Going in to E3 2010 motion control was a big question mark. After three years of Waggleware from Nintendo’s Wii both Microsoft and Sony promised something better as they each jumped into the fray with their new tech. Both Microsoft’s controller free Kinect and Sony’s wand and navigation noreallythiswasn’tatallbasedonthewiiremoteandnunchuckatalldon’tyourememberwemade-funofthatgoofyshitwhenthePS3cameout based Move were covered in the press leading up to the show but E3 was going to be where we finally found out for sure. And we did. While I was not able to go to the press conferences I did manage to get my hands on both the Move and Kinect on the show floor and I was a bit surprised by what I found.

I assume if you are reading this you already know what the Move and Kinect are and have probably already formed your own opinion based on impressions and videos posted elsewhere but for the reader who may have taken a tumble down the wrong rabbit hole and is still reading I will give a brief description of both systems before getting to my own impressions.

When the Playstation 3 launched three years ago it did so right before Nintendo’s Wii came out. At the time, Sony was touting the motion control features of the Sixaxis controller and swore up and down that the inclusion of motion control had nothing at all to do with the Wii being a motion control system and further claimed that the lack of rumble had nothing to do with an ongoing lawsuit but rather that rumble would throw off the motion control and who the hell cared about rumble anyway? If the debut of the Dual Shock 3, complete with rumble and rudimentary motion control, shortly after the lawsuit was settled suggests that Sony was being disingenuous about the hows and whyfors of its controller choices then seeing the Move should prove that Sony had its sights set on the Wii all along. Basically if you took the Wii remote and threw a ping pong ball on top of it you would have the Move controller. If you did nothing at all to the nunchuck peripheral aside from making it wireless, you would have the Navigation component. It is pretty unabashedly the exact same looking thing. But looks can be deceiving and Sony promised that this would be able to provide what the Wii could not: 1 to 1 motion tracking.

For the Kinect Microsoft stayed away from plagiarizing the look and feel of other controllers by taking them out of the equation and making a more advanced version of Sony’s Eye Toy to provide an experience where your movements in open space are tracked and represented on screen. It is like the computer in Minority Report only you aren’t wearing gloves and you are not Tom Cruise. Microsoft claimed that this was going to really revolutionize gaming as we know it and went so far as to put up advertising decals on Media attendees’ bathrooms in their hotel room.

Prior to E3 I really had no idea who I was rooting for. I have all three systems although I am mostly an Xbox guy. Ironically for this debate my loyalty for the Xbox has a lot to do with my preference to its controller. So it was kind of anybody’s game.

I tried Kinect first because I spent the first half of the show in the South Hall and it was there. My first experience with it was Dance Central, a Harmonix made dancing game where you and at least two others can get in front of the camera and do the moves that scroll up from the bottom of the screen while your on screen avatar does the moves properly while looking cool. The girls that worked there who danced with me also looked cool. I, however, was just about as far away from looking cool as I could get without moving back in with my mom. The song I ‘danced’ to was Hella Good by No Doubt and I have to admit that I had a lot of fun while making an ass of myself. I didn’t do terribly actually and managed four out of five stars for my song. I walked away from Dance Central thinking that not only was it fun but I now had serious doubts about whether or not Kinect worked at all. I think if you saw me play the game you would have the same reservations.

The next game I played was in the official Microsoft booth in a glass pod that felt very weird to be in. People from the outside could watch what was going on so it was a little like being in a gerbil cage. The first thing I played here was Joy Ride which is a driving game in which you extend your arms out and pretend you are holding a steering wheel. You then proceed to drive by turning your hands the way you would to drive a real car. If you wanted to do tricks you could lean to one side and if you wanted a speed boost you could thrust your arms forward. There was no accelerator or brake involved so you didn’t have a lot of control beyond steering and occasionally boosting when you had enough of it saved up but I was really impressed by how well Kinect picked up the subtle movements I made to adjust with the ‘wheel.’ I have never really liked using driving wheels in driving games because I think they are over or under sensitive and I never feel like I am really driving. Here I was able to control the car very well and very easily. You couple that with how well Kinect did picking up my movements and I was pretty impressed.

I watched a guy play Kinectimals for a bit and that was cute. The lion cub was adorable and trying to get him through an obstacle course offered up some genuine laughs but I really don’t see this game having a lot of replay unless you are a little kid or have an unnatural affection for jungle cats. After his demo was done, I stepped up to Adventure. Most people have seen the river rafting portion of this but I played a section that was some kind of strange obstacle course race in which the player character is on a platform that moves through a bunch of absolute bullshit. There are things that swing at your head and you legs and things you have to sidestep to avoid. I have no idea who would do this activity in real life but on Kinect you have to hop up and down to make the platform move faster and then jump, duck and sidestep to avoid obstacles. It is really crazy trying to do all of these things and move at a decent speed at the same time. You are left having to hop between obstacles and you have to kind of plan ahead for it.  Walking out of the Kinect booth I was pretty winded both because of my flagging gym routine and because it was genuinely tiring. It was pretty fun too if you closed your eyes at the end when the game shows replays of what you looked like while you were playing.

