You four, commenting within three minutes of each other on a very old post with very similar comments and no full stops, have aroused the suspicion of both Spam Karma 2 and myself. But I, like Spam Karma, have to admit that there seems to be at least one human behind the bigotry, so I won’t delete it.

Instead, give me Western fencing. Sensitive, fast, spacially precise, and if you’re doing it at all right the rumble pack’s all you need.

Also, wot a pity that there will never be a Deus Ex game on Revo, eh?

When you give input to a game with buttons, controlling an avatar works well, because then you can see the direct effect your pushing of a button has. When you’re poking/stroking the world with the DS’ touch screen, then that action translating into something an avatar does is less natural. It works a lot better if you are, in fact, someone poking the world, and the consequences come from your poke.

I think it will be the same with the Revolution controller. Contolling an avatar with it will not work as well as /you/ doing something with it. Whether it’s your actions being translated into the world like that Gametrak game, or DS-like world poking.

I hope this lets us feel like heroes. Badass heroes.

I want to scream, “Yeah, IN YOUR FACE MOFO!” at a computer character as I unleash a can of whoop-ass upon him. The kind of in-the-moment aggression and adrenaline that the added physicality should provide.

I objected to the gesture system in Darwinia for reasons of canon and “feel”; unlike the presence of the Centipedes, stickmen and Space Invaders for example, there was just absolutely no “reason” within that fiction why these Beowulfed consoles would interface with gestures. I accepted it as a means to the end of keeping the screen clear at all costs, but I felt and feel that the game should have used old-school shortcuts or just hotkeys more. .

I was unclear about “gestures”. There are two points to be made there.
1. To date, pointing devices have only been able to access 2-dimensional positional data and through it, a very low-res picture of the first derivative, velocity. The RRC has direct, instantaneous access to position, velocity, and acceleration in six axes. a. Gesture commands could – could – not-suck under those circumstances. Who knows? b. With the kind of freedom Nintendo has created, the line between action and gesture blurs; gestures become things like “stroke up, then strong down over there to bring in the percussion section, twirl with varying intensity to continue the roll.”

2. I’m probably unusually pro-gesture. Most of my daily-use programs have several macros mapped through StrokeIt and I have a separate gesture plugin installed in my Firefox. Despite that, I am no more eager to see them in mouse-based games than you are, for the same reasons. BnW is the only example I can think of where they fit the fiction, looked natural, and were convenient to use.
I was just referring to the very simple sort of thing Nintendo explicitly showed in its mockup concept reel, where a lady is controlling Mario with “swivel right to run right, swivel left to run left, twitch up to jump.” I’d like to try playing classics like that – if it works anywhere near well, it beats bruised thumbs. As several articles have said, it’s a natural thing you see kids do, even today – want to jump, pull up, oh yeah, it doesn’t work that way. Now it can.

You should probably retract that suggestion to spam ideas – everyone’s head is overflowing with them, I’m sure. I have at least enough willpower to not repeat ones I’ve seen elsewhere (Punch-Out Mwaaaa *ahem*). i. Star Wars – first way to actually play with a double-ended saber, anyone? ii. Music conducting – I’m one of those people who cluelessly “conducts” orchestral music while he’s listening to it. The orchestral conducting concept interested me – but I also do it for other genres. I smell a new Frequency/Amplitude, though it would have to be called Phase or Polarization. iii. Heck, combine them: Star Wars music conducting. I think people would pay to be able to “pull” John Williams’ brass up out of thin air over and over. Get a ten-man team together and throw together an applet. Lucasarts has sold less in the past! iv. I’m sure this is already in development, but the next WarioWare is going to be nucking futs.

I actually liked Darwinia’s, but it did become a matter of working out the ‘real’ symbol – it would accept a horizontal line for rockets. Now that it’s gone, I find it wasn’t as integral to the experience as I thought – my perception had been that it counter-acted the freeness of your units by making them cost you physical exertion, but I can’t say the gestureless demo made any less sense without that.

I hope you’re wrong about how it’ll be used, Jason. I’m sure it’ll take years for developers to realise just how much they can do with this, but I hope they at least think in three dimensions from the word go. A pointer for menus, fine, but in-game I want the Z-axis to have some effect. Presumably it can’t work as forward and backward movement in an FPS, but perhaps some kind of speed adjustment? Sprint and walk? Also, am I nuts, or could this be used for looking and quick strafing?

Now accepting other suggestions for what kind of nusto games we can make now that we have a 3D controller. Mario Knife Fight? A shooter Western where you have to toss your gun up and catch it by the handle again after every kill? A fairground Test Your Strength minigame where you have to whack it down as hard as you can? True 3D Frogger?

The only downside to all this is that the control system in the sci-fi novel I’m planning now seems less futuristic.

As for the dancing games; did they really catch on amongst non-gamers? I did consider the comparisons to Dance Dance Revolution, but I’m betting that a whole lot of people opted out of playing it when the opportunity arose because there were other people around. No one likes dancing in front of other people. In MY world.

Waving your arms around in front of the TV can be a private thing, and that’s good. But one wonders if people will be willing to jump in and have a shot at it any more than if it were just a regular old controller. Would more people be willing to fly if planes looked like toasters?

Of course, that’s somewhat secondary to just how cool and awesome it might befor those who WILL try it, such as myself. But there we go.

“instead of being intimidated by a plethora of buttons, non-gamers may now simply be intimidated by the thought of looking like a prat instead”

Yeah, I guess that’s why dance games never caught on. OH WAIT THEY DID. Honestly, I think we look more stupid sitting slack jawed spasming our hands on a plastic bat than we would waving a stick around. But we don’t care, because either no-one sees us, or the people who do see us are doing the same thing.

For me, this is going to be all about beating the living hell out of people. I want a remake of Die By The Sword. I want Oblivion on it, with the optimal attack motions changing depending on what type of weapon I have equipped. Man, you could even swing a chain-mace with this thing.

http://www.whatinterest.com/page/article/view/51

So just pretend that everything I said there, I actually said here, and if you care to read it, respond here. If you care to respond, that is.

Oh, and the picture of the old fashioned controller wrapped around the new fashioned controller? That’s just an IGN mock-up, I think. I mean, there will be a plug-in like that, but hopefully it’ll look less rubbish.

Oh, one other thing: I resent “ergonomic” stuff. As a rule, the more carefully sculpted a mouse, controller, or remote is, the harder I find it to hold. The old NES, SNES, and Genesis pads are great – I just went and checked. The DC’s and N64’s pads were monstrosities; I literally could not play my DC as much as I liked because my hands had to clench to stop the pad squirming to freedom. I can put up with the DualShock, the Dolphin or whatever is OK, but both generations of the XBox’ pad are back to the same nonsense. I was excited when either the XBox 360 or PS3 went to two round sticks at a shallow angle to each other – and disappointed when they went back to trying to mold my hands.

The Revolution Remote Control? It’s a stick that you wave and squeeze – possibly a tab in the other hand, if you want to be posh. I can hold on to a stick. Thank you for respecting my ability to hold on to a stick.

Net reaction? I’m primarily a PC gamer, with a select PS2 library on the side. Until yesterday, I was following the news, but utterly disinterested in the next generation of consoles. Now I am deeply interested in the Revolution. Well played, Nintendo, well played indeed.