Mic Check

Does the Wiimote have a microphone? I don’t know. Nintendo has denied the possibility of a microphone attachment, but they have not explicitly stated that there will be no microphone support built into the controller. Can the Wiimote have a microphone? Yes. Here’s why.

Many argue that the Wiimote prototype seen at E3 is the final design. While this may be true, even after E3 Shigeru Miyamoto admitted, “We’re still debating on the area of how many buttons to use.” This implies that there was still room for at least some small changes in the design of the controller. However, it isn’t necessary to change the form factor of the controller much to add microphone support. Speakers and microphones aren’t all that different in their makeup, and as many sound enthusiasts will tell you, it is possible to use headphones/speakers as microphones. The quality will likely not be as good as an actual microphone, but it will get the job done. So, if Nintendo decides not to include microphone support, it won’t be because it would require another hefty controller redesign.

Next, let’s assume that the Wiimote adheres to the Bluetooth 1.2 specification, meaning the Wiimotes could reach data transfer speeds of 723.1 kbps. How much bandwith does it take to send audio? According to the Bluetooth specification, using either the continuous variable slope delta (CVSD) modulation codec or the pulse code modulation (PCM) codec [A-law or µ-law] takes 64 kbps, or less than 9% of the available bandwidth. Of course with Bluetooth 2.0, bandwidth becomes even less of a concern, but even at 723.1 kbps it is difficult to conceive that the controller data would have such a high bandwith requirement. If Nintendo decides to not include a microphone, it won’t be because audio would take too much bandwidth.

Battery life would also be a concern if a microphone were present. Most bluetooth headsets, if used constantly, only last several hours before the need for a recharge. A controller with several hours of battery life, however, would be nearly unusable. Therefore to conserve battery life, most games that would use a microphone might first only accept audio input at certain times and second may require that a button be held while using the microphone . If the mic is only used as needed, the battery draw for using a mic may not greatly impact battery life. If Nintendo decides to not include a microphone, it won’t because of battery drain.

Having said this, I decline to speculate on whether nor not Nintendo may be planning some microphone support. However, for those who state that it is not practical to do so, I’d like to hear the reason.

Ubisoft Gets It: Why Red Steel Needs Canned Sword Moves

I suppose some good press about Ubisoft’s Red Steel demo did slip out after E3, but it was far overshadowed by complaints about the grainy graphics and less-than-impressive controls. In fact, the single most common complaint about the demo was the “canned” swordplay maneuvers: regardless of how emphatically the contoller is flailed, the game responds with simply horizontal, vertical, and diagonal slashes. “I want free sword control!” cried the masses.

Luckily for us, the masses aren’t game designers. The last time they were, Atari was on its way out the door because of the lack of software quality standards. I refrained from harshly criticizing the games controls (though even I felt they need improvement) because Ubisoft is a smart and successful company; if they felt the need to design the controls this way, there had to be a reason. It isn’t possible that the idea of free sword control simply hadn’t occurred to the development team.

I played through Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney again recently, and I decided to take Mia Fey’s advice. She urges, “Phoenix, think outside the box! Don’t ask yourself why Ubisoft would design the sword controls this way. Ask yourself why Ubisoft *HAD* to design the controls this way!” So I did. And I finally got it. I think it’s time some other people did too.

My argument makes some basic assumptions about the Red Steel which, from a quick search on the web, appear to be correct:

1. The hero will wield a single sword that does not get upgraded throughout the course of the game. Why you would need to upgrade a sword anyway is beyond me.
2. An integral part of the game’s development is sword training that takes place after reaching Japan.
3. Sword training involves learning new swordfighting techniques.

Building a Gesture Vocabulary
First, given the complexity of any 3D control scheme, it may be better to start with a 2D example. Let’s assume that Red Steel were instead being developed for the Nintendo DS, as farfetched as that may sound. When you unsheath your sword, how should it behave? Should scribbling wildly translate into a flurry of sword strikes? If so, isn’t that the analog equivalent of mindless button mashing? More likely we, as the hero, are holding a sword seriously for the first time. Only the most basic lesson of “cut them with the sharp side” is pressing to us. With the stylus, drawing a line quickly from the left side of the screen to the right or vice-versa may be simple horizontal slice, and similar motions could cause vertical and diagonal slashes. These simple techniques form the basis of a gesture vocabulary through which we can express our gaming skill.

