PlayStation Move: It Only Does Everything

Everyone knows the PlayStation Move plays games – we told you that in our hands on with the final hardware (and near final copies of the games themselves) – of course it does, that’s really the whole point of Sony’s new flashy bit of hardware.  What most don’t know, however, is what else it does.  You’re intrigued, right?  You’re desperate to know what else – we can tell.

Well, away from swatting flies or steering a besuited man down the hilly streets of Japan, the PlayStation Move can act as something of a replacement for a Dual Shock in normal, day to day use of your PlayStation 3.  I say something of a replacement, because there’s things it can’t do, and whilst you shouldn’t be surprised that you can use it to control the basic XMB (as we’ve already told you this) you might be surprised at some of its other uses.

That’s the screen that greets you when you first try to access the XMB with a Move attached.  Not the chaps in brollies, mind, they’re part of an advert from PlayTV.  The screen explains that to navigate the XMB, you simply hold in the trigger and move the Move up, down, left or right . Except you don’t, really, I found it’s much more responsive if you angle the controller rather than move it.

Still, whichever way, it works, and it’s great.   You can move around the PS3’s XMB with no fuss at all, and the four face buttons (and the central Move button) are used exactly as you’d expect.  As for PlayTV, well, no, it doesn’t really work with it – although you can press the Square button to bring up the guide you can’t scroll around it – yet.  An update will fix all that in a jiffy though, we’re sure, but that said the actual Bluetooth remote does that job well enough anyway.

A quick tour of the XMB reveals some pretty neat features.  There’s a calibration screen (below) that lets you reset the Move’s sensors via a bizarre twisting ritual that works much better without a wire charging the Move – we didn’t actually need to calibrate the Move at all, mind, but it’s nice to know the option, which is under the Settings column on the XMB, is there in case we need it.

Music wise, you can obviously select an audio track with the Move from the XMB and it’ll play no bother, but fast forwarding and rewinding doesn’t work, although it does try.  What does work, mind, is the same action on Blu-ray movies – you can hold the trigger and swing the Move to control the playback speed (and direction) of a film without any fuss, and whilst some menus were a bit of a problem, basic Blu-ray control with the Move is already in there.

Image browsing is nice, too, especially if you’ve got loads to scroll through, the Move able to flick the thumbnails around with abandon.  You can’t skip between your photos without tapping Triangle first and selecting ‘next’ mind, but again, perhaps a firmware update before Move releases will iron out any such issues.  For something that was never really pushed as a replacement for a Dual Shock, the Move does go some way to trying.

It’s all rather fun, trying out new gadgets like this (and all this is without an Eye attached, by the way).  We’ll have more on Move soon, so stay locked to TSA.

Update: a few people were asking about the web browser, so I had a quick look: it works much like the rest of the XMB at present, with the trigger and the angle of the Move flicking the on-screen cursor between links.  Currently, and again this is a trial without the PlayStation Eye, the Move’s interaction with the browser mirrors that of the Dual Shock’s d-pad: you don’t move the cursor like you do with a mouse, but that could (and probably will) change with a firmware update.