I wanted another game that got me off the couch and using the Wii Motion Plus, and my choice was a tennis game or a tennis game. After checking around it seemed commonly accepted that EA’s Grand Slam Tennis made better use of the Wii Motion Plus than Sega’s Virtua Tennis did.
Now you may have heard people saying that the Wii Motion Control-scheme in Grand Slam Tennis is horribly broken. Or you may have heard that the experience is sublime and anyone who doesn’t think so needs to Learn-2-Play.
As is so often the case, neither extreme stance is accurate. In practice, there is some skill and methodology involved in playing Grand Slam Tennis. If you pick up the remote and start swinging like you would a tennis racket, you might run into some problems, which is frankly unfortunate. Ideally a game like this should be as naturally tennis-like as possible.
To get the best experience, you have to make a deliberate effort to “return to center” after every swing. Hold the remote level and in front of you between each swing and the game works pretty nicely. Aiming feels very natural; if you’ve ever swung a tennis racket you’ll be able to aim in Grand Slam Tennis. Top and backspin works more or less accurately too, with the caveat that every swing has to move forward. If you try to ‘cut’ a fast shot (by which I mean swinging the racket almost vertically and letting the speed of the ball rebound the shot) the Wii will spazz out. It doesn’t understand what you’re doing. I also haven’t had much luck with overhead shots. This is a game of forehands and backhands. Lobs and drop shots are cheaply accomplished by holding down the A or B button.
Grand Slam Tennis has 3 difficulty levels, and the option to play with or without the Nunchuk. With it, you control the movement of the player with the analog stick. Without it, the AI takes care of moving your player side to side, and you send him to the net with the Up on the cross-button, and back to the baseline with the Down. I’ve had a lot of trouble doing this as it seems once you’ve given the order to charge the net, the AI isn’t going to move you laterally until you get there.
So I’ve mostly been playing a baseline game of tennis where I limit myself to fore and backhand shots. And when that’s working, it feels absolutely great. But too often you run into shots you want to make that the game won’t understand, or you forget to ‘center’ and the game gets confused and hits a backhand when you wanted a forehand (or vice versa). Or just swings way too early.
You can play as a pro, or create a player. The stylized graphics look great on the Wii and I found I did a better job of making a player who looks like me here than I did in the much more complex character creator of Tiger Woods.
The campaign in the game is odd. You have major tournaments that are surrounded by strange satellite events where you can win abilities to improve your player. (e.g. Beat a Pro to get their ability.) Then you enter the tourney and if you lose, you’re done. On to the next tourney. So far I’ve been in Australia, France and England, and I’m too much of a non-tennnis fan to tell you the names of any of the tourneys beyond Wimbleton.
There’s also a lite fitness option where the game tracks (roughly…it doesn’t ask your weight or age or anything) how many calories you’re burning while playing. You can set a daily goal and try to play enough every day to meet it.
So is it worth getting? With caveats, yes. You have to go into this with your eyes wide open. If you can work with the limitations of the software, you can have plenty of fun. But if you want a perfect experience, wait for Grand Slam Tennis 11 or whatever next year’s iteration will be called. I hope that Wii Motion Plus controls continue to improve and become more natural and less fussy.
Here’s a video showing what I mean when I talk about ‘centering’ between shots. Thanks to the dude who made this; it saved me lots of frustration.
Thanks to Ethic for bringing this to my attention.
In a LOTRO dev chat hosted at Warcry, the follow exchange happened:
WarCry: Meeko: Any chance that some of the epic instances in volumn 1 will be eased as not so many people are around to group with who are interested in doing them… or a way to hire npc’s to help complete them in future? Orion: Funny you should ask this. Book 8 will see the first change along these lines. Chapter 11, Orthongroth is already set this way. Moving forward – post Book 8 – we are taking a different approach. My recent work has been focusing on providing both solo and group version of the Epic instances to allow players to choose the way that they want to complete the overall epic story.
Orion is Allan Maki, who I find variously attributed as a Content Designer and a Community Manager for Turbine.
I’m pretty excited about this. I’ll admit at this point I play LOTRO as a single-player game, just to get lost in Tolkien’s world when the mood strikes me (the beauty of a Lifetime Membership). I’d love to do the Epic Instances alone, where I could take my time and enjoy everything that’s happening instead of skipping through in-game cut scenes and quest verbiage so as to keep up with whatever manic group of power-levelers I happened to have PUGged with.
Bring it on, Turbine! Can’t wait for more Epic Instance to offer a solo version!
So my bundle arrived today, and I played 18 holes of the new Tiger Woods with the Wii Motion Plus. This post is going to focus on what the Motion Plus brings to the table.