If any game of appreciable length were to progress with only these three techniques at our disposal, the game would not only be boring but also might lead to some repetitive stress injuries. Instead, as we progress through the game, we expect to learn new sword techniques that are executed with new, intuitive gestures. These gestures may be available at any time or could act as combo chains (imagine the ubiquitous hit counter pulsing away in the upper-right corner of the screen) or power attacks. With each new gesture representing a new, named technique, the size of the gesture vocabulary that we call to mind when fighting becomes the out-of-game analog to the amount of training we have received in-game.

In short, training leads to new techniques. Practicing new techniques leads to increased skill. This is done by expanding the gesture vocabulary available to the player.

Thinking Ahead

Anyone who sight reads music, plays Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution, or practices a form of martial arts seriously knows that thinking only in the present can be a fatal mistake. The mind has a buffer of actions that can be performed from muscle memory alone while the conscious mind is thinking ahead. I imagine were I to engage in actual sword fighting, this would also be the case.

Circling my enemy or facing him/her head on, I may attack with light, tentative strikes aimed at catching my opponent off guard. In the even that I notice an opening, I may lash out with a series of attacks knowing that my opponent must parry each one of them until I either make a bad strike and leave myself unguarded or become sloppy in my attacks. If my opponent uses this opportunity to counterattack, then I must be on the defensive until (s)he ceases or I notice another opening. I imagine this to be the ebb and flow of sword battle.

As I am not even an amateur swordsman in real life, I don’t have a library of techniques in my head from which I can pull on the fly to execute a series of attacks. At best, I can think, “(S)he’s not blocking, so I’ll keep swinging.” On the other hand, if I know that moving my controller in a certain pattern produces a particular kind of attack combo, I may choose to employ this pattern to attack when my enemy is at a disadvantage. Instead of thinking, “Just keep swinging!” I would think, “Okay, now do this, that, this, that, and that!” This jibes with how I imagine the situation may evolve in real life; in essence, there wouldn’t be a ton of freeform improvisation on the fly. Instead, the swordsman would think about the options available at all times and may begin to execute a series of attacks almost mindlessly while watching for any sign of a sudden counterattack.

The structure of canned attack moves allows the player to focus on the tools at one’s disposal to achieve victory. Moreover, it allows each technique to be named, memorized, and recalled at will. Using the memory of these techniques, the player can enter “the zone” wherein multiple attacks are unleashed in a combination that continues to build as long as the player can continue to think through the attack.

Flailing Failure

What if you are already a master swordsman? Wouldn’t freeform sword control be the best way to proceed? Wouldn’t it be more fun to have freeform sword control even for novice swordfighters?

One thing that gamers should realize is that Red Steel makes no claims at being a sword fighting simulator. In fact, Red Steel is no more a sword fighting simulator than Guitar Hero is a guitar playing simulator (ask any guitarist!). That is to say, at times you may feel really engaged in the game, but in real life you are still pressing buttons that the game translates into a realistic fantasy experience. The actual act of wielding a sword (or wielding an axe) is far more complex than any game meant for a wide variety of players could possibly convey. There are intricacies and nuances and intricacies upon nuances that are only understood by the most talented in those disciplines.

Freeform sword control would for most players turn into a tiring, rampant arm flailing experience. Moreover, it would be difficult to convey the hero’s slow sword mastery because any attacks you will learn are available from the start. Since I have already stipulated that there are no sword upgrades, this leads to a lack of character power/skill progression and stands at odds with basic assumption #2 above: an integral part of the game’s development is sword training that takes place after reaching Japan. If you want to get better, you have to learn. After you learn, you have to train. And after that, you might one day get good.

And let’s not forget that Ubisoft’s development team is not composed by a clan of master swordsmen. Rather than asking themselves the question, “How can I make swordfighting realistic?” they should instead be asking themselves the question, “How can I make swordfighting really fun?”

They Get It

The more I think about this, the more I’m convinced that Ubisoft really gets it and we don’t. The Wii controller is new to just about everyone right now. We all expect new, immersive ways to play games. However, as most of us haven’t spent more than an hour with the controller yet, we don’t know what it should feel like to play a game from beginning to end. We want to feel that the controller is our gun. We want to feel that the controller is our sword. Yet at the same time we expect wielding a gun or sword in a game to be much easier than the real life counterpart and still be engaging. Let’s not begrudge Ubisoft the right to act on our behalf and create a game that is intuitive, fun, and involving in ways that we aren’t yet capable of understanding. Let’s not be too harsh on them for limiting their E3 demo to a handful of canned sword strikes. Instead, let’s trust that these designers have our best interest in mind — fun — and that they know what kind of experience will help us achieve it.

