Both Microsoft and Sony are now following suit with their own takes on motion control. Microsoft has demonstrated a radical new device called Project Natal that requires no controller whatsoever, but instead determines the spatial location of your whole body using a pair of cameras, which can be used to manipulate the game world in 3D, and in real time, Minority Report style. Sony’s offering is a bit more conventional, using an EyeToy as a camera and a new wand controller to provide tracking data for the games. (This works in the opposite way of the Wii, which has a camera in each controller which track a stationary infrared source.)

But my problem with these devices are not their revolutionary nature, or even what kinds of games could be derived from them. In fact, I’ve seen several fantastic examples of motion control done correctly in gaming, and have my full support for those types of applications. But what I have a problem with is the method of control itself, and how the closer certain games get to emulating real life, the less entertaining they become.

There’s an important distinction here – I’m not saying that motion controls automatically make a game less fun. By sacrificing a binary input with one that has a lot more variables, gaming is slowly being replaced by a simulation. Back in the days of the NES (and even earlier, really) there were simple buttons that usually corresponded to simple commands. You push “A”, Mario jumps. You hold right on the directional pad, he runs unsurprisingly to the right. From the perspective of the game console accepting these commands, the difference is pretty much night and day. Mario’s either jumping, or he’s falling down a bottomless pit (who built those anyway?).

When the analog stick was invented, there was suddenly an entire analog range between “standing still” and “full sprint” when it came to moving characters around a 3D world. Although perhaps strange at first for some people, it soon became commonplace, and it worked because people still had full control over their games. If you wanted to stop Mario from running into a wall, you’d just let go of the analog stick, and it would snap back to its resting position. This wasn’t a pointless addition, either. In Metal Gear Solid for the PlayStation, the difference between slowly sneaking along a corridor and running down it as fast as possible was the difference between successful infiltration and painting a giant target on your head. This was soon followed by multiple analog sticks, analog shoulder triggers, and even analog face buttons in the case of the DualShock 2 controller. Even with all these additions, the use of analog made sense, and the gamer was still in direct control of the game.

How quickly can you switch between "stirring" gestures and IR pointing?

But as we now look at the current generation of game consoles, a trend is becoming increasingly clear: while more “natural” control schemes offer a deeper level of immersion, they are also starting to be misused in ways that truly harm many games’ entertainment value. One example of this is Cooking Mama: Cook Off for Wii. On its surface, it looks like a game that could be very fun, as you swing the Wii Remote around to perform all the various steps of cooking a delicious meal. But in reality, the motion detection code used in the game is so unrefined that more often than not it will mistake your gesture as something else, causing all kinds of chaos as you try to correct yourself to make the game happy before the timer runs out. (Actually, part of the reason this particular game is so hilarious to watch other people play is because the controls are so bad.)

But this is really the crux of the motion control dilemma: whether through fault of hardware, software or some combination of both, motion controls in games simply misunderstand the intent of gamers too often, making the experience less immersive each time it happens. Gamers should not have to change how they’re playing the game just so that the console can figure out the correct command – it should just work.

Try pulling off this trick in mere seconds

Another example of bad design in motion control involves SSX Blur. This is another Wii title that has an excellent idea on paper, but ultimately fails in its execution. In the game, you build up a charge by successfully landing various snowboarding tricks, then when the meter is full you can perform an ubertrick by holding the “A” button and performing a gesture with the Wii Remote. But wait – after actually spending some time with the game, I came to realize that it’s not a simple gesture you’re asked to perform, but instead the tracing of a downright complicated shape with the IR pointer – a task that is near impossible to fulfill in the span of just a few seconds before you perform a catastrophic faceplant in the snow.