First the hardware. You’ve no doubt seen it by now. It’s a module that adds about 1.25″ to the length of the Wii Remote (WiiMote). It comes semi-permanently attached to a WiiMote Sleeve. You stick the front end of the WiiMote into the sleeve, thread the strap through a slit in the back of the sleeve (the strap stays attached to the main WiiMote, not the Motion Plus) and then kind of pull on the sleeve to stretch it a little in order to get the Motion Plus to slide into the Nunchuk port. There’re buttons on either side that you need to press in order for it to engage, and there’s a lock on the back of the thing for once you get it attached. And of course there’s a passthrough Nunchuk port on the bottom, with a ‘cap’ to seal the port. The cap attaches to the Motion Plus with a cord, and you thread that into the Nunchuk cable for security (since the main cable is no longer close to the Nunchuk).
Attaching/detaching the Motion Plus just takes a minute, which is good since the WiiMote won’t fit into a charging station with the Plus attached (I’m assuming most regular Wii owners have broken down and bought a charging station by now…if not, then I see no reason why you wouldn’t leave the Plus attached all the time).
OK so how does it work with Tiger Woods? Well, the game plays MUCH more like real golf. You don’t pick a shot type (full, chip, etc) from a menu. Instead the way you swing the WiiMote determines what kind of shot you make. If you turn your wrist while you swing, you’ll hit a fade or a draw shot. There’s no way to put top or backspin on the ball via motion controls, though. You still need to use buttons for that.
In order to swing, you have to point the WiiMote at the floor and hold down the B button (this is true with or without the Plus). This means you more or less have to be standing to play. I tried sitting in a chair and dangling my hand over the side, and I could swing (awkwardly) by making a short fast arc; this is a tad disappointing — I was hoping the game would require a full swing, but we’re not that far yet. The game plays better using a full swing, and for the most authentic experience, hold the WiiMote in a more-or-less proper golf grip and swing that way (the extra length of the Plus actually helps with that, giving you a bit more to grab onto).
Playing that way, Tiger Woods is tough on the most ‘realistic’ settings! I was hitting 8’s and 9’s on par 4’s in my first round. It’s been a few decades since I played real golf, but when I did I had trouble with a persistent slice. And the same was true here. I found doing a full swing with one arm was a nice balance of emulating real golf and having better control. Serious golfers might do better with a two hand swing, though.
And then there’s Disc Golf (guess they didn’t want to pay for the rights to the name Frisbee). Picking up the Frisbee and throwing it feels very, very natural. (You can play without the Plus but it feels stiff and kind of limited.) I really wish I could just turn the golf aspect off and run around the course flinging the Frisbee around for a while. It controls just like a real Frisbee. Tilt it left or right to curve, a bit up for more loft, etc.
Overall, I’m pretty impressed with the Wii Motion Plus. It really does enhance the Wii experience, and I’m looking forward to seeing what developers do with it.
Engadget ran a post today quoting EA VP Patrick Soderlund as saying “…we’ve maxed out the 360…” Now obviously this is a statement open to all kinds of debate/interpretation, but for the sake of this post, let’s assume this is true and that developers have squeezed all they can out of the 360.
We know that Project Natal requires more CPU cycles than the Xbox 360 can muster (while still running games) so it needs a separate processor. At E3 this took the form (as I understand it) of a fairly typical PC stashed under the table. The final product will apparently come with the sensor and a box of some kind that’ll hold the hardware required to drive Natal.
So what happens when Natal is idling? That processor is sitting there doing nothing. But does it have to be that way? If the interface between Natal and the Xbox is fast enough to act as an input device, is there a way for the XBox to offload some of its slower processes to Natal? Could Natal act as an off-board brain for the 360, extending its life by a few years?
Sega tried this with the 32X years ago — an add-on to the Sega Genesis that never really caught on. But it didn’t have Milo pushing it into homes.
This is just pie-in-the-sky thinking on my part, and I don’t know if any of the processing going on inside the 360 is time-insensitive enough that you could offload it through a USB cable to an external device. But it’d be a nice ‘bonus’ to adopting Natal — getting a speed boost as well as motion controls.
So now that all three of the major console makers have some kind of motion controller system, I figured I’d stick my oar in and give my thoughts on what each platform offers. Major caveat: I’m not at E3. I’m basing all the following on what I’ve read, and building on the hard work the professional gaming press is doing in LA.
