Is Sixaxis a white elephant?

Hjalmar Vikström is Lead Gameplay Programmer at GRIN (best know for the Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter games)

"I think that every attempt at bringing something new and creative to the gaming experience should be applauded, whether it is new ways of controlling the games, a new way of connecting gamers online or an exciting new rendering technique. We, as an industry, need to strive to expand our audience and renew ourselves. Anything else would ultimately lead to us doing the same games all over again, and even though it sometimes might look as if the buyers actually DO want to buy the same old games over and over again, I really think that people would lose interest in that with time.

"I think that the Sixaxis as a controller was hurt by the fact that it didn't have rumble support from the beginning in favour of the motion control. This put extra pressure on the motion control to work wonders, which it frankly did not do from the beginning.

"I think that most PS3 games are trying to be as advanced as usual with the motion control technique just added on. This will make them harder to play and also make the experience from the controller less good. In my eyes you can't demand too much detailed moves with the controller from the player in a stressful situation.

"Therefore I would say that playing MotorStorm with the Sixaxis motion control enabled would be a low point. Small implementations where the player can focus on the motion like, for example, running over the logs in Drakes Fortune would be a high, even though I think that you should be able to do it even better!"