Lenovo announces allegedly revolutionary remote control gaming.
Little tip, Lenovo – when you launch a product that shamelessly copies another’s functionality, don’t simultaneously obscure the fact while using the same style of games to promote it. In this case, we are talking about Lenovo’s newly announced IdeaCentre A600 all-in-one PC, which packs a remote control that can (gasp) be used as a motion controller for games.
Yes, it’s the central novelty of the Nintendo Wii combined with a blackened take on the iMac. All in all, the A600 is a pretty bog-standard employment of mobile technology in a desktop form factor. So bog standard, in fact, that the main selling point seems to be this optional remote control of wonderment.
The remote looks to pack some nice functions, such as an ability to use it like a telephone for VOIP. It can also be used as a wireless mouse, controlling the mouse pointer by pointing it at the screen. Overall, it is obviously designed for media playback control, but some bright spark has decided that games are a selling point.
In its article about the A600, PC World postulates that the game control could make Lenovo a pioneer. It seems to deftly miss the point that, ever since games like 1992’s Dune 2 and 1995’s Terminator: Future Shock, the keyboard and mouse combination has been unassailable as a control system to the point where it almost defines the PC gaming arena.
Nintendo has managed to garner support for its motion-based Wiimote through fairly specific means. Its entire platform is built around motion control, from its marketing strategies to its range of games. What the Wii has that the A600 does not is defined boundaries. We’ve seen numerous attempts to ‘revolutionise’ PC games controllers, but most fall flat, largely due to the open nature of the PC as both a hardware platform and as a gaming environment.
Simply put, if you develop a motion control-based game for a PC, where one properly uses motion control much like the Wii, you instantly cut everyone but Lenovo A600 owners from the market for the game. Which is fine if the game is developed as a tech demo for Lenovo, but it means a high likelihood that, two years down the track, A600 owners will still only have that tech demo to play.
It sounds like a pretty negative viewpoint, but we just keep seeing these strange attempts at innovation. One thinks back to AGEIA and its PhysX cards, which were, indeed, innovative and pioneering, but never had any commercial traction purely because no one would develop for such a minuscule target market. It took an NVIDIA buyout and a complete junking of physics specific hardware in order for physics acceleration to move to the mainstream.
As always, prove me wrong, but I sincerely think we’ll hear a metric crapton of hype about the A600 and its remote control over the next few weeks, and then probably never talk of it in gaming terms again. This isn’t innovation – it’s just symptomatic of a company trying to spin as much marketing fluff as it can from a machine that is really just more of the same. Unfortunately, this seems to have become a trend since Lenovo took the reigns of IBM’s notebook business.
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Anonymous Gibbon
2009.01.07 03:04
"the keyboard and mouse combination has been unassailable as a control system to the point where it almost defines the PC gaming arena."
The keyboard and mouse combination has been unassailable as the hardcore gamer controller of choice. But it's not necessarily the most fun, or the most broadly appealing controller. Also, no games before 2006 were designed with a motion controller in mind.
Anonymous Gibbon
2009.01.07 03:08
I want to add to my comment above–
I for one welcome any and all controllers for the PC. I have been using a Wiimote connected to my PC via Bluetooth as a mouse, media center remote, and also to play games.
Motion controllers are fun and useful, and the more vendors that sell the hardware, the more software will be written for that type of hardware.
2009.01.07 06:07
It is a real chicken and egg scenario. The pull of the keyboard and mouse is still incredibly strong - the number one complaint about most console to PC ports is that the control system is wrong (even though with, say, an Xbox 360 gamepad there would be no difference in control experience).
WASD pretty much defines the more hardcore side of the PC market - every year we see controllers designed to replace the keyboard/mouse combination yet they never really move beyond niche/novelty items.
There may well be potential for decent motion control for some PC games, especially the casual market, however Lenovo doing it with an optional remote is definitely not the way to get a groundswell of support. If it were someone like Apple, or even Logitech doing a gaming version of its Harmony remotes, then there may be more potential to convince developers that a market exists. Unfortunately I've seen way more attempts like this fall flat than succeed in my time in the industry.