After Peter Molyneux praising PlayStation MOVE while at the same time revealing that he thinks Natal is better, it seems that there are other developers out there who would disagree.
While speaking to Matt Casamassina of IGN, an unnamed developer whose company is currently working with MOVE, seemed to be full of praise for the device, as when asked he said MOVE would ultimately outperform the Wii remote in responsiveness and also revealed that their own tests are already proving that true.
Asked if there was any lag with the device the developer also responded with a resounding no, saying that it’s very fast and reliable when programmed correctly, although he did mention that it does still has some calibration issues like the Wii remote, but that it’s still an improvement.
When the subject changed to Natal, the developer was less than complimentary in what he had to say, “It’s sh*t,” he said, also adding that it just doesn’t work as promised. He also said that it’s slow and that the camera is imprecise, which was causing some major development woes.
The developer provided two examples to his interviewer to back up his point, first he refers to a development conference Microsoft held in which Peter Molyneux took the stage and attempted to demo the publisher’s Milo Natal project. Molyneux had called someone from the audience to the stage and asked them to interact with the virtual boy, however Natal’s camera failed to see the person because he was wearing a black trench coat, with him eventually being told to sit down again as it just wouldn’t work.
Another example came when Molyneux said that Milo could interact with illustrations drawn to paper and scanned by the camera. He asked the audience for suggestions. “You could see him cocking his head and listening for the right key words, and then finally he heard something the game would recognize,” said the developer. It was a cat. So he invited someone from the audience to ascend the steps to the stage and illustrate the feline on paper. When Natal attempted to scan the horribly scribbled drawing, it instead picked up the Abercrombie & Fitch logo on the person’s sweater.
Finally when the interviewer suggested that someone must be able to develop properly for the device, such as Rare and Lionhead, the developer laughed and said “They’re just going to try to make launch and then they’re going to patch everything later.”
Interesting stuff and there will be no doubt more of this back and forth as we get closer to the launch of the devices.
Thanks RadioactiveMouse