PAX 2010 Article – Sony Move

A horde of PAX attendees and Sony fanboys and –girls lined up for the Sony Blog’s Move Meetup in Boston to demo the wand-like controller, and grab some free food and swag. The wait was long (with attendees showing up at least two hours ahead of time), the line disorganized, but that didn’t discourage gamers for coming to the largest Sony meet-up in at least six years.

Four demos were on display and playable: a multi-player party game, a grab-bag sports game, a technical demo and, of course, an office-chair racing game that was reminiscent of Crazy Taxi (Of course!). The first three were developed in the U.S. and Europe, while that last one comes from Sony’s Japan Studios. All attendees who I spoke with were disappointed in the absence of SOCOM 4, which has been demoed with Move in the past.

The crowd overall seemed impressed with the precision of the Move, but still wondered about its application to hardcore games. Some praised the controller’s precision, but called it a glorified EyeToy.

“The precision is the key thing,” said Glenn Winters, a PAX attendee from New Jersey. “For me, I’m not a huge casual gamer but I think it has the most potential to get me into casual games.

“I think what Sony still needs to show for the Move is that killer app, the game that’s really going to sell the Move, but I don’t think it’s here,” said Geoff Keighley, video game journalist and host of Spike TV’s GTTV, who stopped by the meet-up and raffled off some swag with Sony. “The Wii sold so well because of Wii Sports and Wii Fit because players understood why you really need motion for them.”

The games demoed at PAX don’t have a set release date, but are expected to be released around the same time Move debuts in late fall.

The multi-player party game, tentatively called Move Party, featured a handful of mini-games where players competed in painting and popping floating balloons among other odd jobs like shaving and dieing salon customer’s hair and using an small fan to float falling baby birds into nests (word to the wise: do *not* let the baby birds hit the fan). The sports-style game, tentatively named Sport Champions, included ping-pong and gladiator fighting. The technical demo holds many small demos that focus on Move’s 3D precision and tracking with Sony software programmers explaining the ins and outs of Move and also the whys and hows. The office racer, tentatively titled Slide, easily won most ridiculous-in-show and caught my eye in the quirky way that only Japanese games can. The game involves players racing down Japanese streets, running from the Yakuza and running over and under (and also roundhouse kicking) everything in the way.

Stay with MyGamer as we cover more from PAX 2010.