Nintendo (Existing):
When the Nintendo Wii initially came out, it offered 2 weeks of great fun followed by a period of “This is it?” for a lot of early adopters. Playing Wii Sports was awesome, but once that was out of the way, a long procession of games with ‘forced waggle’ followed, and many gamers quickly tired of randomly shaking the controller in order to accomplish anything.
Eventually the waggle-wave cooled a bit, and games started coming out that used motion control where it fit in naturally (e.g. pointing, or a quick flip to reload a gun), and standard controls for the rest of the game. Suddenly the Wii was interesting again, and I actually grew fond of the nunchuk/remote combo for controlling games. Having the controller essentially broken into two halves made gaming very comfortable.
Nintendo (Wii Motion Plus):
Next week, the Wii Motion Plus comes out. This is supposed to add more precision and 1-to-1 correspondence between controller and on-screen presentation. This means we’ll have to get up off the couch again. When Tiger Woods 10 is played with the Wii Motion Plus, you’ll have to actually do a full swing of the virtual club, rather than a quick pendulum motion with the WiiMote. At least, that’s my understanding. Hopefully the Wii Motion Plus won’t set back the state of Wii games by very much.
At this point, the Wii is essentially the ‘base line’ of motion controllers. Both Sony and Microsoft seem to be leap-frogging Nintendo in the motion controller arena.
Microsoft and Project Natal:
Microsoft really wowed audiences with its controller-free motion control system. A sensor bar consisting of an IR camera, an RGB camera, and a microphone sits in front of (or on top of) the TV and reads the movements of players. The IR camera actually measures heat, and via heat, distance from the TV. The microphone is for voice commands.
Folks who’ve tried the system say it really works. The neatest demo I saw was a version of Burnout hacked so that the player steered just by holding his arms out as if they were on a steering wheel. When they turn the imaginary wheel, the car turns. Sliding their foot forward and back controlled acceleration. Very neat tech demo.
But I have some concerns. First of all, how well is this going to work when I’m wearing a checkered shirt and standing in front of a paisley-print couch? [Update: After pondering this for a while, it occurred to me that this might not be an issue, given the IR camera. It could use the heat of you body to tell the difference between you and the couch.] The demos were done in an empty room with white walls. Apparently the system can adjust for lighting differences, so they have that much licked.
Assuming the tech works, is this what we really want? If you have a choice of playing air guitar Rock Band, or fake-instrument Rock Band, which would be more fun? Props are important; they give play a visceral feel. I find it ironic that when the PS3 came out with a controller that lacked rumble, they were heavily criticized for losing that feedback. But now Microsoft has a system that by definition has no feedback at all, and everyone is going nuts for it. Nintendo’s Wii Remote has rumble and a microphone and these aspects really add to the immersion. When you wallop a tennis ball with the Wii Remote, you hear and feel the impact of the racket hitting the ball. You won’t get that kind of feedback with Natal, nor is it clear how you’d move around using Natal. How do you get your on-screen character to run, turn (without you turning so you can no longer see the screen) or fire a gun?
So I think Natal will spawn a new genre of games that take advantage of the hands-free control system. But where I think Natal will have the largest impact is with the overall UI of the Xbox. The idea of never having to search for the remote is very appealing. I wave my hand to browser through video or music selections, then I say “Play” to begin playback. Now *that* is both radical and useful, and I’d really love to see MS license Natal to other consumer electronics manufacturers.
And then there’s Milo. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe in Milo. The demo was a heavily scripted event (Molyneux himself apparently admitted that) that made the demo seem more than it was. One of the most interesting aspect of Milo was the facial recognition. A person could stand in front of the Natal sensor and say his name, then when he returned, ‘Milo’ could identify who the person was. That’s pretty neat. The bit where the player splashed around in the water wasn’t anything new: the Sony Eyetoy has been able to do that for a while (granted the fidelity was better here). The conversation stuff was the most scripted…apparently Milo ‘understood’ just a few questions: this is understandable. If Milo worked as well as he *seemed* to work (without tricks) then he’d be about as smart as the voice actuated and controlled computer on Star Trek, and we just aren’t there yet.
But what was really, really cool about Milo was the head tracking. As you walked around the room, the view on-screen changed to reflect how you’d see the virtual world from that new location. This is really huge because it allows some very cool ‘virtual 3D’ effects; I can’t wait for MS to roll those out (see the video at the end of this post for an example of what I’m talking about).
So Milo was a really fun tech demo with some really cutting edge aspects, some rehashed stuff, and some smoke and mirrors. But the aspects that people seem so excited about (talking to Milo) isn’t what was really cool about the demo.
