As of this moment, they’re just porting the first game, complete with new control scheme. According to Interplay CEO Hervé Caen:

Descent will pair perfectly with the motion sensing Wii Remote controller and we can’t wait to show players how intuitive the game play and control can be.

I guarantee if this sells more than a few thousand copies, they’ll move on to Descent II and Descent 3, which is my favorite. I have it installed right now, in fact. There’s a revelatory feeling unique to Descent when you really get your bearings and think “wait, the objective should be up this hatch and behind me” and promptly do a loop-de-loop without losing your place or your lunch.

Look for it later this year, around fall.

There are a number of questions out there. How will the 3D be effected? Will it be faux-3D, as Kotaku wonders? Will it be lenticular lens technology, used for (eye-breaking) glasses-less 3D TVs? After all, the Wii is something less than the perfect 1:1 movement detection they wanted us to think it was. Even the newest motion control technologies are barely approaching that level. Will Nintendo just give us a “good enough” version of 3D?

We’ll find out for sure in June, and I’m guessing it’s not going to actually blow everyone’s minds. I mean, you can play tons of games in 3D right now with the right hardware, and it seems likely that the traditional control scheme (analog stick and buttons) is going to make for rather traditional games. You can’t snatch coins out of the air with your hand, or have Mario mimic your limbs’ positions exactly.

But remember when the DS came out, and everyone said the second screen was just going to be an anchor around the neck of developers? All they wanted was more power, like the PSP, people said. A second screen, who can even think of a use for it? Well, a hundred million units later, I think we ought to have a little faith in both Nintendo and the developers. Off the top of my head, I can think about a few uses for 3D in a single-player, small-screen device, but I’m guessing that there are developers out there covering whiteboard after whiteboard with sweet handheld 3D concepts. Don’t forget, you’ve got the cameras on there, too.

Nintendo is very picky about its hardware, too. The reason, I feel, why they are behind in terms of graphics, is like the reason of the Luddites: it’s not that they don’t like or want technology, but they want to weigh its potential fully before adopting it. So it is with Nintendo, who will I’m sure eventually make possible the photorealistic graphics of the 360 and PS3, but in the meantime seems to be doing just fine with the, let’s be honest, rather meager capabilities of the Wii and DSi. Likewise with the motion control system: they were pitched with the progenitor for Project Natal, and deemed it not ready for prime time, which three years ago it certainly was not (and which remains to be seen). They may have improved the Wiimote with the MotionPlus add-on, but the motion control fidelity on the Wii has been good enough to sell like hotcakes, and I’m guessing that’s about the level they’re aiming for with the 3DS.

So whatever technology it uses (and we all know it will be mocked by fanboys no matter what), we know it is at least approved by a couple guys who probably know pretty well what’s good and what isn’t. They led the charge on motion control, and now they’re starting up the “only in 3D” variety of development. And you better believe there’s going to throw a bitching Mario game into the deal. Get excited.

In some ways, this does seem like the logical evolution of the series: blending its 2D roots with some of the innovations of the Prime saga. Hopefully, they can pull it off. But I have one request: Please, Metroid Other M, tell me mid-game if I haven’t done or explored enough to get a good ending. I can’t invest another 20 hours in a Metroid game just to see the back of Samus for 0.37 seconds and then watch the credits roll.

Oh boy, I love where EA Sports is going with this. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11, due out in June, will feature something called “True View,” which allows you to hit your in-game golf shots from a real-life, top-down point of view. When coupled with the Wii MotionPlus accessory, “It works extremely well,” according to IGN.

Here’s more:

The game features a mode called “True View” that lets you swing through the eyes of your golfer. Activate this mode and point the Wii remote downwards, and the game camera will whisk to the perspective of your character. As you look down at your ball, you aim at the “zero point” on the ground to drive, chip or putt using the incredible accuracy of the Wii MotionPlus-enhanced Wii remote. You can see the subtle movements represented on screen as your club follows all the rocking and twisting you’re giving your “club.”

You can play the old fashioned way as well but if you’re a golfer in real life, it’s probably going to be hard to resist using the True View control scheme. I’m already thinking of ways to just lay my TV flat down on the floor. Might as well go all the way, right?

GDC10: Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf 11 Hands-on [IGN.com]

Similar technology may become mainstream soon actually. Argo Medical Technologies in Israel is currently holding US trials for its ReWalk. That’s a exoskeleton that allows people who are paralyzed from the waist down to use their legs again. Users may not be able to control these mechanical leg supports with their minds, but the crutch-based control scheme looks pratical enough—but unfortunately requiring full upper body function as well (sorry quadriplegics).

The American trials currently involve 14 people, all walking around with a setup that detects upper body movement through shoulder sensors, and moves the legs based on these signals. The battery lasts for 3 hours if used continuously, while Argo Medical is shooting for a public release by the end of the year (pending FDA approval of course). No word yet on the planned price, nor any potential plans by the robotic overlords to get the paralyzed on their side.

