Playing After Burner Climax.

If you haven’t bought it, you’re a cunt.

Sony, desperate to drum up hype for their new motion controller, the Playstation Move, have tried to rationalise why the “hardcore” market doesn’t like motion control, and why this will change with their new controller.

“Hard-core gamers have looked down their nose at motion gaming: it’s not particularly satisfying for them because it’s not terribly precise or challenging, it’s more social. So we’ll have games that the whole family can play that are very social , but we’ll also be able to do hard-core gamer games via a motion device that has never been done before.”

Now before I rip this concept to shreds, I will say I do see one action that the motion control should be able to do better than the common controller, and that is as a targeting or pointing device, for very much the same reason I think a mouse is better to play FPS games with. So maybe all those Halo/Battlefield/CoD players out there (and fucking hell is there a lot of you) might be better off with motion control. Makes a good lightgun substitute for games like House of the Dead too.

But as we’ve seen with the Wii, developers have had a history of shoehorning motion controls into games that really just don’t need them. No doubt with the arrival of the Playstation Move and Project Natal, we’ll see the same thing happening to PS3 and 360 games too. There just lies one simple problem:

Pressing buttons and moving a joystick/d-pad is better.

Every time you press a button or move in a direction on a traditional controller it is programmed to do the precise thing the button/stick/d-pad is meant to do. Not only that, anything in the game world that you react with is programmed to to respond to whatever actions those button presses represent.

(Sure there are games where that doesn’t happen, due to poor collision detection, bad AI, etc, but that’s more due to the fact they are badly programmed games so lets forget those, or at least try to.)

Now with motion control we have a system that, at it’s worst, is programmed to execute what a button press can do with a gesture, basically making you exert more effort that is needed just to do a simple task.

“But Mentuss… What about 1:1 Motion control like the MotionPlus and Sony’s new Move controller? That’s far more precise!”, I hear you (and the execs at Sony) say.

Oh yes, 1:1 Motion control! That will fix everything.

The problem with that lies in how the environment reacts to you. Sure, you can stand in front of the TV, waving your controller in the air (waving it like you just don’t care), and see it perfectly replicated on screen. But you still end up having to do the same motions time and time again because that’s what the environment responds to… It’s the only way you can kill something/open a door/jump to the next platform/etc, which just ends with the reasoning that you might as well still be pushing a freaking button!

This is before we even get to talking about the limits of human physiology. When you have to react to something happening on a screen, pressing a button to perform a pre-programmed result is always going to be more reliable than having to flail your limbs about performing the moves yourself. For a large percent of people, the reaction time for pressing a button compared to waving a limb is going to be much smaller too, purely because we human beings are a diverse bunch and not everyone playing a game is at peak physical fitness.

This is where Sony’s argument that motion controls “just weren’t precise enough” falls down: It’s not about the precision of the controller, but the precision of the people using it!

If you want proof, just take a look at Tony Hawk Ride. Not only did the game need tremendous dumbing down due to the use of a new motion based controller, but the controller made what was left of the game an unplayable mess on high difficulties, as you needed the reactions and physical fitness of a real pro skater to play it.

If instead of shoehorning the tech into games that just don’t need it, you build games around the technology, it’s not like there isn’t a market for for them. Heck, the Wii has proved that ten times over. But does it really matter that those games don’t strike a chord with the old school/hardcore gamers? What the hell is wrong about making different games for different markets using different control systems?

The only answer I can see is greed. Pure and simple, and it’s kind of sickening. You see this huge market of people who would rather play with motion control because its “simpler” to them, a market that dramatically increases sales, and you think that by adding this type of controls to a game will increase your potential sales, you don’t give a shit if changing the control system pisses off the people who used to play the controller-based versions of your games because the sales are now multitudes higher. If you are one of the people making the decisions in the games industry that thinks this way: Fuck you. Because one day, the giant money train you’re riding could just crash and burn, and I hope it fucking does.