I mentioned via twitter that my copies of Just Cause 2 and Red Steel 2 had come in on Friday, so I’ve spent some time with both of those, although, significantly more with Just Cause… my goodness there is a lot to do in that game… if you have, or anyone in your family has ever had, OCD… stay the hell away from this game… I’ll be writing up initial impressions of the both of them either tomorrow, or Monday, but they are both pretty good. The mechanics in Red Steel work surprisingly well, and it’s fun, but it really doesn’t feel Motion Plus-y… I’ll go into more details later.

I was a believer before the initial release of the first ‘Skate’ game… I had played the Tony Hawk franchise for a long long time, and understood it had reached the end of the line when they started moving away from the skateboarding aspect of it (I think Underground may have been the last one I played, and 3 might have been the last one I enjoyed). Skate appeared to be bringing a more authentic and realistic approach to the genre, and I was fully on-board.

Skate delivered on the promise, creating a full and authentic world to skate in, obviously there were areas that were super tuned to be skate-able, but some of my favorite spots in Skate and Skate 2 were simple little sets of stairs just off in the middle of nowhere, that aren’t unlike something you might stumble upon in real life.

For example:

This leads me perfectly into my next point, Skate 2 is Web 2.0 in video game format… I don’t believe there is anything like it… they’ve created this whole social networking framework around the game. You create, and edit videos, pictures, spots, and publish them to your profile, you can view them from their website, they can be rated by the community, everything you would expect from a web 2.0 website… And they only plan to expand from there. Creating brands, teams, and parks, only expands that sense of community. It is a truly commendable effort, even if it failed, but it has worked very very very well. And in case you’re really interested, heres a link to my profile on Skate.reel

The video below is taken from the Skate site, and it outlines how they’re encouraging user creativity with  some new features in Skate 3.

The Skate franchise lives and dies by it’s mechanic, the skating is awesome, and they create environments to enjoy that mechanic, and thats it. I have no qualms about picking up the controller, and just skating around SanVan for hours, no objectives, no scores, just skating… I think they’ve only added a trick or 2 to this version, dark sliders for sure (my favorite). To my recollection there is only one other game that has sold me on this sort of open world mechanic alone, and believe it or not it was Spiderman 2… I spent hours upon hours in that game web-slinging because it was fun…

Its been pretty steady news about the Playstation Move since GDC, and a bunch of articles about how its not going to win over Wii owners, etc.. and I’ve be patiently biting my tongue up until now. There is a quote in the news today from Shigeru Miyamoto that really sort of tied together my reasoning for why the move can be successful, even if it doesn’t take an overwhelming share of the Wii’s install base.

Full disclosure: I’ve made no secret of the fact that; while I own all current gen consoles, I prefer to play my games on ps3 due to hardware problems with the 360 and simply a lack of worth while content on the Wii. I am not however what you would call a fanboy, and I feel I am pretty objective about just about everything in my life, not just video games.

There was a report today of a Q/A with Shigeru Miyamoto where he said the following:

The fact that in 2009 we were not able to sell more than we did in 2008 was simply that in comparison, we were not able to produce fun-enough products.

It’s rare for a public figure to say something so blunt, albeit accurate. I played exactly 2 games on my Wii this year, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and Wii Sports Resort, the former was really fun but not really worth owning a console for, and the latter I really just picked up so I could check out the Wii Motion Plus, which was kind of neat but didn’t get any play time after the first week. Apart from that the only other game that sort of interested me was MadWorld, and it simply didn’t look to be worth the money to me based on all the media coverage. Scanning the incomplete list on wikipedia there isn’t really anything else worth even considering. I plan on checking out Red Steel 2, but even still, 3 games in a year is not enough to justify that Wii still being on the shelf. As Miyamoto said, Wii games just weren’t fun enough this year.

So whats the issue here? Nintendo released a couple decent titles that everyone bought, and they got next to no support from 3rd party publishers… Apart from a (for lack of better term) bunch of shit, thrown together titles, 80% of which are probably crap mini-game collections. I think everyone who was going to cash in on these controls being a new and interesting thing has done so already. And I think this could work in Sony’s favor, if Sony comes out with a few solid titles that support this thing, and with names like SOCOM and LittleBigPlanet already associated with it, its hard to imagine that they won’t, it would be hard to imagine that many PS3 owners wouldn’t pick up the peripheral, even if you already own a Wii.

I agree with a lot of the posts that are focusing on Wii owners not buying a $300 console and a $100 peripheral to play motion control games, but I think thats only a fraction of the story. I CAN see Wii owners, spending $300 for a more powerful console, that can play motion control games if you so wish, that has huge support from various publishers (motion control and otherwise), and oh yea, it plays blurays and stream network media… The fact of the matter is, Move can be successful simply selling to its own install base, think of the PS3 owner who now don’t have to buy a $200 console to play a motion control game… AND on top of that, there is potential to actually have some good games to play on it a frequency greater than twice a year. If Sony does their part, I think some of us may be able to reclaim the shelf space currently occupied by their Wii, and only take it out again everyone couple years when Mario, Samus or Link show up.

Addendum: Destructoid’s Brad Nicholson has posted the best article I’ve read so far regarding the Move and how it differs from Wii Motion Plus, and Project Natal. Clearly it’s written from the Sony perspective, and I’m sure there are some rebuts about why each of the competitors decided to go the route they did. But from my perspective Sony’s points made a lot of sense. Anyway, I consider Brad’s article a must read if you’ve got any interest in this tech at all.