Source

Post from: The Gadget Blog

So EA is bringing FIFA Online to Western countries. It’s been available in Asia for a couple years now, and players from other parts of the world will get to join in on the fun. Oh, the game: it’s a free, online version of FIFA that you play on your PC.

The game, currently based on the FIFA 07 engine, but will be bumped up to FIFA 10, goes into open beta in June, just in time for the World Cup in South Africa, which Spain will win.

It’s kinda like an entry-level version of EA’s popular football game. So entry-level, in fact, that there’s a mouse-control scheme that eliminates the need for a proper controller. (I can’t even imagine playing the game with a keyboard.)

I’m a Pro Evolution Soccer man myself, so excuse my lack of enthusiasm. And even then, you can only play so many matches in a row before you’re like, “Eh, sandwich time.”

Oh, look, I’m taking a single remark from a lengthy interview and making an entire post about it. It concerns Blizzard, the famed developer of World of Warcraft and Diablo. You may think of Blizzard as a PC developer, but that ignores games like The Lost Vikings. Anyhow, Blizzard has said in an interview with Gamasutra, which always does good stuff, that it is not averse to making a console game in the future, just that it needs to be the right game.

An RTS like StarCraft II? That’s probably not the right game: have you tried to play an RTS on a console? Even if a developer pulls it off, as pretty much happened with Halo Wars, compare that to a a proper mouse and keyboard control scheme. It’s almost not even worth the effort to re-invent the wheel like that.

What about an MMO, like You Know What? Again, it’s so crazy to think that you can effectively take a mouse and keyboard and map it over to a controller for such a game. Look at how many buttons this mouse has, and even then it takes a while to get used to it.

As for being so damn pro-PC:

It’s obviously because we’ve made only PC games for the last 15 years, but there’s a perception, I think, that Blizzard is anti-console, and that’s absolutely not the case. We just want to make the right game for the right platform. Think about StarCraft II. Some real-time strategy games have tried to happen on the console. Some of those have been successful, but overall, our experience is that it’s going to be a better game on the PC, ergo it’s developed on the PC.

So it’s not that Blizzard hates your PS3 or Xbox 360, just that its current big games are so PC that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense trying to pigeon-hole those onto consoles.

via Fudzilla

Does anyone seriously think that Nintendo is not building a high-def capable system? You can’t even buy a SD TV larger than 20 inches anymore. Reggie probably told the truth when he said “there is no Wii HD” as it’s probably not named Wii HD, but there has to be some sort of high-def gaming system in the works. If there isn’t, Nintendo is in trouble.

Nintendo made the right decision to make the original Wii not powerful enough to run HD graphics and therefore less expensive. It became an instant success because of not only the novel motion controller and easy-to-like bundled game, but also the relatively low starting price of $250 when compared to the Xbox 360 and PS3. If Nintendo had built a more powerful system, one of those points would have given way and events might have been a tad different.

Plus, back when the Wii came out, HDTVs were still a luxury. They were only available in larger sizes and a higher prices. Now tube TVs are all but gone and increasingly small LCDs are reaching 720p resolutions. By next year, 1080p will probably be the standard resolution for 32-inch or larger screens and every TV will be at least 720p; Nintendo will need to put out a system accordingly.

Of course this next-generation system will employ a motion control scheme. It’s not like Nintendo is going to take a step backwards. This system might not be called the Wii HD, but it’ll follow the Wii philosophy and be high-definition.

Even if Nintendo outs a system next year that’s as powerful and cheap as a nettop today, it will be able to handle at least 720p graphics with a good graphics driver. Nintendo has proved that gameplay and accessibility are more important in the marketplace than graphics, but as time passes and more households upgrade to high definition, it’s becoming the standard, and Nintendo will have to work within those parameters.

Reggie would never tell us a lie. He’s not like that. However, you can bet that Nintendo is working on a low-cost, but also high-def capable, Wii successor as we speak.

It’s unusual playing Tekken on anything but a Sony system. (I’m not counting Tekken Advance for the GameBoy Advance, and neither should you.) And yet here I am with Tekken 6 on the Xbox 360, using the same combos, with the same characters (that would be Bryan Fury and Law, if you’ll allow me to consider Forrest Law and Marshall Law the same character because, really, they are), as I did back in 1998 with Tekken 3. I still can’t make heads or tails of the story, and I’m still fighting pandas and tree-men, but then that’s Tekken for you.

The other unusual thing is how other fighters have passed Tekken by over the years. It’s safe to say that Soulcalibur is now the premier Namco fighter, and it was Sega’s Virtua Fighter, once its ideological rival, that first showed us, three years ago, what a next-gen (well, you know what I mean) fighter should be. (Man I use a lot of commas. Sorry.) Tekken 6 tries to right many wrongs; it mostly succeeds, but it’s asking a lot to dethrone Street Fighter IV as this year’s best fighter.

