Playstation Move in this month’s Qore

In the run-up to E3 I was pretty excited to see what Sony was going to show with regard to Move, their new Wii-like motion controller.

At the end of E3 I was asking myself “Why was I ever excited about that product?” The offers on display were pretty mediocre. There was that Sorcery game which looked fun, and the possibility of playing Socom with it, but most of the rest of the stuff just looked like higher res Wii games.

Then this month’s Qore came out and I remembered why I’d been excited. Move at E3 2009 was more interesting than Move at E3 2010 (and I’d honestly say the same for Microsoft’s Natal/Kinect). The July Qore has the same boring games on display, but then a series of tech demos which we (or at least I) haven’t seen since E3 2009. They have me interested in the potential (at least) of Move again. Whether any game developers ever use that potential is a very big question.

As a worst, and most likely, case most gamers, having seen the dull E3 2010 coverage of Move, will stay away from it in droves, and so developers will see no reason to support it, and it’ll end up another withered branch of the Playstation tree.

But before I gave up on Move entirely, I wanted to share these videos. (We’ll see how long they stay on YouTube before Sony has them removed.) In video 1, skip to the 5 minute mark if you’re not interested in seeing Veronica Belmont spew happy marketing-speak about the Move. The rest of video 1 and first half of video 2 are kind of interesting Move tech demos. The 2nd half of video two is a developer visit with the people making Move Sports or whatever their Wii sports clone is called.

A lot of this stuff boils down to using Move as a 3D mouse, really. I just think about the potential for using it in strategy games or RPGs, rather than silly Wii Sports wannabe titles.