After innumerable demo video clips, plenty of rants from fear-mongering fanboys and quite a few marketing pennies spent, the PS3’s latest gadget is finally here. But us gamers still have a lot of questions though: Will it change the way we play games? Will it dumb down our console experience to Wii-like levels? Is it actually worth buying?<\/p>\n
MyGaming excitedly rips open a Playstation Move Starter Pack to find out.<\/p>\n
The package<\/strong><\/p>\n The basic Starter Pack contains a Playstation Eye camera, a Move controller (affectionately known as a ‘Wand’), a rather stylish strap to prevent unnecessary Wand-flinging, several small manuals and a start-up disc to sample some upcoming Move titles while simultaneously acting as a tech demo for your new toy.<\/p>\n While the forthcoming Navigation Controller and Charging Station will eventually complete the Move family, the Starter Pack contains everything you need to get up and running, a feat which surprisingly took all of 30 seconds to accomplish: simply plug the camera into a USB port on the console, point it towards yourself and turn on the Move controller with its ‘PS’ button and wham, you’re ready to go…<\/p>\n Hardware<\/strong><\/p>\n … or at least you would be if the Wand had any battery power. A quick charge via the mini-USB connector (using the same cable for juicing up your regular controllers) got the device ready for action while I mulled over its rather sexy design.<\/p>\n Sitting in my hand like a very lightweight gardening trowel handle, the Wand is a definitely a clever piece of kit. A giant ‘Move’ button sporting the titular logo functions as your main action button, and it’s surrounded by the four traditional Playstation ‘shape’ buttons.<\/p>\n A single trigger sits underneath the controller similar to those on the Dualshock 3\/Sixaxis, and Start and Select buttons are somewhat awkwardly placed on the Wand’s right and left flanks respectively. Finally, the whole unit is topped off with a rubber sphere which glows in bubblegum colours during use, and the base sports the aforementioned strap, mini-USB port and Charging Station points.<\/p>\n The entire thing is very light and appropriately ergonomic, and I anticipated it being a complete breeze to swish the thing around enthusiastically without tiring or feeling uncomfortable. Eager to prove myself right, I took the Move for its first test run.<\/p>\n Firing it up<\/strong><\/p>\n After watching a brief intro video on the start-up disc and clutching the now-energised Wand in my hand, my first trial with the Move was using it to navigate the Playstation’s XMB (aka the user interface). By squeezing the trigger on the Wand and gently moving it left, right, up or down, I zipped through the menu options at a remarkable pace and with almost no effort.<\/p>\n Although it did feel like this implementation could do with a little bit of tweaking I was excited by my newfound Minority Report-style powers of manipulation, so I used this new method of control to install all of the 9 demo games on the disc as I prepared to really see just what this thing was capable of.<\/p>\n The learning curve<\/strong><\/p>\n Upon running the first included title, Tumble, I was greeted with the Move’s warning\/setup screen, a sight I was soon to be very, very familiar with as it appears before every Move-enabled game. After making sure my strap was secure and my camera set up, I was given a quick overview of Tumble as a deceptively simple game of manipulating different blocks (vaguely similar to Jenga) by using all of the motion features of the Wand.<\/p>\n After a few minutes of Tumble’s tutorial, I was completely and utterly impressed. Unlike the Wii’s basic tracking via accelerometers and sensor bar, the Wand is positioned in real 3D space using accelerometers, angular rate sensors, a magnetometer and object recognition via the Eye camera. In layman’s terms, this means that instead of just inferring your movement relative to where the controller was last positioned, every movement can be actively tracked by the Wand, even if it disappears behind your back. What this translates to is a very precise controller, an accuracy that goes so far that even a subtle rotation of the wrist or a small step closer to the Eye camera can be registered and translated into the game.<\/p>\n This was all demonstrated simply and awesomely via Tumble, which allowed me to build a few towers (and demolish a couple more) all with very basic and intuitive movements. Keen to see what else I could accomplish, I moved on to the rest of the bundled games.