I hit up the Move next and while I really wanted to play Fighting or Socom my first experience ended up being Ping Pong out of the Sports Champion’s collection. I wasn’t very excited to be handed the Lolipop shaped wand to play Ping Pong but whatever, I was getting to play the Move so I took what I could get. My dad and I used to play Ping Pong quite a bit when I was growing up and even now we play both on his table in his basement and on the Wii. So I know my way around a Ping Pong table. Picking up the wand and moving it around, the paddle follows exactly. On my first serve my ball caught on fire and flew past my opponent. Subsequent serves were not as fast but the Move controller allowed me to put all kinds of spin on the ball and it tracked my movement perfectly. I kicked the computer’s ass such that the girl assisting me was noticeably impressed.  Sadly, it was also my cue to surrender my time with the Move to the next guy about to have his dreams of punching someone in the face with a lollipop dashed by Ping Pong.

In my further wanderings, I came across a Move set up in a different area and Brunswick Bowling by Crave was there. The guy gave me a quick tutorial and I gave it a go. It took me a minute to find my footing as it were as the controls were a little different than bowling on Wii Sports and I wasn’t really doing great until it occurred to me that you were supposed to be able to really put some English on the ball with Move. So I started twisting my wrist to make the ball curve and adjusting my swing according to the situation. I starting hitting strikes and picking up crazy spares like they were nothing and the guy running that booth was also impressed. He could have been humoring me but frankly that would have been silly because the skills were there. After I played I asked him if I could video tape him playing and you can see that right down here:

So after I was done with that I got back in line for the Move in hopes that I could get into one of the games I wanted. I could not. I was put in on a game called Shoot. This is basically an on-rails shooting gallery game of the sort that you would normally play with a light gun. The premise here is that you are on a movie set that has gone crazy and is trying to kill you. The particular set that I played was a Western so it was like Westword if Yul Brynner was actually just a cardboard cutout.

There were some initial calibration issues that the guy running the demo had to sort out but after that he handed over the want and I was good to go. In shoot you aim your wand at the screen like you are holding a gun and pull the trigger button to fire. If you want to dodge out of the way of knives, bullets and sticks of dynamite you move the controller in which ever direction you need to go to dodge.

There seemed to be a slight delay between pulling the trigger and the target exploding and I am not sure if that was a problem with the game itself or if it was another calibration issue but either way it didn’t really effect the gameplay very much in the long run. The motion tracking was tight and accurate and I had a decent amount of fun playing it.

So between the two systems I played three games each. I was sad that I wasn’t able to play the same sorts of games for each to provide a better comparison but you just have to go with what you have.  Both of them seemed to work as advertised and I didn’t see any glaring issues with either if you excuse the calibration issue with Shoot. I think at the end of the day both have decent tech that does what it is supposed to do. That being said I liked the Move more because I thought it was more fun. There I said it.

I can’t really put a finger on why I liked it more or why I thought it was more fun but after my sessions with the Move I wanted another one. After my sessions with Kinect I was good. That isn’t to say I would never play Kinect again and honestly Dance Central is probably something that will be in my living room in the future, but I just didn’t connect (*wink*) with Kinect the way I did with Move. It could be that I am familiar with the Wii remote and therefore am more drawn to what I know or it could be that I have a low tolerance for looking like a jackass (which is kind of amazing really as I spend so much time doing it) or it could be that the Move games were more fun. I don’t know but I do know that I liked the Move a lot more.

One disturbing thing about both of the systems is that already the launch titles are clogged with collections of mini-games and casual sorts of experiences. There is nothing really wrong with that and it is not at all surprising but I had hoped for more innovation and depth. Of course if this is just me too money grabbing then there is really no room for that kind of nonsense.  Of the two Sony seems to be trying a bit harder with Socom looking great and seeming to work as it should. I never got my hands on it but I watched others who did and it looked very good.

Looking at price to value on both of these systems, Sony wins on the money score as well. With a bundle that includes Sports Champions, the wand and an Eye camera priced at $99 and the cost of the Navigation controller coming in at $29.99 the Move set up seems pretty reasonable. On the other end, the at the moment unofficial price point for the Kinect is $150. That is $150 for the sensor. And that is it. No game. With a game you are looking at $210. I think that is just flat out thievery of the highest order. And what is up with Kinect games carrying a $59.99 price tag? Priced less they would be a value. Now they are just overpriced shelf fillers.

Obviously I am much more hyped about the Move. It was more fun and $80 less is hard to argue with but the choice between which one is better is going to come down to why you are getting it in the first place. If you want to work out and P90X treated you like a new inmate on Oz then Kinect could offer some real value. Since you would really be doing the exercise you would be getting real results and getting them while you are playing a game. On the other hand if you are looking for a party system for your friends that might actually offer up some real games at the same time then the answer is pretty clear that the Move is right for you.

I think ultimately the battle between these two Johnny Come Lately behemoths will be won by the software and pricing more than the tech involved. They both work and both deliver what they promise but if the software isn’t there and the prices are offensive then they will fail. Sadly for Microsoft it is already kind of looking grim. If they don’t fix their pricing and step up the experiences that Kinect offers then I am afraid they are going to go the way of the Virtual Boy, Rob the robot and Sega CD. And no one wants to go that way.