Tekken veterans will feel right at home, even if the last game you played was Tekken 3, which I have a feeling is going to be the case for many of you. (I actually just received an e-mail that says that Namco has already shipped some 2.5 million copies of the game since its release.) It uses the same control scheme as its predecessors, with each face button controlling a limb, and leaving you to juggle your friend in the air until he punches you in the face in real life. The frame rate, at least offline, never misses a beat, so people who play fighting games to the extent that they calculate frame data shouldn’t be too concerned.

(Breathless rant: this game, even so more than Street Fighter IV, shows how terrible the standard Xbox 360 controller is for fighting games. I just ordered that MadCatz controller from Amazon because I was tired of the absolute piece of junk that Microsoft thinks is a D-Pad. Know that there’s also that bundle that includes the Hori fight stick, but I’m not exactly made of $140 game bundles.)

Online is another story, or at least it can be. I played a good number of matches online (we’re talking hours here… I really don’t have a life, to clear up any misconceptions that you may have), and the few times that the connection wasn’t up to par the game was unplayable. Whereas Street Fighter IV handled rubbish connections by stuttering like a car with bad gas that “knocks,” Tekken 6 slows down, like you’re playing underwater. It totally kills off the fight when it happens, but I can’t sit here and say it happened too frequently. (Maybe the gentleman who wrote the 1UP review, which really hammered the game’s netcode, has a rubbish Internet connection?) Just know that the game isn’t immune to the occasional ruined online matchup. That’s physics for you.

The online match-ups seemed fair, too. I jumped right into a ranked match after running though Arcade Mode once with Law, meaning that my kyu—sort of a ranking the game assigns you to signify your skill level—had only been bumped up twice. Once online, I was paired with people who were just as good (or bad, as it were!) as I was, and we proceeded to go the distance, all the way to round five, more often than not.

You’re not going to hop online and be destroyed right out of the box.

There are several offline modes. The main one that I figure most of you will play as soon as you open the box is good ol’ Arcade Mode, and it’s exactly as you’d suspect. I should note that all the characters, and there are 40 of them, are unlocked right from the word “go,” so you don’t have to beat Arcade Mode five times just to fight as Anna Williams, pictured below dressed like a Bond Girl. (Never mind that Zafinais a dead-ringer for the Bond Girl in Casino Royale, Vesper. Just sayin’.)

(Exciting trivia: the woman who provides the voice for Anna is Pride FC’s former announcer, and the current Dream announcer, Lenne Hardt. You know, the woman who screams, like a banshee, every fighter’s name as he makes his way to the ring. She’s absolutely fantastic, and God almighty do I miss Pride. Dream tries so hard, but it just isn’t the same. None of you have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?)

There’s another offline mode, called Scenario Campaign, and it’s a bit like Tekken Force mode from Tekken 3. It can best be described as a 3D beat-em-up, and will no doubt prove divisive. Personally, I have no time for beat-em-ups, as I’m of the opinion that they peaked with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time. You go around… beating up baddies. I’d be lying if I told you the story was coherent, but, frankly, we don’t play Tekken for the story, now do we? You get the feeling that Namco thinks it can’t “merely” release a port of the arcade game, so it goes ahead and adds this mode. There’s no point in complaining about it, since it doesn’t seem to have distracted the developers from making the core gameplay top-notch.

I suspect that in 2009 (nearly 2010!) the vast majority of hours will be sunk into online ranked matches, as it should be.

So, is she worth taking home to mom and dad? Yes. Do I expect to see it top all the end-of-the-year lists that’ll be coming out soon as the best fighting game of the year? Let’s be honest: those honors belong to Street Fighter IV this year, if for no other reason that we waited years for Capcom to tack on a IV to the Street Fighter name. Nostalgia’s a cheap fighter.

Get ready for a lot more of this

1up just had a little developer roundtable about the upcoming motion controllers (and, uh, the “leading brand” as well). While these guys are bound by diplomacy not to say stuff like “Sony is rubbish” or “Nintendo is going down,” they do make their feelings felt in slightly more polite terms. The consensus seems to be that each has its own strengths (I know, boring) and that innovation is going to be slow in coming.

After all, the first concern is selling units, and the truly innovative stuff happens after games and gamers have been observed. Even something like Super Mario 64, which certainly innovated in 3D platforming, built on other, earlier 3D or semi-3D games. The developers think you’ll see a lot of game+ releases, like say Tony Hawk with some extra functionality built-in, before you get games that are really living in the new control scheme.

Personally, I’m excited to see stuff move beyond the analog stick and/or cursor. That makes Natal the most interesting to me, but in the end it’s the games that will decide things.