Motion Gaming BFFs

The Kinect is fun, especially that one dance game. I have heard a lot of people saying that it is way better than the Wii, which I can understand, but it is not really a fair comparison. They both fall in the motion gaming category but are very different technologies. They aren't really trying to do the same thing, and are used for very different kinds of games.

That said, they both have deficiencies, they're incomplete. They belong together, two halves of one whole.



The Wii's main deficiency is that it isn't entirely motion gaming. You move around but it is essentially just another input on the controller. With the nunchuck, you have the left stick in your hand just like other systems and moving the right half of the controller serves essentially the same purpose as moving the right stick. It can feel more interactive but at its core it is really just one more "button" on the controller. You can make any kind of games that have been made in the past, just with the added type of input.

The main problem I see with the Kinect is that the type of input is rather limited in its uses. It might be more in the center of the "motion gaming" category but I question how much developers will do with it in the future. It recognizes your silhouette and certain motions act as different inputs. Essentially this gives you a handful of "buttons" to use to make a game, along with the eye toy aspect of you silhouette taking up space on the screen.
This gives you the option to make games that are "touch this things on the screen" or "copy what this guy does". Using those with the added depth of the extra "buttons" is about as complex as you can get though, which is still more simplistic than what you can do on a normal controller, at least in some aspects.

So, the Wii isn't really motion gaming, just gaming with some motion. The Kinect is motion, with some gaming but not the whole depth that we have with traditional controllers. The Kinect could really open up if it had extra peripherals like a light gun or something like that. It would be great to make a game like Time Crisis, but instead of having a foot pedal to hide you would actually have to duck. Any kind of prop that the Kinect could use to allow additional input would exponentially open up the types of games that you could make. That would be true motion gaming and a lot less gimmicky feeling than the two separate halves we have now. But very few technologies have been perfected on the first try. I look forward to the results of next generation.