Preview: ZombiU Single-Player

[BrotherRool]

actually at the beginning of the press conference on the 13th they were talking about the hands on events. I went to the one in Seattle, and in terms of feel I have what you would probably call medium sized hands (the gamecube controller was a little awkward, but usable), and the controller felt to have about the same amount of stretch needed as the gamecube controller. in terms of weight it felt about the same as the old XBox controllers (before the smaller ones), or a little heavier then a gen1 Ipad.

in terms of the immersion I found that when sitting, and something needed me to look away from the tv at the gamepad I instinctively lifted the gamepad from the resting position, and brought it to a short distance from the tv line. though for some of the displays where they asked me to stand while playing it didn't feel as natural to bring the gamepad up, but that just tells me that it is a sitting to play system. then someone brought up the touchscreen, but it felt similar to using any touchscreen tablet, and the modelling of the sides actually felt pretty good to rest in.

the only issue I could see with using it is if you have hands on the smaller side, but even my friend who does have smaller hands said that she found it a little bit of a stretch to be in the grooves, but it never felt tedious, or painful to play like the gamecube was for her.

and as a note I still find it funny to be dancing with the WiiMote.

Cheers that was a nice description. I've got small hands but I don't remember the gamecube controllers being unusable for me, so that should be fine. And definitely the whole point of Wii Mote dancing is to be laughing at the silliness =D

 

[FantomOmega]

For the love of god, even watching somebody else constantly switching between two screens frustrates me. I hope, I HOPE that you can turn that shit off and just have everything on the one screen. Pleeaase.

Making the game in First Person view makes this controller REDUNDANT since Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Slender man doesn't need a smaller screen to make things tense since you would only see in-front of you and would need to turn around to make sure the undead is not on your tail

Nintendo tried to reinvent the wheel but only ended up adding spinning rims to the thing!

 

[Tom Goldman]

Remember how you used to have to press a button, perhaps the D-pad, to cycle through weapons in an FPS? Or press pause to equip a new gun in a game like Resident Evil (the older versions, anyway)? No more. With a tap on the GamePad , ZombiU lets you quickly switch weapons, or turn on and off your limited-use-hence-stress-inducing flashlight.

The description hasn't really sold me on this bit. Instead of tapping the right trigger, which our fingers rest on to hold the controller (or okay, tapping a button on the d-pad with fingers in reach, but it's normally right trigger) we can tap a screen instead? Do you have all your weapons on the screen and you can tap the one you want? I guess that would be an improvement, cycling through weapons on a normal controller was normally a pain (hence Halo's two-weapon innovation), even with circular selection ala Resistance and Halo.

Also how does the attention work, with the UI on the screen, do you find it natural glancing at the two or do you have to lose focus on the TV screen to look at the UI?

Last question (this is the problem with Nintendo being innovative, there's so much stuff to understand ) how is it to hold? Pictures make it look like the thumbsticks are as awkward as PS Vitas and it's larger than that. I'm glad they've got proper games in the works for it though

You have a small inventory of icons you can touch. They're in the corners of the touchscreen (3 at each corner) so it's easy to reach over and switch. It was very natural to glance down at the GamePad and I felt it worked well. It added to the immersion as opposed to if you had a zombie radar on your screen, which is "unrealistic" (unless you were wearing Google Glasses)... like I said as if you were really holding a gadget inside of ZombiU's world.

This was after a short impression of the game, so we'll have to see how it works in the long run. I actually liked the GamePad's functionality more than I expected, and it was very easy to hold... not heavy or uncomfortable or anything like that.