second" console with games the other two systems can never have. It is true, it's not about raw power, uber-realistic graphics, or media centric machines. It's about making an affordable machine, with graphics that are on-par, innovative interfaces for unique and one of a kind gaming. I suspect, Nintendo is on the right track after being lost for so many years. The Nintendo Revolution isn't expected until early next year. I can't wait!.

credit to IGN

Posted by tranism at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | | |