Harmonix and Nintendo might have taken casual gaming to the headlines, but it was Sony who arguably kickstarted that particular revolution with products like Buzz, SingStar and Sony London’s EyeToy camera. The latter has built up an installed base of 10.5 million during its five years on the market, and has benefited from strong in-house software support.
With the Mario creator now firmly in the casual gaming driving seat and Microsoft pushing out the likes of You’re In The Movies, EyeToy game designers Sandy Spangler and Mark Parry have been chatting to GamesIndustry.biz about their competitors.
Spangler began by talking up EyeToy as against the Wii remote. "It’s more intuitive, it’s very clear, as opposed to trying to figure out how to… use the Wii remote in ways that maybe naturally don’t make sense – you wave it a lot to do activities where you wouldn’t be waving in real life.
"Whereas what we always try and do with our games is make a direct correlation between the motion that you’re doing and the action on screen, the effect you’re having on the game."
He admitted, however, that the Wii had been "great" for the genre as a whole. "[The Wii] has also been great because now there’s that much more interest in casual gaming and other ways to interface with games. I think it’s just great, it’s just making that many more people out there who maybe would never have thought about buying a videogame system or playing videogames – suddenly they’re interested. That’s expanding the market, that’s always good."
More sustained criticism was applied to Microsoft’s Xbox Live Vision camera, which launched in late 2006. "It’s surprising – the camera came out a while ago and they came out with the one download game, Totem Ball, and then that was it." Spangler observed. "I think that [with You’re In the Movies] they’re probably going to have some technical difficulties to wrestle with.
"They’re using some technical elements that are not reliable, at least not according to our experience. They’re using background subtraction to put you in the movie, and it’s not very robust, that’s why we haven’t done it in any of our games. If the white shifts in the room or something, it can stop working. Good luck to them."
There’s absolutely oodles more through the link.