Edit: digg this post

Edit 2: Comment moderation enabled. If you’d like to comment, please come up with something better than “Dude, you sounds [sic] gay!”

Rhythm Heaven

Q: How can you follow up a franchise as great as WarioWare?

A: Rhythm Heaven.

I cannot wait.

Third Party Pants

I’ve read a few articles lately claiming third parties underestimated the level of interest in the Wii and as a result haven’t thought seriously of moving any of their franchises to or creating new intellectual properies for the system. As it were, they were caught with their pants down. Moreover, they claim that the only third party developer that will really get a chance to cash in on the Wii launch window is Ubisoft because of Red Steel and to a lesser extent Rayman: Raving Rabbids.

It’s a good point that these articles make. It also sounds awfully familiar. Another system suddenly exploded in popularity in such a way that no one thought it could, and few third party developers have full-fledged games in development for it. It’s called the Nintendo DS.

Unsubstantiated reports indicate that third party studios large and small are scrapping their PS3 projects and porting their games to the Wii. If so this is probably good news, though I am concerned about how these ports might utilize the controller. If developers are really jumping ship in regards to the PS3, though, Sony has no one to blame but themselves. They’ve managed to dig quite a PR and unproven technology trench since E3, and being the market leader only affords you so much slack.

When chatting with a friend of mine earlier today about this, he said something that really stuck with me:

“Sony’s been the 500-pound gorilla in the market for too long. Winners don’t learn; they just get dumber until they lose.”

That one has the ring of truth. I’ve seen it happen before.

It happened to Nintendo.

Stroke Order

After I recovered from my first hands-on time with the Wii at E3 (see my impressions on Nintendo’s website at http://wii.nintendo.com/home.html by clicking the “From E3″ tab and viewing the video at position (3,3) from the upper left), I went to the significantly less crowded Nintendo DS area to see what portable goodness lay in store for the upcoming months.

Having seen the trailer for The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass weeks before, my top non-Wii priority was to give the game demo a shot to see how it was shaping up. Recalling my experiences with A Link to the Past and The Minish Cap, I poised my thumbs over the control pad after touching the screen to begin the demo. First I tried to figure out which was the sword button, but none of the buttons reacted. Don’t Zelda games usually have the controls in the upper-right corner of the screen? A tentative press of the control pad also yielded no response. Finally, I picked up the stylus and touched the screen. The hero hurried to that spot I had touched.

At this point I felt a little cheated; I can understand Nintendo wanting to add touch screen controls for their games, but this is probably the first game where I really felt forced to use the stylus for something that seems easier to do with the control pad and face buttons. The hero moved where I touched the stylus and interacted with onscreen entities when I tapped them (such as swinging the sword to attack or opening treasure chests). Though initially awkward, later parts of the demo dungeon that involved using the boomerang (for which the path must be drawn) had me glad that the stylus was already in hand. I got used to the touch screen controls far faster than I thought I would have, and by the end of my ten-minute demo, I was convinced that the control scheme wouldn’t break the game after all.

The Phantom Hourglass is not the only DS game eschewing control by the face buttons altogether. Joining also are the forthcoming Star Fox Command and Mario Hoops 3 on 3. Though games that are controlled purely via stylus are not rare for the system, these games may represent the first attempts at moving established genres and franchises to control schemes that are intuitive to nongamers yet non-intuitive but easy-to-grasp to hardcore gamers.

Is Nintendo taking the right approach in forcing stylus-oriented gameplay in games like Phantom Hourglass? Or should face button control still be offered to satisfy the hardcore audience?

Genius of Toshio Iwai

You may or may not know Toshio Iwai by name. His most recent piece of software, his fourth to date, is a Nintendo DS title called Electroplankton. Though it’s one of my favorite pieces of software for the Nintendo DS, neither is it a game nor can I freely recommend it to just anyone. This piece of software, however, will always occupy a special place in my heart for giving me the courage to start trying to perform music live.

In honor his contributions to music and gaming (via Nintendo), I am posting a few links to Iwai’s current, and future works.

