http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/6508-Touch-Waggle-Touch-Waggle-Swipe

Nathan Boyes – Let's start using what we have!

                New technology is great! It makes things fresh and adds new ways to play games. Touch screens and motion control have been a big hit for consoles as of recent, adding a variety of new control options. That being said, when is the last time you ever used that kinect sitting by your T.V? I'm guessing it's been a while.

                Motion and touch controls can be great, but only as great as the games that use them. Too often have I heard people complaining about the fact that they have to move or swipe instead of pushing a button. When your game is making you do a task repeatedly, such as the legend of zelda's twilight princess with swinging the sword, People don't like throwing their controller back and forth until the enemy is dead. The problem here is that the game is not reading any more input then the fact that hey, the controller has been swung! In essence the game reads it as the exact same thing as pushing a button and thus should not be a motion controlled. What we really need is games that utilize these controls in a way that is both creatively fun and useful.

There are games in existence that accomplish this for both motion control and touch screen. Metroid Prime 3 is a game that handles motion control quite appropriately. Only so much precision can be given from an analogue stick, by switching this over to the Wii pointer, you gain a lot of control. Kirby mass attack and canvas curse handled touch screen quite well, both of these games use none of the DS's buttons because there is no logical command to give Kirby that would require a button. In Kirby canvas curse Kirby rides lines drawn by the player to reach his destination, you do not have direct control over Kirby and thus don't really need any button, and drawing the lines for him to ride would be quite difficult with a d-pad or some buttons. Kirby Mass attack is the same deal, you don't directly command Kirby, but 10 miniatures Kirby's, having to toggle between them and move each individually would be quite difficult, so they give you a pointer for them to take commands from.

Touch and Motion control is not the only problem we have with using new technologies however. The PlayStation 4 has just been announced, but I fail to see why we need it. The Playstation 3 has stellar graphics, even if the Playstation 4 can handle more polygons, there comes a point where our eyes don't even notice the difference. We should make sure there is a reason to make a new technology before throwing it out there. The focus should be making games that use the current technology to it's fullest.

While I do hope new technologies come in the future to help improve games, I also hope we can make sure to use it before passing it to the old section. If games can fallow in the footsteps of Metroid and Kirby, I do believe we will see a better selection of games in the market.