Move isn’t just a gimmick

At Sony’s rather long winded press conference yesterday we were left being impressed by two things. Firstly the fact that Twisted Metal will be returning to the Sony brand and it looks bigger and better than ever and secondly, Sorcery. Sorcery will be an early 2011 title for Playstation Move and in it’s demo showing at E3 yesterday it has shown that it has all the charm of a magicians assistant. Sorcery for those whom didn’t see the conference yesterday, is essentially a wizard style dungeon game whereby you can cast spells and perform magical combat using your magic stick. What impressed us the most was how effortless and simple the controls were, there was no unnecessary waggling needed. Just a nice flick of the wrist and other gesture based controls that absorbed you into the game.

Sorcery allows you to combine different elemental properties, everything from fire and ice, straight through to electricity. It’s not just a case of hitting enemies with these properties, there is also puzzle elements and tactical elements too. For instance, in the demo we saw the wizard making a scorched line of fire on the floor to block enemies for a certain amount of time. Did i mention the wizard has a vortex weapon too? The fact that this move title has been designed in mind to be a fully fledged title wets my appetite for it. It’s becoming abundantly clear that Microsoft’s Kinnect games will be a smattering of party play and die-cast empty experiences. Kinect Adventure looked dull and unexciting, Kinectimals just doesn’t drive most of their market and so on and so forth. The only game we’ve seen that looked remotely fun on Microsoft Kinect is Dance Central. The Harmonix developed title looks really appealing and made the Just Dance 2 announcement at Nintendo’s conference almost laughable.

Sony have clearly laid their cards on the table, they have made it abundently clear that their peripheral device will merge the casual and hardcore audiences together and with support for SOCOM 4, Heavy Rain and Killzone 3 to name just a few, it pretty much drives home that Move will be something all of us will be using regularly, not just for a game of bowling. Whilst Sony’s conference wasn’t the most exciting, it still has shown us that they have some fantastic games coming out between now and Christmas and that early 2011 has real promise too. Most of the Move excitement came at CES and until we can get our greasy mits on a peripheral, we’ll simply have to reserve our judgements until then. At the moment though, it is looking good. Question is, will Sony put enough European marketing budget behind making sure this product is known worldwide. Well the fact they did a deal with Coca-Cola isn’t a bad start.