flickering colours

8Jun/111

E3, Wii U Rapid Response

So this year I've actually followed the bulk of the E3 conferences. Its been an interesting experience, and maybe unsurprisingly I've had a few ideas regarding some announcements made, and reactions to those announcements. These are pretty rapid-fire thoughts, not refined or researched, but rather 'gut feelings' with about an hours' reflection time. The two things I'll talk about here are a general comment on the historical precession of the industry. There's been (as there always seems to be now) an overtone of disappointment, of questioning whether any of the big 3 are 'innovative enough' and why we just aren't surprised by their announcements at this year's E3. The second topic is more specific ideas on the Wii U.

12Mar/102

Control Freak

Move PS3 Motion controllerSo Sony has finally 'revealed' its worst-kept secret ever, the Playstation Move controller. Within seconds of the announcements (and before them too really) the Wii-mote rip-off claims started flying. This strikes me as such a predictable knee-jerk reaction to the leet kids out there who want to come off as superiour by being able to 'criticise' something and sound insightful. These critics act like this has never happened before, and further, that it is a bad thing... Let's have a look at a number of the controllers or 'gamepads' as they used to be called, and see who started copying who, when.

I'm going to start this discussion at the third generation of console, because the first two generations were so full of one-off consoles that had either IDENTICAL joystick and paddle controllers, or wildly different and practically unusable controllers. Many of these are virtually unrecognisable to gamers today and would be quite useless in modern games.