Sony’s Wand System:
Lastly we have Sony’s wand-based motion-control system. If you haven’t seen it, it consists of a pair of wands that include traditional controller buttons, and a light on the end of each wand. The Sony Eyetoy can track the lights with a high degree of fidelity. During the Project Natal demo, a player ‘painted’ by splashing buckets of paint on a wall. During the Sony demo, a player very legibly wrote his name on a virtual wall. That’s the difference in fidelity between the two systems.
In a lot of ways the Sony system seems like the Nintendo Wii Remote on steroids. A bunch of game applications immediately spring to mind. It has buttons so you can shoot a gun, and they could put an analog stick on it so you could move around a 3D space that way (a la the Nintendo nunchuk). The demo showed a very simple RTS game being played using the wands like a mouse. Let’s just pray that we don’t get a bunch of waggle games from Sony!
Really the three systems map well to now, soon, and future. Nintendo is the now solution. Depending on how much Wii Motion Plus adds, we’re all pretty familiar with what Nintendo can do. Sony offers the next step; an enhanced way of controlling your games that should be available and working well pretty soon (Spring 2010 they’re saying). And Project Natal represents the dreamy future. When Natal launches (my guess? sometime in 2011) it’s going to mean a rebirth of the Xbox 360 in much the same way that the NXE did. I don’t honestly see a lot of mainstream games supporting Natal, but I do see it refreshing the entire UI of the Xbox in remarkable ways, as well as adding a new genre: Natal Games.
Back to the head tracking issue. Here’s the video I mentioned. This fellow now works for Microsoft, but before he went to the big M he was hacking Wii Remotes:
*THIS* is the technology of Project Natal that I am most excited about!
Someone (Werit) asked me today if Sacred 2 had slipped down my play list.
It has not. My entire playlist has slipped down. Due to poor planning on the part of upper management at my job, the past few weeks have been rather hellish insofar as having to work a lot of extra hours, extra stress, and so forth. I haven’t been playing anything, aside from some LOTRO, and that I play as a kind of reward. Y’know “OK, I’ll write the data validation scripts for this page, then I’ll kill 10 bog-lurkers, then start the next set of scripts.” (I chose LOTRO because I needed some coin to pay my in-game rent.)
The silver lining is that I’ve killed the 180 bog-lurkers required to complete the deed in the Lone Lands! 🙂
But in spite of what XFire says, I sure didn’t play LOTRO for 14 hours this past week. Much of that time was me logged in, the game running in the background waiting for the next ‘reward’ of killing 10 more lurkers.
This week is E3, and I’m stoked to follow it virtually. After that madness ends (G4TV is showing something like 22 hours of coverage and I intend to watch all of that, plus countless web videos and blog posts) I hope to go back to Sacred 2, probably starting over with a character I can take more seriously than the sexpot Seraphim.
Hmm, wait, that’s not right either. My boss finished Infamous and is going to lend it to me, so I’ll be playing through that first, and THEN going back to Sacred 2.
Bottom line, I didn’t lose interest in Sacred 2…I just got pulled away from it.
So last weekend I was playing LOTRO and made the journey to Rivendell, on foot. As I crossed the Fords of Bruinen I stopped to look around, and said to Angela “Check this out. Remember when Arwen drove back the Nazgul here?”
And I stopped, appalled. Â Because that’s how it happened in the movies, but not in the books.
And I realized it had been far too long since my last read-through of The Lord of the Rings.
So I dug out a copy — Angela’s copy, (despite the face that it has Elijah Wood on the cover), since the pages of my copy are falling out — and started reading. This has been rather a hellish week, work wise, and I’ve only managed a few pages each evening before falling asleep, but already I’m finding it really interesting to read the book after playing the game. Places referenced casually, like The Chetwood, mean something to me now.
I do find myself wondering why the hobbits chose the path they did, given the fine road from The Shire to Bree (in the game) but maybe that will become more clear as I re-familiarize myself with the true story.
If you’ve been playing LOTRO and haven’t read the books in a while, I highly recommend doing so! The two complement each other really nicely.
Today was Day 5 of the 30-Day Challenge in EA Sports Active for the Wii. It was workout #4, since Thursday was a rest day (every 3rd day is rest, it seems).
Yesterday’s workout felt easy and it was over before I knew it. I was feeling cocky, then today came. Jump Squat and Jump Lunges and lots of running. Oh my aching legs.
I am doing better with the running but I’m not really sure how/why other than I’m feeling less reserved about the whole process. I realized as I started to really huff and puff that I’ve been so non-active for so long that I subconsciously have started thinking that heavy-breathing means something is wrong, and I pull back.
