Playstation Move - Sports Champions - Playstation 3 Review

The first title we actually purchased for the Playstation Move was Sports Champions. It seems like these sports titles are the preferred introductory experience for these kinds of motion controls. It makes sense really - since sports are often inherently familiar to people and their movements are somewhat easily tracked and translated to video games. The Wii made use of this a couple of times over, first with the system itself and then the introduction of the Wii Plus.

Here are the sports you get:

- Table Tennis
- Volleyball
- Disc Golf
- Gladiator combat
- Archery
- Bocce Ball

Graphics - 7:

The attempt here is to come up with a more realistic sports entry than the Wii's charming if simplistic sports titles offer. This is both a good and a bad thing as this game looks nice overall, but sometimes animates just a bit stiffly and you see odd graphic pop-in and overlap. I know a lot of people prefer the Wii method, but I can at least appreciate the direction they went in here with Sports Champions and personally prefer the more realistic appearance

Sounds & Music - 6:

The music is nice enough, simple and completely forgettable. It doesn't take anything away from the experience, but it adds almost nothing as well. The sounds are very simple, with appreciate thuds, whacks and player noises where needed, but like the music, these sound effects are very simple and do nothing particularly well, if not particularly badly either.

Gameplay - 8:

The controls generally respond well, and that is the key with a game like this, right? Show off what you can do with familiar controls? I think archery was probably my favorite, tennis my least favorite. My son really liked the gladiator combat, and my daughters were all amused by different sports, if only for a short time.

There is a very nice option to do some of the games like archery and gladiator combat with two motion controllers. It is not required, which is great for families with only one Move controller, but I won two in the contest and was able to sample out both methods and did find that two controllers was better.

Intangibles - 7:

There are not a ton of sports to be had here, but there is a fair amount of depth in trying to master them. There are also quite a few different types of rounds and to unlock everything would take an incredible amount of time. With different sports, everyone's interests and mileage will vary. We also benefited from having two Move controllers, because we could take part in multiplayer, which made things a bit more fun.

Overall 7:

These types of sports games with motion controls often feel like dressed up tech demos, and honestly Sports Champions does very little to change my opinion on this. That said, it feels like a fairly polished and successful demonstration that entertains, if not for a terribly long time. The events are probably not all going to be for everyone, but for the most part they are well enough done that you should find at least a few different types of sports to keep you busy for awhile.

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Playstation Move - Hardware review

So, last year around this time, I won a Playstation Move package that came with Singstar Dance, two Move controllers, a Playstation Eye and all of the necessary cables. I picked up one of the small hand held control sticks to compliment the Move controller as well.

I am going to breakdown my impressions of the hardware, some of the games, and then just my overall impressions of the game lineup and offerings to date.

So, let's start with the hardware, which overall is pretty good. The build is excellent - the durability is quite sound as my kids have managed to drop the controllers several times and I have yet to notice any sort of negative impact on the performance. The appearance of the controllers is a bit odd - my son compared it to a glowing snow cone. I was not a fan of the button layout. The Playstation Dualshock controller has buttons laid out in a diamond shaped pattern, and the Move controller uses a square shaped one. I would have much preferred they stuck with the diamond shape surrounding the "Move" button.

The setup is quite easy, though my PS3 has somewhat limited USB ports, and the eye did use one of those up.

The off-hand control stick I picked up was decent as well, also having been dropped on its head a few times but never failing to operate. Not many games seem to use that controller currently (think shooter games and movement controls mostly), however. Both this device and the Move controllers hook up to the USB to mini-USB and charge just like a Dualshock controller would, and sync up to the system in the same way. Overall, I like that design, but having had one controller of about two years' age no longer holding a charge, I would be concerned that .this could happen here prematurely.

On to the Playstation eye - this is in most senses the least impressive piece of tech in my opinion. It looks nice enough, but the image quality is very, very poor. It responds well to the Move controllers themselves - I found the accuracy of the unit to be incredibly good in most instances, but the camera itself is of such poor quality that in games like Eyepet it was almost jarringly bad.

I heard a lot of concerns about the lighting, but honestly I did not have too many of those. Most lighting conditions in our living room allowed the device to work just fine, even if there was a semi-open window where the camera was pointing. The sometimes limited range of the Playstation Eye itself was sometimes more of an annoyance. Without the ability to 'adjust' the sweet spot on the camera, it was sometimes a bad 'fit' to my living room. I know the idea is to get people up off of their couches at times, but some games were lengthy and being able to sit on the sofa would be nice, but the Eye could not track properly because I was a foot or two away from the sweet spot. Another game, Eyepet, had a very specific distance you needed to sit in order for it to operate properly.

Overall, the hardware is very well-made. The controllers are durable and light, they track very well, and except from some particulars with the Playstation Eye itself, I found it to be very accommodating to our living room. I would score the hardware components as an 8 out of 10.

 

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