Electroplankton Live (via IGN)
Pixelsurgeon Interview
Toshio Iwai @ Sonar 2006
Official Tenori-On Page
Toshio Iwai’s Tenori-On Blog

Mic Check

We’re a few posts in now and devoid of comments. Any new readers yet? Any comments?

Camera Control

The strongest argument for a second analog stick on today’s controllers is camera control. This applies to both third-person 3D and first-person games. Though we have Nintendo to thank for popularizing the independent movement of the camera in 3D console games, it seems like Nintendo might have abandoned its own gaming convention with the Wii controller. Aside from FPS, I can’t see a simple way to allow flexible, independent camera control.

This may not have been an oversight on behalf of Nintendo. Even though I’ve grown used to the dual analog stick paradigm, I never became entirely comfortable with it. Not only is there the issue of vertical inversion to deal with, but some games also have horizontal inversion (i.e., spinning the character versus spinning the world, which is only an issue in third-person titles). Worse yet, many games do not allow the inversion of the axes to be configured.

This doesn’t mean that Nintendo has abandoned third-person 3D gaming. Some of the most prominent titles on the system are of this ilk, most notably The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy. What most people fail to realize — even those that have actually played the demos — is that neither do these games have strict camera control nor do they appear to need them.

First, observe Twilight Princess in action. Any time the perspective can be manually adjusted, up, down, left and right arrows appear at the screen extremities. This rarely happens aside from the first-person targeting. Also, be sure to note how closely the camera follows the hero throughout the demo. This is likely a combination of complex programming and clever level design.

Now observe Super Mario Galaxy wherein there is no control of the camera whatsoever. The camera smoothly zooms and pans to follow Mario and also to suggest the direction in which he should travel on larger planetoids. Again I’m guessing complex camera programming and clever level design.

Though I can’t name all the playable Wii demos at E3 that were not FPS, static viewpoint or on rails, I am certain that these weren’t the only two. And let’s face it, the third-person free-scrolling play style is very prominent in modern console gaming.

What does the lack of a second analog stick mean for third-party developers? Is the death of the third-person free-scrolling game without a smart camera imminent, and if so, is this a good thing? Will this omission result in smarter third-person games, more original Wii-specific intellectual properties, or a lack of support from many third-party developers?

Power Glove, Revisited.

This picture from Go Nintendo is so cool that I simply have to repost it.

Have a look at the Power Glove, revisited.

The Great Wii Hope

The people who have had an opportunity to play the Red Steel demo at E3 are nearly all of one mind: disappointed. That isn’t to say that the game had no merits. I was impressed with the demo because it was a good exhibition of some of the things of which the controller was capable. However, I did think that if the gameplay in the demo accurately represented their final take and tuning of the controls that they were in for a world of hurt on launch day.

Ubisoft is in a unique position as a third-party company attempting to release a blockbuster Wii launch title that redefines a popular genre. The Wii controller has been touted as what could become the new de-facto standard in console FPS control, so Red Steel is under the scrutinizing microscope (as well as MP3 Corruption). If it does not perform well on release, other third-party developers will hesitate to make FPS titles of their own for the system. On the other hand if they pull it off, fans of the FPS genre will flock to the Wii in droves.

Let me make this clear. The Red Steel demo at E3 was interesting as a tech demo. However as an FPS (either first-person shooter or first-person swordfighting), it was not serviceable due to control issues and lack of graphical polish. Both of these issues have time to be corrected.

Another reason why Red Steel is so highly anticipated is because of the story line. Though it isn’t terribly original, it does seem like a great premise for an FPS, and it allows every man to live out his boyhood fantasies of wielding guns and swords in such a way that it feels somewhat realistic. And mostly in Japan, no less. While fighting gangsters. Yes.

Ubisoft is well aware of the demo’s reception at E3 and has said in multiple interviews that the controls — particularly the swordfighting — are being retuned. They have even started a developer blog at IGN to post updates about the game’s development to make this and their other goals more clear. As long as there is a lot press, either bad or good, outlets like this will always have a captive audience.

More so than any other third-party game on launch date, I want to see Red Steel succeed. I want the weapon aiming to be responsive, and I want the swordfighting to be realistic and fun. I want to have fun playing this game, and I want people to have fun watching it as well, perhaps anxious to get their hands on the controller themselves. And moreover if they pull this off, it will show that Nintendo is not the only company capable of designing a bestselling title for their gaming hardware.

And all this coming from a guy who doesn’t play FPS.