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EA “toyed” with the possibility of releasing a Wii MotionPlus-style peripheral for its sports games, VideoGamer.com has learned.
Speaking to VideoGamer.com in an interview published here, EA Tiburon associate producer Greg Rinaldi, who was in the UK to promote Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09, said he was “surprised” that Nintendo was able to make the Wii MotionPlus add-on affordable considering how expensive gyroscope equipment is.
He said: “I’m surprised that Nintendo is able to make it (the Wii MotionPlus) affordable. A gyroscope is an expensive piece of equipment, so they must have a good partner working with them. We were discussing what it would take to get a really real swing, and they were like, well you’d need a gyroscope. I did some research on my own, and gyroscopes are pricey. EA isn’t in the business of creating peripherals, but it’s something we toyed with a little bit. I say leave it to the people like Nintendo. They know what they’re doing.”
When asked if EA’s Tiger Woods team had been made aware of Nintendo’s MotionPlus add-on before it was announced at E3 two weeks ago, Rinaldi replied: “No, we wish we were.
“It was a surprise for us as well. There might have been someone at EA who knew about it, but the Tiger Team wasn’t aware of it.”
He added: “It would have been nice to know. I’m sure Nintendo has its reasons. I’m sure they have plans for it. So, like I said, we’re definitely looking at it and it will be a big part of Tiger for next year. The implications for golf are tremendous. I know so many people who are golfers in real life, and they play Tiger Wii and they’re like “I wanna get my real swing in there”. There’s a certain level you can get to with the hardware as it currently is, and it’s fun and it’s exciting, but it’s not a real golf swing. It’s a simulation of a golf swing. With that gyroscope, and we were kind of debating this on our team for a while, we were hammering our engineers to be able to get real swings in there, but the hardware just isn’t capable of that. With the addition of the gyroscope it’s much more accurate.”
For the rest of our interview with EA Tiburon associate producer Greg Rinaldi click here.
