See i dont think anything that i am picturing from Natal is similar to wii.. What the lead dev said is true. When i played my wii games i was still sitting down on my couch.
For most of them, you could do that(and they're doing that for most of the Natal games too, if you noticed), for several of the sports games, however, it was significantly more fun/easier to play actually standing up doing the motions.
Again the demos shown were very early stages of this product and still the dodgeball looked very controlled and accurate. Its still very early to decide what we think this will turn into.
There is a definite limit to the technology, it copies what it sees you do on the screen. Madden's a great game to look to for this. Sure, it'll duplicate you throwing a football, but what about running? Are you going to run in place, are you going to have to make sure you have a ton of space between yourself and the sensor so you can run the entire length of a football field? How well is it going to handle your taking turns on the field to dodge tacklers while still running?
The Wiimote works significantly better for that style of gameplay, since it combines the motion(throwing) with the running(analog stick on the nunchuk).
Let's look to golf, the golf games(outside of wii sports), worked extremely well, with very accurate detection of your swing. Natal is highly, highly unlikely to have that kind of accuracy; it's still technically possible, but it'd be incredibly difficult to detect any rotation in your hands accurately for the game; especially if you're wearing sleeves.
The wii was labeled a fail before it came out right?
Only by the PS3/360 fanboys and a few
individuals in first/second party MS/Sony companies; all of which paled in comparison to the amount of interest from the industry's third party developers. Most of the industry was praising the hell out of Nintendo for thinking of such a thing(including a lot of the first/second party developers); so I don't know what hole your head was in before the Wii came out. Although I love the fanboyism about how
now, only after Microsoft is finally introducing motion controls, will it actually change the industry.
This isn't meant to be a direct attack on the innovation on the Natal system and it's badass applications, I've already said that I'm impressed as hell with what they're going to do with it; only that the gaming aspect of it is definitely going to fall short. Unless Natal comes packaged with 360 systems(and they didn't say it would), the major game developers aren't going to care about adding support to a peripheral that not everyone will have on their big titles. Just look at the Wii Fit Board, the only major third party developer making big games for it is EA; everyone else is pretty much leaving it alone. The same will be true for the big developers and Natal.
