Andrew Dobson, skilled artist and Nintendo fan of old, gives his take on Project Natal and the Sony Wand in “Danny and Spot” (I’m showing you two comics that were uploaded together, but it’s the second comic that’s relevant here.) Check out his amazing work at the link above!

Fall has, uh, fallen upon us here at the Casa de Marlink, according to the bright red tree outside our door. Halloween rushed in and blew out with the speed and force of six three-year-olds on a sugar high, leaving us with just the leftovers of candy for trick-or-treaters, decorations to be taken down*, and some form of minor plague that some generous soul donated to the big Halloween party.

*Decorations were left up into November to ensure we did not incur the wrath of Sam by taking them down too early.

While I soothe my aching head and raw throat with honeyed ginseng tea, let’s get down to brass tacks. Or thumbtacks. Who even uses brass tacks anymore?

You might notice this isn’t the monthly webcomic review I’ve normally been doing the first Tuesday of the month, although a comic on the Web still makes a feature here. I’m switching up the way things are done, but since how a writer works is only of interest to the writer, I’ll spare you the details and get to the topic at hand. Well, topics. I’m gonna get random and complain about a few things here. This post was inspired by the Dobson comics you see here and the gripes they reminded me of.

This isn’t NEW-news; we’ve all heard that the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 are keen on adding motion controls to their systems. The response from the gaming community so far has largely been a big yawning “Meh.” My, the enthusiasm of disapproval sure has fallen since Nintendo announced the Wii Remote a few years back! (Read the “2006″ panel of the above comic to see the reaction I got a few years ago, when I expressed delight at the proposed Nintendo motion controls that have since come to rule the world.)

But, even though I posted a comic here that’s mocking the Wiimote-mockers, I’m not going to tread…too much…into that old territory of how it’s “cool” to hate the big N because they always seem to come out on top (funny, I would think that would be a reason to LIKE them. We’re supposed to like winners who provide quality products for the consumer, right? Or maybe I’m the only one who still values substance over style. Wait. Said I wasn’t gonna go there. I also said I’d call you after last night. Get used to disappointment, kids.) No, my problem with the gamer-dubbed “copycat” motion technology announced by Sony and Microsoft isn’t relevant to the “copycat” part.

We don’t have a 360 in this house, due to there being nothing we wanted to play on it. We do have a PS3, which I pretty much only use as a DVD/Blu-Ray player. I spend basically all of my gaming time on the PC, the Wii, or my older Nintendo systems (and much of my PC gaming is playing Nintendo ROM’s when I’m not playing Oblivion). It’s not that I’m just obsessed with everything Nintendo does to the point that I won’t touch the competition. It’s that I’m obsessed with Nintendo BECAUSE they produce the games I actually like to play and replay, an area in which both Sony and Microsoft have been severely lacking for me. Let’s have another set of Dobson comics to illustrate:

Before anyone says anything, A Boy and His Blob falls under the “third-party” category, not the “new intellectual property” one.

Yeah, I’m not a big first-person shooter fan, nor am I diggin’ the dull “realistic” brown graphics that make backgrounds and items largely indistinguishable and have become the gaming norm. Don’t think I’m ignoring that Nintendo has been known to fall into this trap too (Twilight Princess, why you gotta hurt me so bad with your muted colours? Can’t we go back to the vibrant pallets of your NES and SNES glory days when I could tell one object from another? Even your N64 forays were more vivid!) And many of the PS3 FPS offerings are pretty much all the same thing, graphics-/gameplay-wise. Even the rare stand-out FPS games like Call of Duty: World at War and Battlefield: Bad Company tend to look alike…and play alike in a bad way, which I’ll get into and ties into the motion-control thing….

I can’t comment on the 360’s proposed motion controls beyond quoting a few gamer responses of “Way to do what Nintendo already did!” since I’ve never played a 360, but I’ve got a big problem with Sony’s take. Which is, how can PS3 developers be looking at new types of controls when the ones they’ve been working with for years are still so loose and unresponsive?

There aren’t that many PS3 games I’ve been excited for and actually played. There was Metal Gear Solid 4 (more brown futuristic FPS with a scruffy hero!), Eden, LittleBigPlanet, and the minigame LocoRoco Cocoreccho!, and that’s pretty much it. And I probably would have liked those games a whole lot more, had the controls actually freakin’ worked.

The battle against Vamp in MGS4, for example, took about five times as long as it should have because the CQC maneuver to put someone in a lock-hold only works when it wants to. And let’s not forget the other times during the game that Snake wouldn’t grab what he was supposed to or go where he was told. (Cranky old man.)

In Eden, the controls work like you’re playing underwater with slow response time, which leaves your little character missing easy grab-jumps and constantly falling to the beginning of the level while the timer ticks down. I can generally only play one level at a time, before getting so frustrated at the controls that I quit playing it for the next two months.

LittleBigPlanet…do I even need to get into the controls and hit detection that are so sloppy, even the game’s designers admit there’s something amiss–and then completely reneged on their promise to repair the broken controls by Christmas 2008? I have tried so hard to love this game with all my heart because it’s extremely unique and obviously a labour of love (see also: Stephen Fry narrating), but it’s another one that leads to migraines. I still recommend to friends that they play this game–but as a rental. I can’t justify buying it until you’ve seen if you can love it despite the crappy controls.

LocoRoco…another game that would be so creative and so much fun, if only the damn LocoRocos actually did what they were told, instead of bouncing in place and ogling the pretty butterfly that is clearly telling them to jump on each other and form a stack. Many friends have seen this game on the PS3 and wanted to try it, only to give up after ten minutes of yelling at the screen and shaking the controller.

Ever since the PS3 entered my home, I’ve had this theory that game developers aren’t making games harder–they’re making games harder to play. (Or perhaps making the games themselves “stupider” so that they don’t recognize what you, the player, are trying to do with that weird little alien “controller” thing your PS3 has heard so much about.) And there’s a big difference between the two. People like a challenge. People don’t like watching themselves fail even though they hit the right button at the right time. If developers can’t get regular old button-dominated controls to work as they should, how can they expect to re-revolutionize gaming with a new(ish, *ahem* Nintendo) type of control? Do me a favour, Sony. Get the old right before you move on to the new. Make me love you, as Nintendo made me love them over two decades ago, and continues to make me love them, by getting it right the first time. And Microsoft? At least try to catch my interest next time, okay?

I now end this largely nonsensical ventilation to pop pills for the headache and more tea for the throatache. Catch you on the flip–or catch you at Nekocon this weekend for those who are going, provided I’m not dying of the zombie plague by then!

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 7:51 pm and is filed under American Comics, Burning, DKM Marlink, Gadgets, Internet, Random, art, games, news, stuff, the Internets, webcomics. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.