Nov 17, 4:03 pm
A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to get my hands on two unreleased Ubisoft titles - Red Steel on the Nintendo Wii, and Rainbow Six: Vegas on the Xbox 360.
I had to have a go on Red Steel first, as I’ve been insanely curious about the Wii. After spending a good half hour holding and dribbling over the nunchuck and wii remote, I was ready to take my chances with some crazy yakuza men and start the game. After all, how hard could it be waving a bit of plastic around in the air? Well, surprisingly so.
First of all, using the Wii controllers is a subtle practice. Not, like some of the advertising campaigns, all about the player waving their arms in the air. For the first couple of minutes I was just spinning my character around in circles as my movements were too broad. Moderation and control was the key.
Red Steel shooty shooty bang bang
Once I got to grips with that, it was time to start using my controllers in combat. Ever tried the “rub your tummy and pat your head at the same time” trick when you were a kid? Yeah? One controller for sight, the other controller for movement, whilst at the same time having to think about lock-on aiming, crouching, jumping, zooming, using the trigger, and reloading. As I stood, flapping my arms in the air, I suddenly realised that multi-tasking housewives will completely own on this console.
Thankfully after an hour I was much more comfortable running around, opening doors, sword fighting (my favourite bits), and pointing at tropical fish in response to the gleeful shouts of my on-screen fiancee. For a brand new way of gaming, FPS’s chuck the Wii gamer in at the deep end, but once you master the controls, you can master any other type of game. After a few hours, I felt pretty good, like I’d given my brain the equivalent of a ten-mile run. It’s also worth mentioning that Red Steel has an options screen where you can change the sensitivity of the controllers.
However, there was no time to rest! Rainbow Six: Vegas sat before with a Live Vision camera. Everybody’s already seen it capture super boring things like, y’know, REAL PEOPLE. This time I was going to take the new face capture feature and push it to its limits. For this I needed some key ingredients:
- A front and side profile of Terry Wogan, printed on two pieces of paper.
- Sam Fisher’s disembodied head, with goggles, stolen from a life-size Ubisoft mannequin.
- A plastic, 10” model of Fred the Homepride Chef.
Next up, Sam Fisher’s disembodied head. The camera looks for a number of points in a face to compose its image - if it can’t find or recognise these, the face capture won’t work. As the shape of a human head is one of these points, I wasn’t all too confident if it would work with Sam’s night-vision goggles attached. Surprisingly, it did - but treated the goggles as though it were part of Sam’s flesh, so you ended up with pretty severe forehead trauma. Lovely! I then tried removing the goggles (they’re on a pole poked into Sam’s hairline) - and the face capture worked perfectly. Round two - 3D Sam Fisher formed!
Fred the Homepride Chef
Finally, it was Fred’s turn, and immediately there were problems. No disrespect to Fred, but he doesn’t actually have a nose. Or, y’know, any shape to his face. There was no side profile to speak of. Three attempts and much fiddling with the brightness setting, we had to accept defeat. It may be a while before my Homepride / Rainbow Six fantasies are complete. Round three, no 3D Fred.
Considering the rubbish I forced the Live vision camera to put up with, a 67% success rating is more than acceptable. It also managed to capture my ugly mug, though I had to tie my hair back as it obscured the shape of my face for the side profile. I’m wondering what lies in store when the game is released, and what other ways people will push it to its creative limits. My weird Terry-monster may just be the start!
Toodles.
Who’ll blink first?
