Milo and Kate – impressions and an interview

Good old Ellie :

“Can you draw a nob ?”

Someone give that lass her own website and all other games websites should just stop.

Ellie’s interview is very amusing, as usual.

But…. I…. just can’t bring myself to care about this. At all. In any way shape or form. The fact that this is the long-touted top-secret Dmitri project makes it even worse!

“But we haven’t cracked the real problem, which is him understanding the meaning of it all. He’ll give you the illusion he does that. The interesting thing is you can only talk to him when the Talk icon appears at the bottom of the screen.”

Talk now, what you say makes no difference.

What a crock of shit…

The concept’s making my head boggle. If it really does work, it could mean the dawn of games without the “interface” issue. My mate tried Far Cry 2 round my house a while back and ended up spinning around looking at the ceiling. If he could just talk to characters on the screen, he could play anything.

I really, really, really want to see this in the flesh.

He could play anything so long as it involved standing still, you mean?

That was a great interview.

Interesting that body language / facial expressions are easier for a computer program to understand / process than spoken language. Fits nicely with human evolution.

Isn’t it just SEGA’s Seaman game with a prettier fish?

It’s the pad that stopped him playing it. I showed him the controls and he just laughed. Reload, crouch, iron sight, fire, jump, move, look… It’s easy to forget that we’ve all been playing games forever and we’re used to certain protocols. He could barely walk forwards.

I just meant that Natal is practically incapable of one of the most fundamental interactions with videogames: moving your character. It isn’t a replacement for the controller but a companion, so whilst I’m all for your friend being able to engage with comparatively simple titles, games as we know them are still intrinsically tied to buttons and sticks. Far Cry 2 will forever be beyond him, for instance.

I want to train my Milo and pit it in an arena against other Milos where it can brutally savage all other Milos in unarmed combat as red-blooded Gamertag spectators cheer on.

“Rip ‘is fuckin’ head off Milo!! Gyaaaah!!”

And Molyneux can make some meta-game where you can place side-bets to earn cash to use in the forthcoming Fable 3!

You may well be right, Aimless. Gah. I have to work. But I am definitely excited by this.

I want to be able to punch people in the face.

“Far Cry 2 will forever be beyond him, for instance.”

Yeah, but at least he should be able to look in the correct direction if the camera is used for look/aim direction.

You can do that any day of the week Mike!

There had to be another fucking dog in it, didn’t there?

The optimal scenario is that they continue to make games with controllers for people like us and they use this stuff to make completely different complementary things.

I think the big thing to come out of the Milo demo is that you’ve a lot of people wringing their hands wondering if games can eclipse other mediums like film, books etc as an art form, are/can games be art etc. What can interactive media do that non-interactive ones can’t.

There’s a glimpse right there. It’d shut up someone like Roger Ebert for starters.

Hm sound like MS goes casual like Nintendo. Hm so i guess Sony is the only option for real gamers then.

lol… yeah, there were absolutely no hardcore games shown yesterday.

It’s true, I heard Microsoft are only allowing minigame collections to be released on the 360 from now on. All the great games they showed during their conference have been cancelled.

Hm yeah I might as well throw my 360 in the bin.

Why is this ‘casual’ and ‘not for real gamers’? Just because something’s accessible and a bit different, doesn’t mean it’s not good. On the contrary, this is a really genuinely exciting development for videogames.

And while it’s a long way off yet (certainly getting it to the stage where it responds to everyone and does half the stuff that Molyneux clearly wants it to do), it’s clever of Microsoft to showcase it so early because it’s going to make the MotionPlus stuff tonight look a little old hat, regardless of how many times – and I think it might be a lot – Nintendo uses the phrase ‘here and now’ in its conference.

“Hm yeah I might as well throw my 360 in the bin”

You don’t have to, ms were kind enough to build in a self destruct for you

I think the Natal stuff looks amazing.

Don’t really care if it doesn’t cut it’s own revolutionary new type of gaming experience, but the potential to improve current game controls along side a traditional controller is huge.

Just added a link to Joystiq’s piece.

I want a Natal-controlled Ninja Gaiden game. Perfect 1:1 controls. That’d separate the men from the boys.

Do as I say, Itagaki, you I-wear-sunglasses-indoors tart, you.

“Do as I say, Itagaki, you I-wear-sunglasses-indoors tart, you.”

Milo, the peadophiles dream, the peado’s get the kid and no arrest warrant.

Well, forgive me for being completely dickheaded here…

It’s Peter Molyneux. You guys clearly know him better than me, but I do know, that he hardly ever delivers on what he shows.

If he does then great! Step one, but then logistically, there are still going to be a mass of problems. Space, having to stand. There’s plenty others, but none of them lend themselves to being the centre of the living room.

“Having to stand…”

Yeah, this is one hurdle that most gamers will find impossible to get over. Proper physical activity.

You can take the piss, but it’s true.

You can have something more from sitting down on the couch and watching a movie.