If Apple did this, I’d think similar to G’Tron…except that I’d be worried their first attempt out the gate would doom any game cred they might try to create. But really I don’t think Apple would do this. You can’t argue whether their first cellphone attempt was a success; it’s because they made a good product the first time. This game thing is just “blah” wrapped in a lot of marketing effort.

If this wore an Apple label you’d all be shitting yourselves.

“HOW’S HALO GONNA MAKE YOU LOSE WEIGHT, JIM BOB?”

Okay, 1) I am going to quickly tire or a game that requires me to hold my fists out in the air to control it. 2) I call shenanigans on the shifter “control”. There is no way the computer can reliably look at that motion and tell anything except “person has used shifter”, rather than “person has shifted up or down”. Which means the game isn’t very realistic, despite the fact they’re selling it on the basis of immersive realism. 3) I don’t recall seeing it, but then how do we control speed? Hold our foot out for a pedal? And how do you calibrate that without an existing object? And even if the system can determine minute amounts of difference in the angle of my foot, do I really want to hold my foot at an exact angle without support for extended periods? Or do we write the game so we assume you’re just going top speed all the time, which again goes against the whole premise.

And on 2) above, I’m not even saying “that’s impossible to do with technology”. What I’m saying is that it’s impossible to accurately predict with a person. With the quick hand motion that I saw, the only way a human is going to be able to convey “shift up” as opposed to “shift down” is if there’s a physical object there they can hit to indicate it. I don’t mean it has to be a controller, I just mean that as a visual transmission of information, I don’t think you can reliably communicate your intent under that situation. so that means, in the demo, either that hand motion is interpreted as “use shifter” (which the game always translates into “shift up”, which negates the premise), or the demo is just lying, which I’m inclined to believe because of what I said about scanning the skateboard.

And man I would love to talk to parents to see how they feel about installing that kungfu fighting game on the tv in their trailer living rooms.

It’s largely been a sort of bait-and-switch; you buy a Wii because Wii Sports looks awesome, then you buy the great Nintendo games you should have been getting with the last two systems you skipped, almost not noticing how little motion control was in them.

Microsoft has made an industry out of seeing what other people do right, and then doing it on a larger and cheaper scale. If the people who gave us Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and Kirby can’t figure out this new technology, do you really think the geniuses behind Solitaire and Mindsweeper are going to figure it out for them?