Wii Motion Plus

Anybody out there picked up Wii Motion Plus and games that came out this week: Tiger Woods 10, Grand Slam Tennis or Virtua Tennis 2009?

Tiger Woods 10 is getting great reviews, but the reviews for the tennis games are scarce at this point.

My brother is really into tennis, so I was thinking we could get Grand Slam Tennis and play online together. You can get Tiger Woods bundled with a motion plus, and I hear it's great, but I've never played a golf game besides Wii Sports golf and I've only been golfing for reals once.

I'm waiting for Wii Sports Resort, and Red Steel 2 before I get Wii Motion Plus. It really does look good, though. If only it hadn't come so late in the system's life span.

Billy Motion was telling me last night that WiiMotion Plus will work with all games, I thought it was just certain titles. Is that true? He claims that it's just a better accelerometer. I thought games had to be programmed to take advantage of it.

Supposedly the tennis game is really good. I'm waiting for RED STEEL 2 to get one though.

Damn shame THE CONDUIT doesn't use it. They really should have this thing built into the controls from day one.

He's confused. They have to code for it. In theory, Nintendo could change some of the underlying API's and provide better control for existing games but I wouldn't bet on it.

Even then, the IR sensor bar stuff is wholly unaffected.

I'm going to get the TIGER WOODS game. It looks dynamite, and the Frisbee Golf aspect? Fuck-to-the-Yes.

The developers of THE CONDUIT, High Voltage, have pretty quickly moved the forefront of innovative third party Wii gaming. The dev tools they built for THE CONDUIT let them prep one level of essentially, LEFT 4 DEAD using the Wii in sixty days before E3 . (It's called THE GRINDER). I'm reminded of Bungie back in the Mac days. They made great games, and they made even better engines for game development. Forge and Anvil were amazing for FPS development and that Myth engine was a wonder in its time. Watch out for these guys.

Hmm, that's what I thought then. It seems like the older games wouldn't really benefit from it anyway.

I think the hope is that they'll actually move toward motion control games and not so much god damn "shake to reload" crap.

I've got THE CONDUIT on preorder, but I'm not all that excited about it. Looks like a pretty generic FPS, which isn't really what I want from the Wii. However, I feel like I ought to support those guys, they are doing some pretty great work and really kind of raising the bar for what the Wii can do. If they can turn out a 360-quality FPS on woefully underpowered hardware, that's pretty significant and it shakes up the idea that the Wii can only do hobbled, casual games.

THE GRINDER looks pretty good too.

Michael Barnes wrote:

I've got THE CONDUIT on preorder, but I'm not all that excited about it. Looks like a pretty generic FPS, which isn't really what I want from the Wii. However, I feel like I ought to support those guys, they are doing some pretty great work and really kind of raising the bar for what the Wii can do. If they can turn out a 360-quality FPS on woefully underpowered hardware, that's pretty significant and it shakes up the idea that the Wii can only do hobbled, casual games.

THE GRINDER looks pretty good too.

That's pretty much how I feel too. I heard High Voltage say they were going to add Motion Plus support to Conduit, but that it didn't add much to the game so they left it off. Grinder looks way cooler though. I'm not all that interested in Gladiator A.D. though.

Red Steel 2 looks really awesome. I'm really looking forward to it and I hope it doesn't disappoint.

I thought Nintendo had said Wii Sports Resort was going to be $25 and bundled with Motion Plus. But everywhere online I see you can preorder, it says $50 and bundled.

I'm one of probably four people on the planet who really liked the first Red Steel. Probably every negative observation ever made about it is true, but it had some good ideas and was the only launch game where the developers got ambitious with the motion controls. The end result was decidedly clunky, but it was novel, and I had a lot of fun with it.

Unfortunately, almost nobody followed their lead. Even Nintendo took a less-is-more approach with the Wiimote from day one, which is pretty friggin' bad considering the whole damn system was built around it.

They really should have this thing built into the controls from day one.

Especially since after market upgrades to console systems have and almost unblemished record of complete and utter failure. Still, Sony managed to get a lot more mileage out of the original playstation by switching to the Dual Shock controllers, which consumers didn't seem to mind too much, and the console was pretty underpowered compared to it's competition at the time. So, it may work out for the Wii as well, but they really need to get some games worth buying onto that damn thing, and soon.

mjl1783 wrote:

Especially since after market upgrades to console systems have and almost unblemished record of complete and utter failure.

Like the Wii Fit. The Rock Band/GH controller craziness.

