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Fresh out of Gamescom is this video footage of Killzone 3 being demoed with the PlayStation 3's upcoming one-to-one waggle-stick, Move. Tight, motion controlled FPS has been a bullet-filled holy grail ever since the announcement of the Wii, but one or two games aside - Metroid Prime 3, give yourself a gold star. You too, The Conduit, even though your level design was rubbish - the great point-and-shoot revolution hasn't come.
Will Move's razor sharp control make Killzone 3 the great leap forward we've been waiting for? From the look of this video, and ourown hands-on experiencewith the controller (but not Killzone yet, alas), it could well do so. Though the more FPS-puristic of us here really hope that something can be done about the massive control deadzone in the middle of the screen.Scroll downfor the video and further elaboration on that point.
As you can see, it all looks tight and responsive right now, as we've come to expect from the Move technology. What surprised us though, is the significant size of the deadzone in the middle of the screen. If you're not familiar with the concept, deadzone aiming is a system used in Wii FPS which stops gestures from turning the camera viewpoint until the crosshair is moved to the edge of the screen. When moved around in the middle, the pointer behaves similarly to in an on-rails shooter, traversing the static screen to freelypick out targets.
Deadzone targetting is implimented primarily to reduce the confusion potentially caused by unwanted movement inputs by providing a more obvious neutral position for the Wii remote to deal with. Metroid Prime 3 and the Conduit both provide extensive customisation options to allow you to shrink the deadzone right down, equating things much more closely to what you'd get with mouse control in a PC FPS. Somehow, we'd expected Move's tighter movement sensingandspatial awarenessto do away with much of the need for a deadzone, making the controls behave more like a hand-held analogue stick. But it seemsthe system hasbeen put in Killzone 3 to the same degree as before, probably to compensate for those with lazy wrist syndrome (a medical gaming complaint we might have just made up).
If you've played the likes of Call of Duty 3 on the Wii, you'll know how floaty and stop-starty an experience a big deadzone can make an FPS (indeed the bit at2:22 when the dev flanks around cover shows this off clearly), so we're really hoping Killzone 3 follows Metroid's lead by allowing a massive reduction. Though we highly doubt Guerilla willhave overlooked that issue.
Other than that though, it all looks good, with sharp, fastaiming throughout (We'll ignoringthe unfortunate cliff-related slip-up for now). We're a little dubiousthat theexplained process of holding L1 and flicking Move to throw grenades won't get tiresome (ditto yanking Move to pick up guns), but hopefully there'll be an option to change that too. So what do you think? The future of immersive console FPS, or will you be stickingwith a Dual Shock?
