[WII]TIME杂志上关于WII及手柄操作的文章

desert_fox

在15日要出版的TIME杂志上有一篇关于NINTENDO的文章<NINTENDO&#39;S NEW GAME>,其中有一段关于WII手柄操作的话,同时瓦里奥系列也将登场WII.

After Warioware, we play scenes from the upcoming Legend of Zelda title, Twilight Princess, a moody, dark (by Nintendo&#39;s Disneyesque standards) fantasy adventure. Now I&#39;m Errol Flynn, sword fighting with the controller, then aiming a bow and arrow, then using it as a fishing rod, reeling in a stubborn virtual fish. The third game, and probably the most fun, is also the simplest: tennis. The controller becomes a racket, and I&#39;m smacking forehands and stroking backhands. The sensors are fine enough that you can scoop under the ball to lob it, or slice it for spin. At the end, I don&#39;t so much put the controller down as have it pried from my hands.

在 Warioware 之后，我们玩塞尔达晨光公主，阴郁黑暗(按照任天堂的DISNEY奇幻风格)的一作。 现在我是Errol Flynn , 将控制器作为刀剑战斗, 然后对准目标用弓和箭, 然后以它作为一支钓鱼的竿，在桥上对付一条难以对付的鱼.第三场游戏, 或许是最有趣的, 也是最简单的: 网球.控制器变成一个球拍，而且我正手拍球又反手击球,感应器够灵敏,你能打出缓慢的高球, 或削出旋转球.在最后, 我不情愿的放下了这有趣的仿佛和我融为一体的手柄.

PS:金山快译奇垃圾,原想偷下懒,结果自己得重新翻译一遍.


全文:It is cherry-blossom time in Kyoto, Japan, and I am dancing the hula
for Shigeru Miyamoto. It&#39;s not easy to get into the hula spirit in a
hushed conference room in a restricted area of the gleaming white
global headquarters of Nintendo, with several high-ranking,
business-suited Japanese executives watching my every (undulating)
move. But I&#39;m doing my best. I&#39;m trying out an electronic device that
the Nintendo brass devoutly believes, or at least fervently hopes, is
the future of entertainment. Outside, drifting pink petals remind us of
the impermanence of all things.



You may not have heard of Shigeru Miyamoto, but I guarantee you, you
know his work. Miyamoto is probably the most successful video-game
designer of all time. Maybe you&#39;ve heard of a little guy named Mario?
Italian plumber, likes jumping? A big angry ape by the name of ...
Donkey Kong? The Legend of Zelda? All Miyamoto. To gamers, Miyamoto is
like all four Beatles rolled into one jolly, twinkly-eyed, weak-chinned
Japanese man. At age 53, he still makes video games, but he also serves
as general manager of Nintendo&#39;s entertainment analysis and development
division. It is an honor to hula for him.



But Nintendo is no longer the global leader in games that it was during
Miyamoto&#39;s salad days. Not that it has fallen on hard times exactly,
but in the vastly profitable home-entertainment-console market,
Nintendo&#39;s GameCube sits an ignominious third, behind both Sony&#39;s
PlayStation 2 and even upstart Microsoft, which entered the market for
the first time with the Xbox only five years ago. Miyamoto and Nintendo
president Satoru Iwata are going to try to change that. But they&#39;re
going to do it in the weirdest, riskiest way you could think of.



All three machinesPlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube--are showing their
age, and a new generation of game hardware is aborning. Microsoft
launched its next-gen Xbox 360 in November of last year; Nintendo and
Sony will launch their new machines this fall. Those changeovers, which
happen every four or five years, are moments of opportunity in the
gaming industry, when the guard changes and the underdog has its day.
Nintendo--a company that is, for better or for worse, addicted to risk
taking--will attempt to steal a march on its competitors with a bizarre
wireless device that senses a player&#39;s movements and uses them to
control video games. Even more bizarre is the fact that it might work.



Video games are an unusual medium in that they carry a heavy stigma
among nongamers. Not everybody likes ballet, but most nonballet fans
don&#39;t accuse ballet of leading to violent crime and mental
backwardness. Video games aren&#39;t so lucky. There&#39;s a sharp divide
between gamers and nongamers, and the result is a market that, while
large and devoted--last year video-game software and hardware brought
in $27 billion--is also deeply stagnant. Its borders are sharply
defined, and they&#39;re not expanding.



And even within that core market, the industry is deeply troubled.
Fewer innovative games are being published, and gamers are getting
bored. Games have become so expensive to create that companies won&#39;t
risk money on fresh ideas, and the result is a plague of sequels and
movie spin-offs. "Take Tetris, for example," says Iwata, 46, a
well-dressed man who radiates good-humored intelligence. "If someone
were to take Tetris to a video-game publisher today, what would happen?
The publisher would say, &#39;These graphics look kind of cheap. And this
is a fun little mechanic, but you need more game modes in there. Maybe
you can throw in some CG movies to make it a little bit flashier? And
maybe we can tie it in with some kind of movie license?&#39;" Voilà: a good
game ruined.



