Hands-On With The PlayStation Move

The PlayStation 3 Motion Controller--wait, sorry, the PlayStation Move--feels like it has a lot of potential. But I'm not sure how much of that potential I saw in the games Sony had on offer at its GDC showcase tonight. The Move (it's going to take some time to get used to saying that) is able to track more variables at a higher level of precision than the Wii's Remote does, but most of the initial games Sony had to show seemed pretty similar to the kinds of things developers have been doing on the Wii for a couple of years now.

But first, let's break down the controller a little bit. It's got a glowing orb at its top, below which are the four standard PS3 face buttons and an "action" button marked with the Move logo in the middle of the four regular buttons. There are start and select buttons on the sides of the controller's cylindrical casing, and a trigger on its underside. Sony will also be selling a peripheral "sub-controller" that you'll hold in your off hand for games that require it, and this controller basically resembles the left half of a DualShock, with analog stick and shoulder buttons included. But SOCOM 4 was the only game I saw tonight that used this second peripheral.

Both of these controllers feel sensibly designed and perfectly natural in your hands. I didn't stop to think about which buttons I was hitting or how I was moving them around, probably because they're so similar to the existing PlayStation 3 controller. In fact, it sort of feels like Sony split a DualShock in two and slapped a scoop of multicolored ice cream on top of one side. Mmm, ice cream. I'll take a Rocky Road-flavored Move, please.

Based on my snap judgement, depth is the biggest thing about the Move that could change the way it's implemented in future games. The required PlayStation Eye camera apparently keeps a precise measurement from its fixed perspective of the size of the glowing orb at the top of the Move, allowing it to judge exactly how far you are from the television and adjusting your in-game control accordingly. That could let you move an in-game character or cursor in and out of a scene, maybe even reaching directly into the television and manipulating objects in the game world directly based on your distance from the television.

In fact, "alternate reality" in its various potential forms seems like the big advantage the Move has over the Wii (aside from HD graphics). In addition to the depth sensing allowing you to move in and out of the game, the Eye can supply a video feed of you and the controller, and the PS3 can seamlessly map 3D objects onto the controller to make it look for all the world like you're holding a paintbrush, or a tennis racquet, or a bug net rather than just a hunk of plastic with a glowing ball on the end. The 3D object-mapping is a striking and really impressive effect, but developers will need to come up with more engrossing ideas than simple minigames to make this aspect of the Move stick.

I got to spend some time with the light gun game The Shoot, the simplified hand-to-hand combat game Motion Fighter, and SOCOM 4, the last of which played pretty much exactly like you'd expect a third-person shooter to play. SOCOM 4 has destructible cover in it, but otherwise I didn't see much that was new to the franchise or the genre in general. That said, the Move felt like a natural and precise way to aim my weapon, without the swimminess or jitter that you sometimes get when using the Wii Remote as a pointing device. It's really too early to say how distinctly the Move will be able to differentiate itself from the Wii's controls; the potential seems to be there, but I'm waiting for Sony to offer a more profound proof of concept.

Here's a couple of less obvious things that actually excite me about the PlayStation Move.

• The PlayStation Eye can identify features like a player's eyes, nose, and mouth, and use them as reference points for head-tracking control, giving you the chance to control your perspective
• The color of the glowing orb on the controller is entirely controllable by the developer. It can display a smooth gradient from one color to another, so it could go from green to red slowly as your health diminishes, or something like that. Creative developers could probably come up with some interesting ways to use that feature.

How many other ways can I convey a "wait-and-see" approach to this thing? The technology seems to be more robust than anyone else doing motion control right now, but I want to see it harnessed by more than point-and-shoot games and minigame collections. Since the Move isn't shipping until around the end of the year, let's give Sony just a bit more time to impress us, shall we? 
 
See, here's a sample.