The other issue, of course, is adding motion control for the sake of having motion control. There are plenty of games out there that have this problem, most frequently at the behest of game publishers for marketing purposes. It’s new, it’s a gimmick, and it will sell more units. I’ve seen plenty of fighting games demonstrated where one of the mechanics involves shaking the Wii Remote as violently as possible to perform a special attack. Not only do I consider this completely unnecessary in the scope of the game, but it also wears out the gamers’ arms to the point of not wanting to play. How is that supposed to get people to play your game more?

Just as expensive as a real fish tank, except you'll never get wet

Taking all this into consideration, it certainly makes me wonder if upcoming devices like Project Natal will become even more counterproductive in the quest for immersive gameplay. There are just so many more factors for it to  contend with compared to a traditional controller, such as variations in the room environment, lighting, body shapes, speed of the motions being performed, and even how a “tennis swing” would look slightly different for pretty much everyone on the planet. Adding all these up, the console has no choice but to rely on a lot of guesswork, which in turn leaves more room for error. And error-prone games are not very fun to play.

It’s not all bad news though. As I mentioned before, there are also many shining examples of motion control done well, and these do give me hope for the technology. Some of the highest-rated games on Wii like Super Mario Galaxy, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption all use motion control in subtle, but effective ways. There are occasional gestures as well, such as using Samus’ grapple beam by casting the Nunchuk forward – but it’s not overused, and recognized nearly every time.

While I do think the technology will eventually mature enough to a point where motion control is accurate, reliable, and easy to use, we aren’t quite there yet. For that reason I think that many current games would be better off either investing a lot more time refining their controls until it becomes a worthwhile addition, or avoiding it entirely. Not every new game needs motion controls to be fun, just like how every modern game doesn’t need cutting edge graphics to be deemed entertaining. But that’s another blog post entirely.

Installing

After configuring my partitions for the beta (something the average user wouldn’t have to even think about), I proceeded to install it. This process was pretty easy; there were a half-dozen or so prompts to step through, and it took care of the rest. I went to the store, came back, and it was finished. No complaints here; it’s as easy as it should be.

Using Windows 7 for the First Time

Once everything is up and running, you’re presented with the desktop, with a picture of a betta fish on it (get it? beta?). My first instinct when it comes to new gadgets or programs is to start messing with everything, but I held back to see what it would do. Windows soon popped up a balloon letting me know that I didn’t have an anti-virus program installed, and offered to let me find one online. Only three solutions are currently offered, but the page says more are on the way.

Otherwise everything was pretty clean. The desktop only had two icons, one of which won’t be there in the final retail version, and three default pinned programs on the taskbar: Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, and Windows Media Player 12.

Taskbar

One of the most apparent and controversial changes to Windows is how the taskbar now looks. Instead of a skinny bar along the bottom of the screen with long buttons representing each running program, the bar is now slightly taller with large, rectangular icons replacing the long “bar buttons” everyone is used to, and running programs intermingle with those that aren’t. The best equivalent to this new paradigm is the Mac OS X Dock, where a button acts as both an application launcher (if the program is not open yet), and an application switcher (if it’s already running). However, there are some pretty important user interface differences.

The icons as seen above will appear differently depending on what’s going on with the program at any given time. The first icon, Internet Explorer, is pinned to the taskbar, but isn’t running. Every other program in this shot is running, as indicated by a glass frame around the icon. Next, the currently active program is “lit” – in this case, it’s Firefox. Programs that have more than one window open are automatically collapsed into the same icon, and you can tell it has more than one thing going on by the “stacked” look of the tiles, such as with Windows Explorer and Messenger above.

Hovering the cursor over any running program will load up a preview pane, like with Vista, but it goes a step further by having a live thumbnail of each window or document of that program, and the thumbnail itself becomes a button to switch over to that program. In Internet Explorer, each browser tab becomes a separate thumbnail here, too. You can even close unneeded windows or tabs straight from here; it works extremely well.