I don’t want to get too touchy-feely but I really feel like I’m starting to think differently about things. Even after just 5 days. After my first workout I felt terrible and really gross (sweat? EWWW!) but now, yeah, I’m wiped after the workout, but I’m kind of, I dunno, proud of the sweat? And I know I’ll feel GREAT in an hour or so, which is the best part of the whole experience.
I’m not eating any better, but I’m intending to eat better. LOL. We’ll see how that goes. Getting lots of veggies is a challenge for me. I take some baby carrots to work to snack on, but what other veggies are convenient & portable? Any suggestions?
I’m considering getting a set of these, once they release:
I just don’t know how they’d work with having to put the Nunchuk into the pocket. Maybe have 2 Nunchuks and just plug the appropriate one into the Wii Remote?
So far, really happy with the product, and feeling a bit better about my self. I already seem to feel like I have more energy, though maybe its all in my head. But I’m not questioning it for now.
If you’re on the fence about Active, I heartily recommend you give it a shot. It’s actually working for me in ways that Wii Fit never did.
I promise I’m not going to make this a daily workout blog! But I did think it might be of interest to some for me to relate a bit more EA Active experience.
I woke up this morning sore, but not uncomfortably so. In fact it was that “good feeling” soreness, though oddly it seemed to get worse, not better, as the day went on. That said, I worked from home today so my ‘commute’ was 15 feet from the bedroom to the office and plunked back down in the chair to write code.
I went out to do some shopping this afternoon and that loosened things up, but then it was back to work for part of the evening, so I didn’t get to EA Active until about 9:30 pm, which I think is much too late to do this kind of thing. But life happens, right?
Tonight’s workout was different from last night. A few new things, a few varieties of things I did yesterday. Yesterday I did side lunges, today it was side lunches with a toe touch, for instance. No boxing today, instead it was tennis (just returning balls at a target, not actually playing).
The leg strap was fussy again. I finally got it to stay put after Angela insisted I should wear it higher on my thigh than I’d been doing. After I looked at my on-screen trainer I saw she was right, so I put it almost as high as it would go and cinched it down pretty tight and it finally stayed in place. I kind of tucked the leg of my shorts around the pocket in the front and that seemed to work well. I think you’d have to do that with anything the least bit baggy. So under the shorts unless you’re wearing spandex or something, and believe you me, you do not want me wearing spandex. Even if you can’t see me, it would cause a darkness that would spread across the lands.
I’m already getting better at using the tension strap and pocketing/unpocketing the Nunchuk. The upper body exercises really feel kind of trivial. I know you can double up the strap but I’m afraid I’m going to break it (and I know some folks have broken them). I might see if I can find a heavier weight strap the next time I’m at a department store.
On the other hand, the lower body exercises continue to kick my behind. And I struggle on the track when it comes time to run. It *always* tells me I’m too slow. Brings back bad gym class memories. I was blaming the system, but then I just went for it and I got into the “Perfect” range, which I could maintain for about 10 seconds before I started wheezing. Plus we live on the 2nd floor and it was closing in on 10 pm and our office is technically the master bedroom so I was worried I was stomping on the floor when someone was trying to sleep.
But bottom line, it’s clear that the running is going to be an on-going challenge for me. But that’s ok.
I’ve also found that you have to be careful with the exercises and do them as instructed. For instance, I was doing these standing leg crunches… you lift one knee up high and are supposed to cross your hands over your belly and ‘crunch’ your abdomen forward. I was just lifting my leg, and I wasn’t getting any Active love. Turns out you NEED to cross your hands over you belly (thereby placing the Remote on you belly) and then you have to crunch forward in order to move the Remote, and then the rep counts.
In general, smooth controlled motions work best, but I guess those are best for maximum performance anyway. It’s important to know that you don’t have to start the exercise with the on-screen trainer…it’ll wait for you. So get your breathing right and then start. But once you start, you have to maintain cadence with him/her/it, and it will do things like make you hold a position for an extra few beats now and then. You WILL curse at this thing.
The good news is that after I was done, I didn’t feel the need to pass out. I managed to get right to the showers (yesterday after the workout I wouldn’t have trusted myself to stand up near all that hard porcelain). So Day 2 wasn’t as bad as Day 1. And Day 3 is a “rest” day and I have to confess I’m glad of that!
I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with the product. I do feel like I’ve had a full body workout, and I sure do sweat (I barely broke a sweat on Wii Fit). I’d just love to see EA take advantage of the Wii Motion Plus add-on when it comes out.
Oh, and my apologies for any typos. Apparently my brain is slightly oxygen starved after working out and my writing gets really sloppy, but I don’t really notice how bad it is until the next day!