I suspect that those two have pretty much blown that old adage. Also, the thing about the Wii Motion Control is that it is $10 on top of the game. That's nothing like the massive expensive line of Sega craziness that make people say that.

The Rock Band and Wii Fit controllers don't count. They're bundled with all the games that use them, and the games that use them are extremely popular. Wii MotionPlus is not going to be the same thing, and you can't package it with every game that uses it if it's going to become standard.

If you're not into sports games, there is no reason to buy the thing right now other than curiosity. That, and maybe the anticipation of games coming out later that you do want to play. Unless you're in one of those two groups when Red Steel 2 comes out, you're going to pay more to play the game than you would without the required hardware. Granted, it's not much more, but it's more.

Is that $10 going to be a deal breaker for most people? Probably not, but if there's only a handful of games that use it, or the games that do use it sell like crap, or it's not eventually built into the remote itself, fewer people will go out and get it. If it doesn't sell, fewer games are going to use it, which will of course lead to even poorer sales for the hardware, and so on and so forth.

It's cheap enough to the point it probably won't matter, but the Ram Pak was pretty cheap, came packaged with some games, produced a very appreciable graphical improvement, and still tanked. So we'll see.

Comes with, what is to the general audience, WII SPORTS 2. Millions sold.

Us geeks totally underestimate the number of people that own a wii and play nothing but wii sports for half and hour once a week and are afraid to try anything else. They will buy this...

I could argue that the Wii itself is nothing more than a bundled peripheral for Wii Sports.

WII SPORTS really is kind of its killer app...I'm sure there's thousands- if not millions- of Wiis out there that never see another game other than WII SPORTS.


Unfortunately, almost nobody followed their lead. Even Nintendo took a less-is-more approach with the Wiimote from day one, which is pretty friggin' bad considering the whole damn system was built around it.

You know, it's funny. For better or worse, RED STEEL really kind of represented what we THOUGHT was going to come from the Wii. Actually, several of the launch games were including TWILIGHT PRINCESS, TRAUMA CENTER, EXCITE TRUCK, CALL OF DUTY 3 etc.

But once it took off and got into the hands of a new demographic, that changed. It was really in that second generation of software that we saw all the CARNIVAL GAMES, the endless fishing and cheerleading games, PARTEE BABIEZ or whatever it is, and so on.

Nintendo really kind of dropped the ball on licensing and made exactly the same mistake Atari did back during the video game crash by not controlling the third party field. They let any yahoo with a dev kit come up with some half-assed game with bobble-head looking characters.

I actually got to see this happen first hand. They made a Wii game based on one of the shows my wife works for. They had a development team come out and talk up all this stuff they were going to do. The game came out and it was HORRIBLE. All that stuff, concept art, ideas, amounted to nothing. It was a waggle game, and a really bad one at that. And yes, it had bobble-head looking characters.

So now, Nintendo's reputation among gamers is trashed. I don't know that Wii Motionplus or anything High Voltage does is going to repair it. They dove a little too far into the casual market and neglected everybody else, which was a big mistake in the long run although when money is rolling in it's hard to say "no" at the time.

Of course, a lot of the shit Nintendo takes is really unfair and is internet garbage. I keep seeing poor, dumb Reggie taking all this flack for talking up Nintendo and its products...what's he's supposed to do, say "Yeah, we fucked up, the vitality sensor is stupid, Wii is for pussies". HE'S THE NORTH AMERICAN PRESIDENT OF THE FUCKING COMPANY. Yet the PS3/360 fanboys eat up every corporate word of the gigantic megacorporations to which they've pledged fealty.

Rant over.

They will buy this...

They will probably buy this. There's precedent in both directions. That's all I'm saying.

Nintendo really kind of dropped the ball on licensing and made exactly the same mistake Atari did back during the video game crash by not controlling the third party field.

And when they did try to impose more stringent control over third party stuff back in the 90s, they got a nasty reputation of bullying and alienating third party developers. Damned if they do, damned if they don't I guess.

In the end, they could have imposed all the restrictions they wanted on third parties they wanted, it wouldn't have mattered. The shovelware sold; No More Heroes didn't. The people have spoken.

So now, Nintendo's reputation among gamers is trashed. I don't know that Wii Motionplus or anything High Voltage does is going to repair it.

Dude, where have you been? Nintendo's reputation among gamers has been trashed for years. Outside the handheld market, it's been mostly downhill for them since Mortal Kombat on the SNES.