In previous versions of Windows, you could optionally attach a Quick Launch toolbar next to the Start button that would contain copies of shortcuts found in the Start Menu. In Windows 7, however, it’s either in one location or the other. For example, if you drag the shortcut for Notepad from the Start Menu onto the taskbar, it will disappear from the Start Menu. In other words, you’re moving that program shortcut into a permanent new position on your taskbar. (The All Programs sub-menu is different – this keeps an instance of each program no matter what.)

This is important from a usability standpoint, because people have a much easier time remembering where a program shortcut is if they specifically put it there themselves. Starting with Windows XP, Windows had a bad habit of constantly rearranging the Start Menu based on which programs you used most frequently. If a program wasn’t used for a while, it would eventually drop off that list, requiring a dive into the All Programs sub-menu if it needed to be located again. But this was countered with the ability to “pin” desired programs to the top of the list, where they would stay put (and not move around, thankfully). The result was a weird mash-up of stationary and shifting programs that ended up being more confusing to the average user than it should have been.

Windows 7 changes this by associating clearer functions to each of these two locations: the taskbar is for pinned programs as well as running programs, and the Start Menu is now a full list of the most accessed programs that aren’t already pinned to the taskbar. This makes your commonly-used programs only a single click away instead of two, which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but in the end is a change for the better.

One other feature about the new taskbar that I really like are Jump Lists – a replacement for the old right-click menu that offers very helpful, program-specific shortcuts in place of the old window-management links like maximize, close, etc.

On my widescreen monitor, I could open 23 programs before it had to add scrollbars to the taskbar. Even with that many programs open (albeit they were smaller programs like Calculator and Notepad), it didn’t slow down at all. Which leads me to…

Performance

Performance is very impressive in Windows 7, and it marks the first time in Windows’ release history where a version didn’t have higher system requirements than its predecessor. Although I haven’t tested this for myself, a number of reports around the Internet claim that Windows 7 is even able to run reasonably well on netbooks and other less-powerful computers. This is great news, which means a lot of the bloat found in Vista has been trimmed back, while maintaining the pieces of functionality that actually mattered. In addition, Microsoft has said that the underlying architecture for drivers is not changing much between Vista and Windows 7, which means that people shouldn’t have any of the frustrations that they had when upgrading from XP to Vista. If these improvements could be kept solid all the way up to launch, I think a lot of people would be very happy.

Final Thoughts

Windows is by far the most commonly used operating system in the world, and to see improvements to the interface like the ones seen here is really a change for the better. Vista was all about making some radical changes to the way Windows was built in order to prepare it for the future, while Windows 7 takes that, adds genuinely useful functionality while trimming away excess, and delivers an OS that I’m actually looking forward to using later this year. While no official release date has been set, 2009 sounds likely to a lot of people, including myself, and I hope they can deliver on that.

For additional reading, I direct you to the Windows 7 section on the excellent SuperSite for Windows.

Windows Shortcuts

• Moving the cursor around…
  • one character at a time: Left/Right
  • one line at a time: Up/Down
  • one word at a time: Ctrl+Left/Right
  • to the beginning of a line: Home
  • to the end of a line: End
  • to the beginning of the document: Ctrl+Home
  • to the end of the document: Ctrl+End

• Navigating website or program forms…
  • forward one field: Tab
  • backward one field: Shift+Tab

• Making a selection starting where the cursor is…
  • one character at a time: Shift+Left/Right
  • one word at a time: Shift+Ctrl+Left/Right
  • one line at a time: Shift+Up/Down
  • one paragraph at a time: Shift+Ctrl+Up/Down
  • one page at a time: Shift+PageUp/PageDown
  • to the beginning of the line: Shift+Home
  • to the end of the line: Shift+End
  • to the beginning of the document: Shift+Ctrl+Home
  • to the end of the document: Shift+Ctrl+End
  • to include everything: Ctrl+A

• Manipulating text to…
  • delete the previous word: Ctrl+Backspace
  • delete the next word: Ctrl+Delete
  • move selected text to the clipboard: Ctrl+X
  • copy selected text to the clipboard: Ctrl+C
  • insert text from the clipboard: Ctrl+V or Shift+Insert

