Starting in the mid-2000s, games with more involved input than a simple controller started to become very popular. The trend did not start in that era, as we learned in Mara’s presentation in class — many video game peripherals existed in the 80s like the Konami Laser Scope, and served to get the player more immersed in the onscreen action. In the 90s, music games like Dance Dance Revolution and Samba De Amigo allowed players to have fun and also get a pretty mean workout in at the same time. The mid-2000s, however, are when these games really broke into the mainstream. For example, it was impossible to escape the allure of Guitar Hero at the time, practically every kid at the time had a plastic guitar or two sitting in their basement, before the band peripherals evolved to the drum set and microphone down the line. Even more apparent, the Wii’s controller itself was a motion gimmick, tying the entire console and hardware to this new wave of games.
I’m a fan of these games, to an extent. I think that the best ones have their own dedicated peripherals. My personal favorite of the bunch, Samba De Amigo, uses plastic maracas that sense height from the ground using sonar sensors. The maracas obviously don’t have many uses outside of that target software, but when the game itself is so much fun then I have no qualms about spending the money for two sets. Samba and DDR both started in the arcades, however, so Sega and Konami had a chance to test the waters and make sure that people enjoyed the concept before bringing it to the home.
Meanwhile, I think that trying to implement these controls into more traditional games is not a fruitful endeavor. I never personally enjoyed using the Wii Remote’s motion controls; it rarely amounted to anything more than pointing a cursor on the screen to do something that would be far easier with the analog stick or shaking the thing to accomplish something that could’ve just been done by pressing a button. In Super Mario Galaxy, for example, the player could point the Wii Remote at the screen to pick up little jewels. However, I honestly felt that this broke the immersion and I would just walk over to the jewels and pick them up instead because I didn’t feel like picking up the Wii remote and waving it around at the screen. In fact, nearly every game that I enjoyed on the Wii could have been played with the GameCube controller, which was immensely preferable. One title that I did enjoy with the motion controls was the second Rayman Raving Rabbids game, which was released shortly after the console’s launch and featured some 4-player minigames. In one, the characters were in a movie theater and you had to hold the controller up to your head like a cell phone and then put it down when the usher came in, or else face a point deduction.
I’ve never tried a virtual reality or augmented reality game, but they seem like very cool concepts. Horror games, for example, would be lot scarier if they surrounded the player with this technology rather than being confined to a TV screen. The accuracy and accessibility of the hardware will be key to determining how fun the games will actually be, however. Based on what I’ve heard in class, some of the new technology like the shifting mats that emulate terrain for players sound like really cool ways to play. I think that things like these could help to bring arcades back to the mainstream, as most people probably don’t have the space or money for such a device in the house. In the end, only time will tell how these new titles stand aside traditional TV video games.
CSE 40850 - Eddie Brady 