The Richter Scale^®

Even though only media and exhibitors are presently permitted on the show floor here at E3 (at least for the next half hour) the floor feels crowded in some spots.

Nowhere is that more obvious than at the Nintendo booth, where people are standing in line for half an hour or more (myself included) to get their hands onto the Nintendo Wii controller and games for a test spin. Lines are expected to get up to 2-3 hours long when the seething masses get in.

The line for the Wii is a sharp contrast to the non-existant wait over at the Sony booth where about a dozen playable PS3 titles are being demonstrated. I tried my hand at several - Genji, Warhawk, and Resistance: Fall of Man.

The PS3 controller does not feel appreciably different from the PS2 controller - it might be marginally heavier. The demo units were also connected via a USB cable, while the final models will be wireless.

Gameplay is reasonable for titles which are only partially complete. Graphics are excellent, as expected. I spoke to one of the level designers for Resistance, and he was raving about the power of the PS3. He was telling me that on the PS2, as a game gets close to the release date it’s typical to start simplifying levels by removing various graphics elements which contribute to slower response and rendering times.

Not so with the PS3. If anything, he is able to throw more complexity at it as he goes on, to help create even more realism. One example he gave was of a wall in an underground level where he designed a detailed bolt and washer, and then has 300 of these visually “holding” a wall in place. His work has certainly paid off in what I saw during my playing of Resistance both in Mission mode and in Deathmatch.

Only one of the titles Sony was showing offered support for the 6DOF feature of their controller - a feature which more and more appears to be a bit contrived as a form of thunder stealing (from Nintendo). Lending credence to that is that only Warhawk had any support for the feature. And the PS3 is only about six months from launch.

Gameplay with Warhawk was actually not as bad as it looked during the Sony press conference on Monday, but it certainly took a bit of getting used to tilting the controller to fly a plane instead of using the thumbstick. Once I got the hang of it, it did feel a bit more intuitive though. I think a big hurdle for at least experienced gamers will be the expectation that since the PS3 controller looks and feels like a PS2 controller, games will use it the same.

That’s where Nintendo gets it right - by creating such novel and different controllers there are no expectations or controller experience response to overcome. You have to learn to use the Wii controllers from scratch.

The Wii remote is remarkably lightweight, but I suspect that there were no batteries installed and that power was supplied by the tether. It requires that a sensor strip be mounted on the TV to properly sense the infrared input.

My first Wii game was a skeet and duck shooting game to help demonstrate the use of the Wii remote as a pointer. The Wii remote was pointed at the screen and controlled a crosshair and the trigger on the remote was used to fire the gun. The use of the controller in this fashion with the sensor strip is a step up from light pen sensors in gun controllers in the sense that it works with any kind of display (light pen guns are limited to CRT displays), but the downside appears to be a slight sluggishness in response. Perhaps that’s only on the development systems we were playing on and it will be improved in the released version of the Wii. That said, it was pretty easy to use, and I just barely beat the demo gal.

Next I tried Excite Truck, a racing game. In this game the Wii controller was held lengthwise parallel to the screen and tilting the controller left and right would steer the truck I was “driving” in the direction tilted in. Same controller, but completely different use.

Next was H.A.M.M.E.R., where I finally got to use the Nunchuk part of the controller. The nunchuk plugs into the Wii remote to get its power and presumably to use its transceiver. It’s also the device on which a thumbstick/joystick is located, and in this game it was used to move the main character while the Wii remote was used to aim (using the infrared driven crosshair) and use the weapon - a big ass hammer. The Wii remote was also used to super slam the hammer as well as swing the hammer around, all by wrist and arm motion. Again yet another different use for the Wii controllers.

The graphics I saw for the Wii are not nearly as awe inspriring as those on the PS3, but that again could be the result of the titles involved. One thing that was noticable in all of the dozen Wii titles I looked at, though, were jagged edges. No apparent anti-aliasing. I will wait for production units before making my final call on graphics quality, however.

But for game control novelty and ingenious game design and game play, the Nintendo Wii appears to win hands down.