• Some sample shortcut combos…
  • Delete the entire current line of text:
    Home; Shift+End; Delete
  • Delete the current line except for the first word:
    End; Shift+Home; Shift+Ctrl+Right; Delete
  • Move the first line of the document to the very end:
    Ctrl+Home; Shift+End; Ctrl+X; Ctrl+End; Ctrl+V

As you can see, a pattern exists behind these controls, such as the Shift key always being used for selections, and the Ctrl key used as a modifier to select larger chunks of text. Macintosh computers follow a similar paradigm, although some of the commands are set up differently, such as needing to press Command+Left to get to the beginning of a line instead of using the Home key. Learning these basic patterns and subsequently these shortcuts will undoubtedly save you a lot of time when working with text on a computer.

Extra Trick: Although these have to do with the mouse and not the keyboard, I wanted to share them anyway. Single-clicking somewhere will obviously place the cursor to that location, while double-clicking on a word will select that word, and triple-clicking on a word will select the entire paragraph that word is in. It even works in web browsers – try it on this page!

Do you know of a keyboard shortcut for text entry or editing that I missed? Let me know in the comments and I’ll include it on the list!

When I was first told about the sale, I hadn’t even heard of most of the phones the AT&T sales rep mentioned. After all, I only kept up with what I thought were the only high-end devices I would possibly want: iPhone, T-Mobile G1, the BlackBerry Bold and Storm, and a few others. The problem is that none of these devices except for the iPhone are carried by AT&T (which was needed in order to grab the good deal), and the iPhone itself has a monthly cost too high for me. But I was quickly proven wrong when I picked up my new phone, the LG Vu.

LG Vu - inside the main menu

I keep thinking that the phone should be spelled “Vue” because it’s most prominent feature is the 3″ haptic touch screen (it vibrates a bit when you touch it). At 240×400 pixels, the screen is very pretty and easy to read, and impressively bright. Although its design is clearly inspired by the iPhone, there are several things that set it apart. First of all, the entire device is smaller and lighter than the iPhone (weighing in at 3.16 ounces compared to the iPhone 3G’s 4.7 ounces). Instead of a single face button, there are seven: call, end, clear/back, volume up/down rocker, lock, and camera. Personally I appreciate the hardware buttons for core features like these instead of needing to navigate through menus to adjust the volume.

The device also has a host of other useful features: 3G network speeds, a 2-megapixel camera with auto-focus lens, an image editor, Bluetooth, IM client, a music and video player, a full HTML browser, multitasking capability, and perhaps most interestingly, a TV receiver.

Now, this doesn’t pick up analog TV signals out of the air like you think it would (because of power consumption issues on mobile devices), but instead, it uses a service called MediaFLO. FLO, which stands for Forward Link Only, is a completely separate band from the 3G network; in fact, it runs on the old UHF band, but its purpose today is to stream mobile-compatible video to devices in its area of coverage. In my tests, it worked flawlessly with almost zero buffer time, and delivered entirely watchable video, despite streaming at only 200-250 kbit/s. Switching channels happened instantly, and the service also downloads a live station guide so you can see what’s on now (or later). The phone even has a hidden but expandable antenna in case you’re in the outskirts of the reception area. There are a dozen or so channels to choose from, including NBC, CNN, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and more, but the programming itself felt a little lackluster to me, especially for the price, with a lot of repeated shows being streamed. Since FLO is a relatively new technology, I expect this to improve over time.

Picture taken with the LG Vu's camera

One of the features I was most surprised with was the phone’s built-in image editor. With it, you can apply effects such as sepia tones, adjusting the contrast or color balance, crop at various sizes, resize, rotate, and flip. It’s also easy to save your modified image as a new file, and then send it via Bluetooth or in a multimedia message, or set it as a picture ID or your phone’s background image.

