I played several Playstation Move games at E3 this year. The first was a tech demo of sorts known as The Shoot. This was like playing an old school light gun game — the game moves on rails and is played from the first person perspective. Various old west outlaws pop out, along with some innocents, and it was up to me to move the Move and zap the bad guys while avoiding the good guys. I thought the sensitivity of the controller felt slow, but that was how this demo was set up — I played several full speed games as well that were much better.
Start the Party! will include over twenty family friendly games, with the E3 demo showing off four of these. It’s an augmented reality game in which players will see their Move turn into an object on screen, and players can see themselves in the background of some of the games as well.
First up was a bug smacking game in which the Move turned into a fly swatter. Various bugs would appear on screen and you had to simply swing the Move around to smack them before they flew off screen. Red bugs would explode and damage your swatter, which took several seconds to replace. The goal is to simply swat as many bugs as you can before the timer expired. It was neat to see the Move translate my wrist rotations in realtime and I could visibly see the effect on screen as my swatter could turn 360 degrees in 3D.
The next game turned the Move into a fan. Baby birds were slowly falling from the top of the screen and I had to catch them and gracefully direct them into the baskets on either side of the bottom of the screen by keeping them aloft with the fan. Whenever the basket had three birds in it, it would go away for a few seconds and comeback empty, adding a bit of strategy to the game as you have to keep catching and guiding these birds to the baskets before they fall. Just like the bug swatting game, the Move detected my motions accurately and in real time, but the actual game wasn’t that much fun.
The third game of Start The Party! that I played was a painting game in which the Move turned into a paint brush. The object was to quickly move the brush around to fill in pre-defined shapes. About a minute later, after several increasingly tougher shapes, the game ends and the overall picture of what you have been painting is revealed. That was pretty cool, but otherwise this wasn’t very compelling.
Finally, the fourth game of Start The Party! I saw turned the Move into a flashlight. With it, I had to zap ghosts in a dark room before the spooked me. Whenever a certain kind of ghost came onto the screen, you had to quickly put the Move behind your back, which was really neat to see because the game showed me in the background. Whenever I moved the Move behind my back, the light on screen went out. It’s such a basic idea, but worked well and was fun.
These two games should be available at launch this September.
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