Play Taste

The first of many E3 roundup posts. I’m just going to try to quickly summarise some of the cool stuff that was shown at E3 over the last week.

Microsoft

Project Natal – This is Microsoft’s entry in to the whole motion control thing thats going on right now, except this time YOU ARE THE CONTROLLER. Okay actually what it is is a camera that has motion tracking on it so it attempts to do motion capture in real time. It seems to work pretty well, far better than I expected, one of the tech demos they showed off was a 3D breakout game and it worked fairly well. I think it may have been more convicing if she wasn’t flailing about. In addition to this was the whole thing from Lionhead, great video but my god some of that was total BS the tech to do some of it just doesn’t exist.

Motion Controller – Microsoft still has another motion controller in production, but there isn’t anything on this other than the fact that it still exists.

Nintendo

Vitality Sensor – Apparently Nintendo decided that the next peripheral that the Wii needs is something to measure your heart rate. Umm…okay…

They did show off a little more motion plus stuff but nothing that wasn’t already known

Sony

PSP Go – The next iteration of the PSP, pretty much everything that was leaked. It has a slide out controls, 16GB of internal flash memory no UMD slot, I think the screen is slightly smaller but the same res. All in all a very nice looking piece of hardware and somewhat more portable than the original PSP. Downside $249. That’s kind of expensive compared to the current PSP 3000 so I guess its good that the 3000 isn’t going anywhere. I kind of want to get a PSP and I don’t really want to have to deal with UMDs so I guess that puts me in the market for a Go.

Unnamed motion controller – Somewhat similar to the Wii controller except that it has a glowy ball on the top of it for camera tracking. The main difference between this and the Wii remote is that precision seems to be the name of the game. And it basically does what the Wii promised to do that didn’t, couple of tech demos that showed that it is really sensitive to movement. Looks cool but totally don’t want it.

Andrew Games