The phone also includes a fully-functional web browser, the application I probably spend the most time in. Most of the web pages I tested rendered with very little trouble, but it did encounter noticeable slowdowns on larger pages, or those that incorporated a lot of JavaScript. Flash support is absent from the device, although sites like YouTube have support for streaming videos to the phone’s internal video player. I’ve noticed, however, that I opt for the “screen-optimized” rendering mode, because it almost always reformats the page in a way that is much easier to read. Instead of needing to scroll around in all four directions, not to mention zooming, I just find it much more comfortable to use the up/down rocker on the side of the device to read a page in a linear fashion. This, combined with mobile versions of websites (Digg River instead of Digg, for example), also makes page loading times much more pleasant, even on 3G networks.

Here's a night photo also taken with the LG Vu

Although I just spilled out a range of features I really like about the phone, it’s not without its problems. Staying with the web browser for a minute, I often find myself pressing the wrong link when several of them are close to each other. A feature to more precisely select links on denser pages would have been appreciated, such as an on-screen set of arrows, or a function to use the up/down rocker after pressing near a dense cluster of links to selectively choose the right target. This issue probably spawns from the touch screen not being as precise as it should be, but since the rest of the phone’s interface is large enough to press selections without difficulty, this problem only occurs on denser web sites.

The home screen and main menu are frustratingly locked down. The home screen contains four icons in a row along the bottom (menu, TV, contacts, and the dialer), but the can’t be rearranged or customized. I would much rather have an Internet shortcut in place of the TV button. Inside the main menu itself, the icons are confusingly categorized, and these cannot be moved around either. Programs are spread out in three different tabs with no apparent logical structure behind it (the music player, Internet program, camera, and games folder are in one tab, while the video player, picture viewer, and calendar are in another, while the IM and e-mail programs are found in a third tab next to the address book and recent calls list).

I’m also mystified why I cannot delete any of the pre-installed game demos, pictures, videos, ring tones, applications or bookmarks. I’m pretty sure I would never touch MySpace Mobile, so why subject me to the torture of keeping it in my applications list? I also have to scroll past a full page of default bookmarks that I never load just to get to my own. It’s truly a huge oversight in terms of the user experience. It also took me some time to learn the locations of the over-branded phone functions. Internet is accessed through a program called “MEdia Net”, while the music player is called “AT&T Music” (I thought that would bring me to their music download service, but that one is labeled “AT&T Mall” – go figure!) At least the calculator, calendar, and alarm clock weren’t subjected to the marketing machine.

Another thing to note is the mysterious competitive lack of support for Google products. While it’s possible to download Java-based versions of their Gmail and Google Maps applications, they weren’t built specifically for this phone and don’t offer the seamless interaction with the touch screen like they should (Google Maps doesn’t utilize the touch screen at all). There is no support for Gmail in the phone’s internal e-mail program, no support for GTalk in the IM client, and at the time of writing this, I have yet to find a way to sync my Google calendar with the phone’s calendar. Since I use Google’s offerings on a daily basis, this is particularly frustrating for me. Finally, only the proprietary earbud headphones can be used on this phone; no standard 1/8″ jack is anywhere to be found.

The keyboard in landscape mode

The LG Vu definitely is not for everyone. People like me who use nearly all of the phone’s available functions will get a lot of use out of the device, especially with its great multitasking capability, but for other people, it would probably just be too much. The phone is not difficult to physically operate, but it does have a learning curve involved.

An unlimited data plan is recommended for this device, while the TV service is not yet worth the monthly fee. The virtual keyboard lets you swap between T9 mode and a full landscape keyboard, and its accuracy is fairly high. I could probably type faster on a hardware keyboard but it gets the job done.

Overall, however, I still rate this as a very complete phone. Battery life and call quality are both very good, the feature set is one of the best available, and it looks great too. The LG Vu is available from AT&T and Rogers Wireless.