<\/p>\n The bundled games<\/strong><\/p>\n In addition to Tumble the start-up disc includes 8 other demo games (Beat Sketcher, Echochrome II, EyePet, Sports Champions, Start the Party, The Shoot, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 and TV Superstars) to give you a good idea of what to expect from future Move titles. These are all quite brief and for the most part very Wii-like in their simplicity: for example, Beat Sketcher lets you paint on your screen to music, Start the Party gets you to bash bugs with a racket, and EyePet lets you play with a Tamagotchi-esque critter. Several of these titles also feature disclaimers stating that they are still works-in-progress, which left me feeling somewhat disappointed at this fairly thin offering.<\/p>\n Not put off by the brief and juvenile demos though, I decided it was time to move on to a test worthy of a real gamer.<\/p>\n Real-world testing<\/strong><\/p>\n Having recently picked up the brilliant RUSE (read the MyGaming review here) I was really excited to see how it stacked up as one of the Move’s first supported titles. As soon as I reached the game’s menu screen I was chuffed to see that the Wand could already be used to select various options before I even started playing. I swept over to the ‘Continue Game’ button and resumed my assault on the evil German forces.<\/p>\n Forgoing the manual as real gamers do, I entered the battlefield hoping to figure things out as I went along. Fortunately being the intuitive system that the Move is it was only minutes later that I was dishing out orders of death to my tanks and whishing around the unit selection screen with ease. So useful is the Move controller in RUSE in fact that it may finally settle some of those tired “you can’t play RTS on a console” arguments; it may even give the good ol’ keyboard and mouse combo a run for its money.<\/p>\n A flick of the wrist to the right opens the unit creation menu which is navigated using the same trigger method as the XMB before closing it via another flick in the opposite direction. Units are then ordered around through simply pointing where you want them to go or what you want them to attack, and issuing their orders through the Move button. As an extra cool bonus, the glowing ball on the Wand changes its colour depending on the context e.g. it’ll turn red when targeting an enemy, letting you know exactly what action is going to be carried out even if you’re in the heat of battle.<\/p>\n I did make a few mistakes though as the system is not always laser-pointer accurate, but after a few minor adjustments to the sensitivity and an hour or so of practice I felt quite adept at controlling my forces.<\/p>\n Battlefield navigation took a bit more getting used to though, with twists of the wrist being used to turn the camera and some trigger pulls and up\/down movements zooming in and out. I switched to the Dualshock 3 for navigation by holding it in my left hand with the Wand in my right and instantly found this to be the ideal combo of control; I can only imagine this getting even easier when the less bulky Navigation Controller comes out next month.<\/p>\n Closing comments<\/strong><\/p>\n Despite a basic Starter Pack offering, I’m very excited for the future of the Playstation Move. One just has to look at the number of titles coming out with Move support (we can already have a go with it in Resident Evil 5 and Heavy Rain) and it’s clear that this is going to be a whole new level of gaming for PS3 owners and not just a gimmicky new controller as some have already slated it. (I’m already salivating for Move-enabled Killzone 3, and hopefully some Lightsaber-wielding in Force Unleashed 2.)<\/p>\n The big question though is, “Should I buy one now?” Well, with a fairly reasonable price tag of R699 RRP for the Starter Pack it’s not exactly going to put you out of pocket for being an early adopter, but the games selection is pretty limited at the moment. If you haven’t played Heavy Rain yet then the completely controller-overhauled Move Edition should be reason enough to get Move-ing, but other supported AAA titles will only be released in the coming months.<\/p>\n We’ll keep you updated though as soon as we get our hands on other Move titles, as well as an expanded review when the Navigation Controller and Charging Station hits the shelves.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dan Parmenter takes a swing at Sony\u2019s much-hyped motion controller<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11681],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-playstation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7707\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}