Having had several false starts last week with Sony Move purchases, I finally went to my local Kmart to pick one up on Saturday. My rationale was a deal that Kmart was offering for a $25 PS3 game coupon with the purchase of the Move bundle. I will freely admit that I am a sucker for a deal as well as a new gadget. So I am now the owner of Sony’s Wii reaction.
The bundle remained unopened until the following Monday. Early that morning I opened the packages and connected my well-crafted Move controllers(gotta have two) to my PS3 to be charged. The charging took a bit longer than I expected but I didn’t want to use them until they had been fully charged. The setup was fairly painless and was aided with the use of high-quality, according to the package, velco.
The first and only title I had a chance to play was Sports Champion. Having briefly played the gladiator game at a local Sony event, I decide to try that first. To my surprise playing with one movemote(don’t you just hate that name?) is fun despite the game’s ability to map the shield control to another movemote. I spent the next 20-30 minutes making my way through the Bronze level tier. When that mode concluded I went on to try frisbee golf. Sports Champion has another winner. Eventually I tried all the different modes and enjoyed them all except for table tennis. I could not get a handle on where and how I needed to hold the movemote to play effectively. Nevertheless, the difficulty I had with that single mode was not enough to ruin the overall enjoyment I had with Sports Champion. It is good at what it does even if sometimes I felt like I had done it before. Which is not necessarily a bad thing but a $100+ investment can alter one’s expectations.
Overall the move is very solid and even the XMB control works pretty well. I still find it difficult to recommend to those who want fresh and new motion gaming experiences. But if your expectations are in-line with the current software’s offerings, dive in. The many would-be Move owners need not worry. Those new, exciting and HD experiences are coming and will likely be worth the wait.
Part 2 will focus on my kids and our initial experiences with Eyepet