Google is certainly not new to bringing unique products to the mass market. With both web-based and desktop applications ranging from virtual environments to 3D modeling software, it’s not surprising to me that a web browser was inevitable.

Their goal is to build a fast, rock-solid browser that may not have the power of extensions like Firefox, but instead a multi-threaded core that won’t cause the entire browser to crash when one website decides to go rogue, plus the ability to run multiple processes of JavaScript at the same time. Each instance of a web page is sandboxed, in that the address bar (“omnibar”), navigation buttons, and page render area are all independent of each other. While appearing repetitive at first look, this design greatly helps the overall stability of the browser.

I gave Chrome a test run, and was very pleased with its speed, both how quickly it loaded up and how fast pages were rendered. The latter should be expected, as it runs off the lightning-quick WebKit rendering engine. The visual design of the browser (literally called a chrome in programming lingo) is minimalistic but pleasant to use and not distracting at all.

Memory usage is also handled well. Because each tab is an entirely separate process, closing down a Chrome tab destroys the whole process tree and clears up that memory instead of leaving it possibly fragmented like other browsers. I also found it interesting that you could go look at exactly how much memory and CPU power each web page used in real time through Chrome’s internal task manager.

Currently only a Windows version is available, but Mac and Linux versions are coming soon, and even a version for Android is in development, which I’m excited for. In addition, the entire project is open-source.

I’m left with a very good impression of a new web browser when I previously thought any more in the market would simply get ignored. Although I don’t think I would personally use it as a primary browser, namely due to the lack of extensions as stated above, I still find it a valuable program for testing web devleopment in the WebKit rendering engine. I also think that many of Chrome’s best features will eventually work their way into other major browsers, and Chrome itself will continue to improve in the features department.

As you can see, the technology is very impressive, and I can see countless applications for it in television, movies, and more. But on the other hand, video footage is one of the forms of evidence (used in courts, for example) that is difficult, but not impossible, to forge. The introduction of this technology into the mass market could have large implications on how these sorts of videos are treated, much like how Photoshop lets you modify a photo to change a detail, move an object, or even erase a person.

Imagine if a security camera caught a criminal during a robbery, but the recording was modified to erase that person and insert another before being submitted as evidence to the court.  It’s not as impossible as it may have once been.

Here’s another example: a travel video for tourists is filmed for a beach resort, then is selectively enhanced to show buildings in better condition, a less crowded shoreline, and more palm trees than there actually are. Is this false advertising? Is it wrong?

It already happens all the time in photographs, so what makes this any different? Our society is already used to the idea that photographs are often enhanced to improve color balance, remove blemishes, and so forth. But video is something else entirely. When somebody sees a video on the nightly news, they trust their eyes that what they see actually happened. But this could be changing soon, especially if this finds its way into post-production software like After Effects. And then, the camera will have to join the cake as part of things that are full of nothing but lies.

I’ve come to notice that many PC games shipped these days – not just Mass Effect – tend to require one or more patches after its retail release to get it to a respectfully stable point. But because the option of updating a game after it’s released is available to developers, it seems like they often use this as an excuse to put sloppy code out to retail. “It’s playable, yeah, but we can always perfect it later!”

Not to discredit game developers, I know how much effort it takes to develop a high-end video game, especially one as large as Mass Effect. The game literally spans dozens of individual worlds, has amazing graphics, built-in physics, advanced AI, and more. So, does that mean I should expect to run into a few bugs?

I believe the answer for most gamers is “yes” – as long as they are not game-breaking bugs. But this particular game seems to be another case entirely. On more than one occasion I suddenly found my character waist-deep in the floor unable to move, attempting to shoot at an enemy who had wound up inside a giant crate, witnessing another character lazily floating across the floor, or just experiencing some completely arbitrary bug that forced me to go out of my way to figure out a way to bypass it.

