Move 2 Weeks On Part 1: The Hardware

Welcome to the first of our massive 4-parter Move special. Two weeks on, I have hammered the Move and Navi to pieces to bring you the most in-depth Move report on the net. Did they even give me any biscuits for my work? No. Why? Because they’re tight wads. Send complaints to TSA Towers. I want my biscuits.

So, for all three of you who don’t have a Move yet, let’s get down to brass tacks, starting with the hardware.

Packaging and Contents

The standalone Move and Navi come in those sealed plastic packaging boxes which require a saw and considerable accidental self-harming to open, and should in my opinion be banned altogether. Fortunately, the Starter Pack at least comes in a more environmentally friendly cardboard box.

Inside you’ll find the controller and a manual full of obligatorily ridiculous warnings. First complaint: both devices require a USB cable to charge, and neither come with one. If like me you only have one charging cable, you are going to have to charge them one at a time via your PS3. They also don’t come pre-charged, so you’ll also have the pleasure of needing to wait a couple of hours before you can do anything.

The demo disk in the starter pack offers 11 demos which includes a couple not currently on the PSN store such as The Fight and Time Crisis, but it is not likely worth the extra money just for these.

Design

The Move is a two-piece mould which is a little unfortunate but not really a problem, and I think most buyers won’t realise until they get one that the orb on the end is actually squishy – developers can change the light in the orb to any colour they wish, which is a nice touch in multi-player games where the colour indicates who’s turn it is.

On the controller you’ll find a PS button, a Move button, the four face buttons and a trigger underneath called T. On the left and right-hand sides are Select and Start buttons flush to the plastic moulding. Holding down T in the XMB lets you navigate, and this is surprisingly easy after a few minutes of practice.

The Navi has X and O, an arrow pad which is pleasantly beveled inwards, an analog stick, a PS button plus L1 and L2. Or in my case, R1 and R2 because I’m left-handed and they didn’t think of that.

Both devices are robustly constructed in the same way the DualShock 3 is robustly constructed: it’s as good as you can get when using really cheap plastic, but should withstand plenty of throwing around regardless. Excessive compression or tortion on the orb will cause is to become mis-shapen, so be careful not to stand on it.

My main complaint about the Move device is that the orb is an absolute dirt magnet. Now, while my house is not exactly spick-and-span (I am a gamer after all), it is not a war zone either, and even the process of taking the Move out of its box immediately saw dust all over it. Place it on your sofa or carpet and you will find micro-fibres building up on it in no time. It doesn’t affect gameplay, but it looks unsightly. Unfotunately the orb is also a two-piece mould which means all the minute flecks of dust build up in the mould joint.

As a lefty, I also didn’t appreciate the placement of Start. The orientation of the buttons is such that for a right-handed player, Start is easy to reach and Select isn’t. For me, this is the opposite.

Setting up

Configuration is a snap and just like a regular controller except with an additional calibration step, which is very easy to perform. Plug your Move and Navi into the USB ports, press PS on them, pull out the cables and you’re good to go.

Each of the two devices uses one controller port, but games take their interaction via the port of the Move controller: the Navi automatically pairs with it via Bluetooth, so its controller port assignment should normally be irrelevant (but see later).

I have one major complaint: almost every game requires you to re-calibrate the Move within the game as well as via the XMB. Most games require you to do this every time you start them. This is rather stupid in my opinion when calibration has already been performed, and this urgently needs to be standardized in a firmware patch. Every game requires calibration using a different technique, and one or two (notably Echochrome ii) caused quite a bit of hassle.

Your PS Eye needs to be set to widescreen mode (the blue dot above the lens), which should be the same as how most of you are using it already, and generally speaking pointing it straight forwards works fine, but note that EyePet requires you to tilt it all the way down, so be prepared to keep faffing about resetting the camera if you plan to play EyePet.

In use

First up, if you’re on a budget, save your money. Only Heavy Rain and Resident Evil 5 Gold Edition require a Navi; in RUSE it is optional, and almost no games require 2 Move controllers at the moment, including the multi-player games which with the exception of for example Table Tennis in Sports Champions, are mostly turn-based.

The controllers are very light and pretty easy to use, although I did get confused when playing Resident Evil 5 a few times since you have access to X and O on both hands. Tracking is very accurate with some games using 1-to-1 mapping and others using a coarser granularity to help the player.

Be aware that while you don’t normally notice the orb in front of you when playing, it will reflect in your TV screen and is more or less always visible.

The camera coped equally well with dark and light conditions although the video is very grainy and covered in blue speckles during the dark in games which show a video feed. Sports Champions warned me that my room was too bright due to my powerful aquarium lights, but this did not affect gameplay. In the dark, the only problem I had was with EyePet recognising my hand movements (without the Move).

Space requirements

Make no mistake, Move requires a bigger room than the hype would have you believe. While you can sit playing Flight Control HD and hardly move at all, if you’re planning to play something like High Velocity Bowling or Sports Champions, you will need room. Sony advises standing 2.5m (8 feet) from the camera – I used it from 1.5m away with no problems. However, height is an issue. I am 167cm (5′ 6”), but when a friend of height 187cm (6′ 1”) came to play, the Move would regularly lose tracking as he raised it in the air due to being sufficiently close to the TV that the orb went out of the camera’s field of vision.

Unlike the Wii, playing a game like tennis on the Move requires you to physically walk left and right at times because the avatar does not stand in one spot as it does in Wii Sports. On other games you will be asked to spin around, lunge, jump back and so on. The Move absolutely requires more room than a Wiimote to operate successfully.

Battery life

In a nutshell, it’s awful. If you take on a full days’ gaming session of 6-8 hours, expect to have to charge your Move at least twice. The manual warns against playing with the USB charging cable plugged in, but for sitting down games I often found myself doing just that, because it was the only way to continue. Battery life is a major issue, and since the controller is much lighter than a Wiimote, I do hope that more potent heavier batteries are released to help address this.

Conclusions

Overall, I’m pleased with the Move. It (usually) works as it should, and the games that are worth playing are great fun. I am lucky enough to have the space for it, and in my opinion it is priced well at only £39.99 for the Move, £50.99 for a Starter Pack including camera, Move and demo disk, and £22.49 for a Navi here in Norway, where prices are normally massively inflated compared to the UK.

Aside from my main banes of poor battery life and rapid dirt accumulation, all is well in every other regard.

In the next part, we’ll have a comprehensive run-down of every Move game, past, present and future, and take a look at what’s worth playing.