Lee’s Daily Blog

So this years E3 seemed to be big on controllers. The main focus of these seemed to be to compete with the wii remote. Manufacturers seem to have seen how many units the wii managed to sell to people who weren’t traditionally described as gamers and seem to want to tap into this. I personally don’t think they’ll be quite as successful as the Wii as the type of game available also matters

One of the bigger announcements seemed to be the camera for the Xbox 360 which detects the movement of the whole body without the need for a remote. The video below discusses this and also contains some interesting discussion from Steven Spielberg on the role of video games.

The technology itself looks very impressive in the demos and if it does work like that when out in the real world, will lower the barrier of entry – possibly to even lower than that of the Wii. However, I’m intrigued to see how well this camera is going to work when put into all the different room environments – will it be selecting sofas as people? If someone wants to go to the toilet from the other side of the room, is it going to get confused?

Not wanting to be beaten by this, Sony released something very similar which uses two controllers which work together with the Playstation Eye – an existing product for Sony, but something which hasn’t really come to anything.

New Controller for Sony. Click to view the full size image. Within it you can see the two controllers that are held and used to generate the motion on the screen.

(video available at this link)

With the wii, well, um…. They released an add-on for their wii remote, but it was nothing astonishing. Most of the Nintendo announcements were software related. In regards to their controller, they announced a modification to the Wii Motion Plus, which was the development they announced last year and also a new add-on called the Wii Vitality Sensor.

The Wii Viatlity Sensor

“Just as we enable you to see the centre of your body balance with Wii fit, the Wii Vitality Sensor enables you to see the information related to the inner world of your body,” said Nintendo’s chief, Satoru Iwata, at the event.

There were also a few different controller types available for PC games. Although nothing really new, the cost of these items seem to be falling fast as companies look at finding different ways to get people to interact with computers games and to get ‘non gamers gaming’ – like the Wii did when it was released.

Other big news from the event included the announcement of Sony’s PSP Go:

The new console is slimmer than previous versions and has a sliding screen to reveal the controls. They also announced that this version of the hardware would only be able to download titles to play on the console. They will, however, be keeping previous versions of the console which require the UMD disks and will keep releasing software on the UMD disks for these consoles.

Software Announcements

A selection of the software announcements included ‘Beatles Rockband’ for the Xbox 360, with Ringo Starr and Sir Paul McCartney present for the launch. (From BBC News):

The game marks the first time any Beatles music has been licensed to a third party.

“The game is good, the graphics are very good, and we were great,” said Ringo.

The game, which goes on sale on 9 September, will feature 45 songs, along with a bonus track – All You Need is Love – which can be bought online via Xbox Live.

Nintendo mainly focussed on Software announcements, including the second 3D Mario title for the console – the first time this has happened, which also suggests the Wii could be around for quite a while yet.

Why not discuss your views on the announcements in the comments section of this post.

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