Patches, then, are the solutions to these bugs – but in many cases, they’re not just small tweaks to the game. I regularly see game patches that are hundreds of megabytes in size, or even larger. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a minor change! Shouldn’t such major problems be sorted out before a game gets published?

PC games seem to have a lot more of these problems than consoles do. Wii is currently the only game console that cannot apply a patch to a disc-based game after it is released. (Channels, Virtual Console, and WiiWare all have this capability, however.) Regular firmware updates have improved some of the core functionality of the console, but none of the actual disc game code gets changed. Yet, games released on Wii seem to have a much lower “problem rate” than PC games. In fact, I have never seen a game-breaking bug on the console.

So, why is this the case? Developers must get code correct before it’s released on Wii, there is no going back. But PC and the other two major consoles all have the capability to update their games – so this leads me to believe that developers simply aren’t as strict about the code that gets pushed to retail as they used to be, and I think that it’s an unfortunate mindset for game developers to be in.

Just off the top of my head, I can name the Wii Zapper, Steering Wheel, Balance Board, and Wireless Guitar, not to mention a dozen or so cheap plastic shells made available for the Wii Remote by third-party manufacturers. And that’s just for Wii – in the previous generation, the DK Bongos stick out especially well in my mind as a limited-use accessory for the GameCube. And for each of these accessories, I can think of one, maybe two games that use each.

The Wii Zapper came bundled with Link’s Crossbow Training, a fun but shallow target-practice pack-in, but the contraption did little more than hold the Wii Remote and Nunchuk together. The Steering Wheel can be found in any home with Mario Kart Wii, and the Balance Board is, at present, used for Wii Fit and a sports game by the name of We Ski. Finally, the Wireless Guitar has been used for all the various iterations of the Guitar Hero games.

This year at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, Nintendo unsurprisingly introduced even more accessories for its beloved console. The first is an attachment for the Wii Remote, named Wii MotionPlus. This attachment contains a gyroscope, which combined with the other remote data helps it figure out where it’s located in 3D space, as well as help measure things like torque data, which was impossible to do before. The second accessory is a microphone – the first official device to use one of the Wii’s USB ports – and it sits right on top of the sensor bar, allowing for voice chat in supported online games.

However, I have to step back and ask what the far-reaching effects of these new peripherals are. After all, I certainly don’t see a huge flood of games coming out to take advantage of those other accessories. Why should developers spend time including support for the microphone or more precise data from the Wii Remote when there’s not even a guarantee that gamers will have them?

Because these types of peripherals are optional, game developers would be very hard-pressed to develop a game that required any of these devices. From a business standpoint, they could potentially lose a lot of sales just because a potential customer doesn’t have what’s needed to play the game.

So, the remaining option is to create games with optional support for these accessories. That way, a sale would be much more likely when the consumer is assured that he or she could play regardless if they owned that particular accessory.

But, the minute an accessory becomes optional, it starts to have a less important role in the living room, and may even be discarded or forgotten because – hey, why would you want to spend the time setting it up when you could be actually playing the game quicker?

That was, of course, an extreme example. Most consumers would not discard something they just bought for entertainment, but another issue still presents itself – video game peripherals simply aren’t getting attention from very many games. As I mentioned above, the major add-ons for Nintendo’s console this generation have hardly seen any use at all outside of the game they were originally designed around.

I will admit that both a Wii Remote “extension” for more accurate motion control and a microphone designed to listen to everyone in the room seem to have a lot more practical applications for future games, but game accessories I’ve seen so far are poorly thought out, resulting in an almost identical “shelf life” to the game it was purchased with.

What I hope to see in the future is both the foresight to include any hardware needed to play games included with a console right from the start, and broader game support for well thought-out accessories that do happen to get released. Without these, the future market could very quickly become saturated with accessories that have hardly any use. While the people looking at Nintendo’s bottom line would be happy, not very many gamers would be smiling about it after a while.