What to do? Here&#39;s Microsoft&#39;s plan for the Xbox 360: faster chips and
better online service. And here&#39;s Sony&#39;s plan for the Playstation 3:
faster chips and better online service. But Iwata thinks that with a
sufficiently innovative approach, Nintendo can reinvent gaming and in
the process turn nongamers into gamers.



"The one topic we&#39;ve considered and debated at Nintendo for a very long
time is, Why do people who don&#39;t play video games not play them?" Iwata
has been asking himself, and his employees, that question for the past
five years. And what Iwata has noticed is something that most gamers
have long ago forgotten: to nongamers, video games are really hard.
Like hard as in homework. The standard video-game controller is a kind
of Siamese-twin affair, two joysticks fused together and studded with
buttons, two triggers and a four-way toggle switch called a d-pad. In a
game like Halo, players have to manipulate both joysticks
simultaneously while working both triggers and pounding half a dozen
buttons at the same time. The learning curve is steep.



That presents a problem of what engineers call interface design: How do
you make it easier for players to tell the machine what they want it to
do? "During the past five years, we were always telling them we have to
do something new, something very different," Miyamoto says (like Iwata,
he speaks through an interpreter). "And the game interface has to be
the key. Without changing the interface we could not attract
nongamers."



So they changed it. Nintendo threw away the controller-as-we-know-it
and replaced it with something that nobody in his right mind would
recognize as video-game hardware at all: a short, stubby, wireless wand
that resembles nothing so much as a TV remote control. Humble as it
looks on the outside, it&#39;s packed full of gadgetry: it&#39;s part laser
pointer and part motion sensor, so it knows where you&#39;re aiming it,
when and how fast you move it and how far it is from the TV screen.
There&#39;s a strong whiff of voodoo about it. If you want your character
on the screen to swing a sword, you just swing the controller. If you
want to aim your gun, you just aim the wand and pull the trigger.



Nintendo gave TIME the first look at its new controller--but before
I pick it up, Miyamoto suggests that I remove my jacket. That turns out
to be a good idea. The first game I try--Miyamoto walks me through it,
which to a gamer is the rough equivalent of getting to trade bons mots
with Jerry Seinfeld--is a Warioware title (Wario being Mario&#39;s shorter,
fatter evil twin). It consists of dozens of manic five-second mini
games in a row. They&#39;re geared to the Japanese gaming sensibility,
which has a zany, cartoonish, game-show bent. In one hot minute, I use
the controller to swat a fly, do squat-thrusts as a weight lifter, turn
a key in a lock, catch a fish, drive a car, sauté some vegetables,
balance a broom on my outstretched hand, color in a circle and fence
with a foil. And yes, dance the hula. Since very few people outside
Nintendo have seen the new hardware, the room is watching me closely.



It&#39;s a remarkable experience. Instead of passively playing the games,
with the new controller you physically perform them. You act them out.
It&#39;s almost like theater: the fourth wall between game and player
dissolves. The sense of immersion--the illusion that you, personally,
are projected into the game world--is powerful. And there&#39;s an instant
party atmosphere in the room. One advantage of the new controller is
that it not only is fun, it looks fun. When you play with an old-style
controller, you look like a loser, a blank-eyed joystick fondler. But
when you&#39;re jumping around and shaking your hulamaker, everybody&#39;s
having a good time.



After Warioware, we play scenes from the upcoming Legend of Zelda
title, Twilight Princess, a moody, dark (by Nintendo&#39;s Disneyesque
standards) fantasy adventure. Now I&#39;m Errol Flynn, sword fighting with
the controller, then aiming a bow and arrow, then using it as a fishing
rod, reeling in a stubborn virtual fish. The third game, and probably
the most fun, is also the simplest: tennis. The controller becomes a
racket, and I&#39;m smacking forehands and stroking backhands. The sensors
are fine enough that you can scoop under the ball to lob it, or slice
it for spin. At the end, I don&#39;t so much put the controller down as
have it pried from my hands.



