Nintendo has been talking about the difficulties of creating the next generation Wii console for several months now, with one of the creators of the device – and indeed designer of some of the company’s finest games – Shigeru Miyamoto saying, “I think that in the next generation of (Wii) hardware, the challenge is how unique and different a product Nintendo is able to make.”

However, it now appears that the Wii will only see mild evolution rather than all round revolution in 2011 though, as rumours grow of a HD Wii 2 coming out next year. Continue Reading

Dr Richard Marks – who many will know as being the creator of Sony‘s PlayStation Move technology – has got in a nice dig at motion control rival Kinect, saying that Microsoft’s decision to have no controller at all on the product could actually end up being quite “limiting”.

The Kinect doesn’t look too limited here anyway.

Speaking T3, Marks claimed that Sony had considered doing away with the controller in the same way that Kinect does, but that ultimately it did not allow enough freedom for the gamer. “I think it depends if you believe that controller-less is necessarily better which I don’t believe,” said Marks. Continue Reading

Earlier this month we reported that Microsoft’s Xbox 360 got a massive bump in sales thanks to the new 250GB version available in certain parts of the globe. Overall though, the last 12 months has seen the Microsoft console lose out heavily to the PlayStation 3 in sales, with the Sony product outselling it by four million units worldwide.

The figures mark a huge turnaround from this time last year, when the 360 outsold the PS3 by 1.5 million units in the preceding 12 months. The full figures show that Microsoft sold 10.3 million consoles in its last financial year, which ended June 30. However, Sony confirmed yesterday that it sold 14.3 million PlayStation 3s in the same period, pushing the machine’s total sales to 38.1 million. Continue Reading

It seems that Sony, which has been fairly happy to disparage other companies’ motion-control efforts, has talked fairly openly about why it didn’t go with the same kind of kit as Microsoft’s Project Natal.

Sony's PlayStation 3 motion controller could prove interesting stuff indeed

For those who haven’t encountered it before, Project Natal is Microsoft’s camera-based motion and gesture control arrangement for its Xbox 360, due to hit later this year. Microsoft has long touted the controller-free approach as a defining part of the Natal experience, while Sony, with its upcoming PlayStation Move controller, has been championing the “motion control with buttons” approach. Now though, Sony’s own R&D manager, Dr. Richard Marks, has explained to some extent just why Sony didn’t decide to go with something more like Project Natal.

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It seems that Sony has managed to impress crowds with its motion-sensitive controller, dubbed PlayStation Move, during this year’s Game Developer Conference. Now though, it seems there are some serious limitations to the hardware.

Sony's PlayStation Move controller is a bit of a strange beast...

Apparently, according to Gizmodo, Sony’s PlayStation Move controllers won’t be nearly as friendly as Nintendo’s Wii controllers are when it comes to getting a few friends together and duking it out. Indeed, if the word from GDC is correct, it seems that the PlayStation Move controllers will limit PS3 owners to two-player games, if those games require the use of both the Move controller and the optional nun-chuck style sub-controller, as it seems many will.

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It seems that Sony has discarded those names we heard were up for consideration over the course of the last few months, with word coming out now that Sony’s motion controller will be titled, quite simply, “Move.”

Sony's PlayStation Arc itself looks fairly strange...

Sony had been fairly tacit about its upcoming motion control device, with previous reports indicating that we could expect the input to arrive under the name “Wand” or the perhaps cooler “Arc.” Instead, Sony will be rolling with Move, and took the time to reveal a couple of different packages we can expect to see when the device eventually releases later this year.

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