Nintendo Okie

So, PlayStation Move.  I like the name.  I think Move is better than “Arc” or “Gem.”  At least Sony didn’t make up a word like Nintendo did for Wii.  One thing I did notice, and from what I understand this is bugging a few people, is that Move is very similar to the Wii-mote.  Some might say that it is a flat out copy.  Honestly, I don’t really care. 

Sometimes it is easy to forget that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are companies trying to make as much money as possible.  They are businesses, and a business is supposed to make money.  So if one company makes a lot of money with a product, you can bet that others will soon follow.  Right now, Nintendo is raking in the cash with the Wii.  So it only makes sense that Microsoft and Sony are going to try to replicate that for themselves.  I remember how upset I was when Microsoft announced Avatars for the Dashboard.  I was pretty mad that they were just a copy of Miis.  My first Avatar was as generic as I could make him look.  It was supposed to be a protest against Microsoft, but it just ended up confusing the people on my friends list.

After a few weeks, I abandoned my protest and created my real Avatar.  Now, I really couldn’t care less about my 360 Avatar but Microsoft is certainly taking advantage of Avatars in ways that Nintendo hasn’t used for Miis.  Like it or not, Microsoft is nickel-and-diming people for shirts, hats, pets and giant cotton swabs.  I am not a fan of the Avatar marketplace but somebody must be because they keep making that stuff.  When the Wii launched, I wished Nintendo would have allowed us to make our own shirt designs for my Mii.  My point is that Microsoft took the Mii concept and added to it, improved upon it even.   Sony has their Miis as well with the Home avatars.  I like to call them “Homies.”  Homies were appealing to me at the time simply because they were very different from Miis in a visual sense. 

Now we have Move.  The addition of the sub controller just adds to the “copy of the Wii-mote” argument, but it is much better than the alternative of holding a Dual Shock with your other hand.  That would be awkward for so many reasons.  As I said before, I don’t really care if Move is a Wii-mote copy or not.  If Sony is able to take this controller design and improve and innovate with it, then everybody should be happy.  What if Move ends up working really well and is wildly successful?  That will only force Nintendo to improve on their technology.  Maybe Nintendo will have to open their hardware up to new possibilities because they simply can’t compete with Move.  That is the kind of thinking that brought us the Wii in the first place.  Nintendo didn’t want to compete with console graphics and horsepower, so the opened the world up to motion control. 

Meanwhile, Microsoft is working on Project Natal.  It is odd how Microsoft and Sony have switched positions with me this time around.  I used to applaud Sony for how different Homies were to Miis and I booed Microsoft for their Avatars.  Now, Microsoft is the one with the twist on the concept while Sony has used ctrl+c.  As I mentioned on the podcast last week, I am not as interested in Natal as I am Move.  I haven’t had any hands on time with Natal, but I can’t imagine it working very well.  It seems like a concept that is a little ahead of its time.  Ultimately, I think that Natal will never live up to what Microsoft is promoting it as because the technology isn’t sophisticated enough.  In the end it will be a gimmick that will give us half broken games that you only play for ten minutes. 

The only thing that truly bugs me about Move is that Wii may lose some of it exclusivity.  Games like Zack & Wiki and Elibits won’t be capable only on Wii anymore.  Some of the games that make owning a Wii a good thing might start showing up on PS3, or even 360.  If Wii loses all of its third party exclusive titles, will the only reason to have a Wii be for the first party software?  In the end it all boils down to companies fighting each other for your money.  That competition is a good thing.  Sure, some ideas may be copied here and there, but as long as we get better games it shouldn’t really matter.