Sony believes that buttons are at the root of hardcore gaming experiences.
With E3 2010 over and done with, the motion gaming battle has begun between Sony’s PlayStation Move and Microsoft’s Kinect. Which one does Sony think is better? Move, of course, because it uses buttons where Kinect does not.
Sony R&D Manager Richard Marks told Eurogamer that gamers “want to know that what they’re doing is having an effect.” While he is a “heavy proponent of 3D cameras” like those Kinect uses, Sony looked at the technology and thought “there just weren’t enough experiences that made it make enough sense as a platform-level controller.”
According to Marks, Kinect’s lack of buttons prevents it from a enabling a truly hardcore experience. He believes: “Sometimes we need buttons to have certain kinds of experiences … We need to know exactly what you’re doing with your hands, especially in the more hardcore experiences.”
“When you have only the camera, it’s a magical feeling but sometimes you just wish you could select something,” he continued. “I don’t want to wave to click a button.”
“If you make a gesture to make something happen all the time, you don’t have that immediate feeling of knowing that it worked. You have to wait and see if it happened and that just slows everything down. A click gives instant knowledge.”
Though I don’t like to get in on corporate bashing, Marks is right. On my playthrough of Heavy Rain, there was a certain section where a rotation of the controller took me five times to get through correctly even when I knew it was coming and exactly what I was supposed to do. The issue was that the game was not reading my input correctly. Sometimes it’s better to just click a button, and Kinect is marketed around the fact that it has none. Kinect is a cool piece of technology, but Sony could be right in saying that Move might be suited to the more accurate experiences that a hardcore gamer would enjoy.
Source: Eurogamer
