Have you been day-dreaming about PlayStation Move and its wealth of possibilities? As you can imagine, we have, hence the article you’re about read! Now, indulge us in our fantasies for just a few minutes. We’re not saying that implementing PlayStation Move into these games would be possible, nor are we saying that it would necessarily work. We’re as clueless as you are to its possibilities until we see it in the flesh. In a perfect world, however, these are the franchises that we feel could really benefit from Move if indeed the technology is capable of making such crazy dreams come true.
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Tekken
Now bear with us here – we know that prancing around in front of the TV screen is embarrassing enough at the best of times, but when you’re basically kicking somebody’s teeth out in-game you probably don’t want to be doing a drunk’s version of the funky gibbon in reality. But think about those sweet 10+ button combos for a minute. Now think about how cool it could be, when playing against a mate in the same room, to be stringing together 10+ martial art’s shapes as said mate cowers in the squatting block position beneath you.
If the Move can handle that kind of frantic shape-shifting, if it can deal with the precise movements that would make doing Paul’s Death Fist, Bruce’s Nightmare Elbow or Jack’s Jackhammer feel so satisfying to enact with the curtains drawn, then the rush you’d get out of pulling off a ten move combo and making all the right martial art’s master shapes would be out of this world. The clincher here is that you’re only going to look as daft as an expert air guitarist does thrashing away to Highway To Hell and you’ll feel ten times as cool.
Heavenly Sword
These motion capture wands work great for sports bats, be they tennis racquets, baseball bats, cricket bats or ice hockey sticks, but there’s only so many ways you can whack a ball. Swords, on the other hand, can thrust, twirl, chop, hack and slash in a million different ways and they’re all exceedingly satisfying in the realms of Heavenly Sword. Sure, it’s a total no-brainer suggesting that a chop-chop, maim, kill, disembowel game would benefit from some motion detection but Heavenly Sword’s got the right set up to make this more than just a swing your arms around in a Jedi Knight kind of way party. For starters, the three modes of attack attached to said Heavenly Sword, long range chain thing, heavy duty power blade and nifty, stab you in the eye before you can say not in the face sword could be mapped on to the Move in such a way that all the motion detection jiggery pokery would allow you to utilize all three attack styles exactly as they are on screen.
We can see it now: millions of people across the planet unable to stop themselves from butchering a Jaws quote and proclaiming, “We’re gonna need a bigger living room” right after they’ve launched into brutal, bloody attack on an enemy army and ended up smashing all the pictures off the bookshelf and breaking that family heirloom their grandfathers carried up their skin flute through the final year of World War II. And that’s only the half of it, the amount of fun we’ve had messing around with the after-touch on projectiles in Heavenly Sword would increase tenfold if you could do the same thing with a deft flick of the wrist. This game is gagging for it.
LittleBigPlanet
There’s no real reason to give LittleBigPlanet some motion capturing enhancements; if it ain’t broke don’t fix it goes the reasoning. But then we had a little idea. Wouldn’t it be cool if when you’re designing your own levels you could add in your own Move moves? You know, like say you’ve just devised a fiendishly hard level and you want to make it that little bit harder for all those people out there with the innate knack of completing everything ever on the day of its release. Wouldn’t it be sweet if you could video yourself tossing one PS Move over your shoulder and catching it behind your back while rubbing the other one on your head and then setting that as the only way a player can perform jumps in your level? This is a genius idea and we won’t have anyone say otherwise.
The scope for extraordinary stupidity is massive. Aside from the obvious sexually suggestive shapes that can be thrown while holding a thick black bat with a bulbous tip in your hand, there’s the endless one-upmanship that comes with trying to out do one another with ever more outlandish moves. If all goes well LittleBigPlanet will reach the heady heights of a medical condition – forget Tennis Elbow, here comes LittleBigPlanet Shoulder.
MotorStorm
Anybody familiar with Mario Kart on the Wii will know that putting motion detection into a racing game doesn’t make it any better. And unless you can rig up some sort of elastic band-based set up whereby any cornering attempted is met with some meaty resistance, motion detection lends nothing to car racing games at all. However, motorbikes live in a different physics world to motorcars. On a bike there’s no need to steer left and right with a wheel – when you’re blapping (yes, blapping, that’s the professional term for going stupidly, bone breakingly, face skin scrapingly fast) around hairy off-road circuits it’s all about the lean.
You’ve got to lean into the corners; the further you lean the sharper the turning. So would it not be a damn great game that allowed you to strap a PS Move to each shoulder and simply lean your way round MotorStorm’s chaotic off-road courses? Lean back to pull wheelies, forward to land the huge jumps. Sure, it would probably suck for the trucks and cars, but the quad bikes, dirt bikes and snowmobiles are perfect for this and MotorStorm is one kind of videogame that would definitely benefit from some motion detection shenanigans.
Flower
Right, it’s time to calm down a little. An entire evening of thrashing around with two Moves in your hand isn’t going to help you get any sleep. Normal people would do the sensible thing and turn their consoles off. Have a cup of Ovaltine, read a book, pop some easy listening on, that sort of thing. But we’re not normal people, are we? We’re fanatics. And as such we can’t bring ourselves to turn the thing off until we’re halfway up Stair Mountain on our way to beddy byes. We need another way to unwind.
Everybody and his grandma knows that Flower is a beautiful, relaxing, engaging videogame, so what better way to chill out than with a spot of Tai Chi? This has got to be one of the best games to nail some motion capture to. Mapping the controls to various Tai Chi moves would mean that you could play this with the curtains wide open and not feel a complete fool if any of the neighbours spot you through the window, since they’ll think you’re some kind of spiritually well-balanced human being in touch with your inner being. Plus, you’d be learning some particularly violent martial arts moves without even realising it and you’d be playing a fantastic game all at the same time. So you could go to bed at the end of each day having satisfied your videogame needs while impressing that little cutie from over the road and arming yourself with the kind of moves shaolin monks once used to smash the skulls of marauding enemies with. What’s not to love about that?
What games do you feel that would benefit from PlayStation Move functionality, PSU readers? Be sure to let us know in the comments section below!