Hands-on With the Wii MotionPlus

Parz writes "In June, Nintendo will be releasing a peripheral called MotionPlus. This small device attaches to the bottom of the Wii-mote and acts as a more sophisticated motion-sensor to the controller as it currently stands. Its goal is to bring greater parity between a user's movements and the animations that they bring to life on-screen. Gameplayer got some hands-on time with the device, and they are extremely impressed." The MotionPlus will only affect new games; Nintendo has said they have no plans to add support for older titles. Virtua Tennis 2009 will be the first game to support it, and Eurogamer has a look at the game both with and without the MotionPlus.

Re:Swordfighting

[dzafez]

Actually, you could go further and really teach Iaido, or Battu-Jutsu on Wii, including many Kata.

No plans to support older titles

[Drinking Bleach]

Read: It's a near impossibility to support older titles. It would be nice to head over to http://hackmii.com/2009/02/why-the-wii-will-never-get-any-better/ [hackmii.com] and find out why; specifically:

As it turns out, Nintendo chose not to have any operating system or common code at all running on the Broadway CPU. When you run a game, everything that shows up on your screen, ever, is being loaded from that spinning polycarbonate disc. And there are no mechanisms for anything else to run on that CPU: no update infrastructure, no Home Menu updates, nothing. If they ever want to have a "hypervisor" run above games, they'll need to get a new CPU with full-blown virtualization capability (or an emulator), because games assume they have direct access to the CPU and most of the hardware.

If you've been following the Wii scene, you might be thinking, "what about IOS?" Indeed, Nintendo's security and I/O Operating System runs alongside games (on a separate CPU built in to the Hollywood chipset) and it is updated as part of system updates. It includes some important bits and pieces like some peripheral drivers. However, as it turns out, Nintendo has decided that every new feature will be developed as a separate fork. Your Wii contains many IOS versions, and the older have never been updated except for security reasons (to fix our exploits). Not that they've added many new features, but if you look closely, new IOS features do not operate when you're playing older games. This includes any updates to the WiiConnect24 downloads code, and even some minor things like the "slot LED blinks when you eject a disc" feature - try it when you're playing Zelda and you'll see that it doesn't work, because it's using the very old IOS9.

Re:Swordfighting

[vux984]

the Wii is generally (if not always?) targeted at whole-family orientated stuff,

no. Not always.

Manhunt 2
House of the Dead: Overkill
Tenchu: Shadow Assassins
Alone in the Dark
Brothers in Arms: Double Time
Madworld
Resident Evil 4
Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles
No More Heroes
Mortoal Kombat: Armageddon
Driver: Parallel Lines
Escape from Bug Island
Call of Duty: World at War
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent
The Godfather: Blackhand Edition
Target Terror ...

There's lots of blood&gore and more coming to the Wii. Some of its good... some of its shit.

The Xbox/PS3 gets most of these too though and their versions are usually the stronger titles. This is partly because the xbox/ps3 is the stronger platform in terms of hardware, and partly because the people looking for blood&guts gravitate towards the xbox/ps3 (and a large portion of them are -only- interested in a title if it has an "M" rating -- actually favoring blood&guts over having a game worth playing (but I digress...)

All that said, a title like Resident Evil 4 or the new Metroid Prime in my opinion show the Wii to be an EXCELLENT platform for FPS and hard core games. The control scheme when done well is infinitely superior to the xbox/ps3 analog stick controllers.

Re:parity

[Aladrin]

Maybe you should look it up, then, because that's exactly what it means.

http://dictionary.reference.com/dic?q=parity&search=search [reference.com]

2. equivalence; correspondence; similarity; analogy.

Re:parity

[tomhudson]

bring greater parity between a user's movements and the animations

You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means.

It comes from the french word pareil [typepad.com], which means "same".

The whole idea of a parity bit is to make sure the data is the same.

Re:It should've been like this in the beginning.

[Hogwash McFly]

Secondly, the Wii motion plus is rumoured to be a 20$ item or included with several upcoming Wii motion plus games, so how can it go from being 'too expensive' only a few years ago to being a 'throwaway item' now?

In the same way that a DVD burner can go from $150 to $20 in a few years time, or RAM that cost you $80 a couple of years ago is now $20. Technology becomes cheaper over time.

Re:Swordfighting

[Bakkster]

As another fencer, I would have to disagree. There's still too many things that can't be measured with just a wiimote. Wrist angle is the most important, as the wiimote would have no way to verify the wrist was absolutely straight. Body lean, distance between the elbow and body, and foot position are also very important. Simply attempting to teach, or even practice, fencing with a wiimote could lead to poor habits that will be difficult to correct later on. The problems you would create would outweigh any benefit.

I agree with the earlier comment, leave the learning on the piste. Use the wiimote for what it is, a game. A Kendo or fencing game would be great, but a training tool is out of the question.

Re:The Wii MotionPlus is an expansion device

[Bakkster]

This thing contains afaik 3 multi-axis accelerometers that are way more precise than what was possible during the launch of the Wii years back.

Actually, it uses a 3-axis gyroscope. Accelerometers can only measure movement, but the gyros can measure position. This is why you had to use a lot of "waggle" on wii games: the accelerometers couldn't tell the difference between flicking your wrist and an arm movement. The gyros can.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/08/wii-motion-sensor.ars [arstechnica.com]

Re:It should've been like this in the beginning.

[Chris Burke]

Please don't give me 'the tech wasn't available' or 'the tech was too expensive at the time'

Okay I won't tell you the uncomfortable truth that you don't want to accept. Unless that sentence counts.

Firstly, Nintendo was making a profit on the Wii hardware from the get go! They should've put it in even if it reduced that margin, other manufacturers make a loss out of the gate.

Up until this generation, no they didn't. Microsoft lost money on the XBOX, because they believed the urban legend that all console makers used the console itself as a loss leader. Halfway through the generation, both Sony and Nintendo revealed that no, they didn't, but were happy to have Microsoft design their console strategy around it. This generation, both Sony and Microsoft decided to go balls-out on the hardware necessitating their per-unit losses. They do this by subsidizing their games business with profits from other business units.

Nintendo can't subsidize their game consoles. You're basically saying they should have risked going out of business if the "lose money on the console and make money on games" model, which hasn't worked out for Microsoft yet, didn't work out for them.

But yeah, those greedy bastards wanting to sell their only product at a profit!

Secondly, the Wii motion plus is rumoured to be a 20$ item or included with several upcoming Wii motion plus games, so how can it go from being 'too expensive' only a few years ago to being a 'throwaway item' now?

[Insert any of a thousand graphs showing price decreases in technology over time]