test_account said:
How is the gameplay on them? I've only tried Wii Sports myself. Is it just as good, better or worse?
I was going to give this more joke answers, but it seems you're genuinely curious. Unfortunately, I played Xavix outside on a sunny day. This isn't really fair to Xavix as their equipment is, I believe, entirely optical tracking based. I also think it works with a camera on the system looking out at the player and the tracked device (opposite the Wii), which means much more interference since you have no idea what is behind the player (think eyetoy). needless to say, the performance of the system was terribly sketchy.
I played baseball, tennis, and bowling for about an hour. Some worked way better than others, though this is in part because I had no idea how to play and because of the sun. From what i remember, baseball was the only one I felt I really understood. Pitching was cool (you use a ball for pitching and a bat for batting), but batting was in first person I think, so it was really hard to time things right. Xavix tennis was also in first person, which made it nigh unplayable. They also made us stand very far away from the TV to play each sport (like 7 feet at least) which made the timing in first person even weirder. They likely did this because XaviX is looking for the targets in different locations depending on the sport you play, so it needs a wide field of view (but how far can you get and still see those lights!?) they had tape down for us to tell us where to stand, but I'm not sure it was in the right place, particularly for bowling. In short, Xavix is very picky about location.
Bowling should have been better, but I think the machine it was on was set up wrong, because the result of throwing the ball was really random and didn't always cue. Another problem with Xavix tracking the device, is that you never know when the device is occluding itself, unless you really study it and figure out where the IR points on the device exist. I may have been swinging the bowling ball in a manner Xavix couldn't "see". When the Wii uses the pointer, you always have an on screen indicator, not because it's necessary, but because they want you to know when you aren't being tracked...
If you want to try it, it would be best to play on an in store demo somewhere. Having played Wii Sports, I'd like to try Xavix again (and in a better environment) to really compare, but I doubt I'd like the results. Ironically, the time I played it, they were touring with Nintendo about a year before the Wii was announced (conspiracy???) and Nintendo was there with Metroid Prime 2 and holding Smash tournaments. If xavix is using all optical tracking, it actually could make for theoretically better tracking for some sports (boxing could actually punch where you are placing your fist, baseball could give you a high or low swing) but the design of the games left you as a disembodied force, making it really difficult to interact. This type of design requires stereo vision.
The big problem with Xavix is that the console itself is basically only the camera, and the chipset for each game is largely in the cartridge. Therefore, each time you buy a game you purchase new tracking nodes in novelty shapes as well as a new cartridge/chipset. The result is very expensive, and the graphics weren't so hot. While I can't fairly comment on the gameplay, Nintendo has 10uped them on accessibility and price, packing all sports in one "free" game, and removing the optical tracking completely from the sports improve the accessibility beyond compare. Wii Sports works far better than I expected it to, for being so limited by the internal sensors. When I realised Wii SPorts was tracking all itnernal, I thought it would suck compared to Xavix, but it seems that is not the case
By this definition i would say that Wii is sorta a revolution since we have basicly been using a "normal" handcontroller as standard for the last 20-30 years. Nintendo changed that and i would say that is a pretty drastic change.