John Schappert, a senior vice president at Electronic Arts, is
overseeing a version of the venerable Madden football series for
Nintendo&#39;s new hardware. He sees the controller from the auteur&#39;s
perspective, as an opportunity but also a huge challenge. "Our
engineers now have to decipher what the user is doing," he says. "&#39;Is
that a throw gesture? Is it a juke? A stiff arm?&#39; Everyone knows how to
make a throwing motion, but we all have our own unique way of
throwing." But consider the upside: you&#39;re basically playing football
in your living room. "To snap the ball, you &#39;snap&#39; the remote back
toward your body, which hikes the ball," Schappert says. "No buttons to
press, just gesture a hiking motion, and the ball&#39;s in the hands of the
QB. To pass the ball, you gesture a throwing motion. Hard, fast
gestures result in bullet passes. Slower, less forceful, gestures
result in loftier, slower lob passes. It truly plays like nothing
you&#39;ve ever experienced."



Of course, hardware is only half the picture. The other half is the
games themselves. "We created a task force internally at Nintendo,"
Iwata says, "whose objective was to come up with games that would
attract people who don&#39;t play games." Last year they set out to design
a game for the elderly. Amazingly, they succeeded. Brain Age is a set
of electronic puzzles (including Sudoku) that purports to keep aging
minds nimble. It was released for one of Nintendo&#39;s portable platforms,
the Nintendo DS, last year. So far, it has sold 2 million copies, many
of them to people who had never bought a game before.



The real demographic grail for any game publisher is, of course, girls.
And although females have historically been largely impervious to the
charms of video gaming, Nintendo has made inroads even there, with
products so offbeat that they barely qualify as games at all. In
Nintendogs, the object is to raise and train a cute puppy.
Electroplankton can only be described as a game about farming tiny
singing microbes (surely every woman&#39;s dream?). In Animal Crossing, you
take up residence in a tiny cartoon town where you plant flowers and go
fishing and design shirts. You can visit other players&#39; towns and trade
shirts with them. The reaction from traditional gamers tends to be
&#39;Fine, but who do I shoot at?&#39; But Animal Crossing is a hit, and
Nintendogs has sold 6 million copies. (Incidentally, Miyamoto points
out that Animal Crossing wasn&#39;t originally designed for girls. "Many
female schoolchildren are purchasing and enjoying it," he says,
cracking himself up. "Also ladies in their 20s. But the fact of the
matter is, this game was developed by middle-aged guys in their 30s and
40s. They just wanted to create something to play themselves.")



It has always been Nintendo&#39;s habit, maybe even its compulsion, to bet
its big franchises from time to time. That&#39;s one reason it has been
able to transform itself so completely over the years; it began life in
the late 19th century as a playing-card manufacturer. It&#39;s also the
main reason the company keeps really large reserves of cash handy, in
case things go awry. Look at the disastrous Virtual Boy, a 3-D game
system that was released in 1995 and retired, unmourned and largely
unsold, in 1996. Look at the name they come up with for their new
console. For years it was known by the predictable but perfectly
serviceable code name Revolution. It has now been rechristened the
Nintendo Wii, an unreadable, unintelligible (that daunting double-i!)
syllable. (For the record, it&#39;s pronounced "we," and the i&#39;s are
supposed to represent the new controller ... never mind.)



But the name Wii not wii-thstanding, Nintendo has grasped two important
notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don&#39;t listen to
your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal--they
blog a lot--but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers
would be the only audience it ever had. "[Wii] was unimaginable for
them," Iwata says. "And because it was unimaginable, they could not say
that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the
customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them.
Sony and Microsoft make daily-necessity kinds of things. They have to
listen to the needs of the customers and try to comply with their
requests. That kind of approach has been deeply ingrained in their
minds."



And here&#39;s the second notion: Cutting-edge design has become more
important than cutting-edge technology. There is a persistent belief
among engineers that consumers want more power and more features. That
is incorrect. Look at Apple&#39;s iPod, a device that didn&#39;t and doesn&#39;t do
much more than the competition. It won because it&#39;s easier, and sexier,
to use. In many ways, Nintendo is the Apple of the gaming world, and
it&#39;s betting its future on the same wisdom. The race is not to him who
hulas fastest, it&#39;s to him who looks hottest doing it..

该用户已被禁言

真的假的 看上去蛮有趣的

多古拉

哈哈！希望自己能早点亲身体验一下！

wjbobby

其实街机里就有通过感应器用球拍打球的，感觉很多街机独特的玩法都可以通过wii在家用机上实现了

象拔蚌

看来得重新锻练一下了，要不到时应付不了这体力活啊！

lee.rei

什么都看不懂........

desert_fox

期待瓦里奥大哥的表现啊,难道可以用手柄当棍子敲敌人脑袋.

飞走的烤鸭

NDS也不是用了什么很先进的外设,但是只要有精巧的软件对应,就能有点石成金的力量,希望PS3也不要忽略EYETOY2的性能,多开发出几个优秀的游戏对应

nbvcxz

真是有意思啊  大期待啊 挖卡卡卡卡

nds

当剑砍...当网球拍.....时间一长..就不怎么舒服了吧..==