14 DAY TRIAL // In what has been a rather low key announcement, Nintendo has said that it plans to release the hardware Wii Motion Plus add-on and the new Wii Sports Resort game suite in June, on the Japanese market, and in July, on markets in North America and in Europe, according to a Reuters report.
This is quite significant because the Wii Motion Plus is the first improvement of the motion-tracking technology of the Nintendo Wii since it was launched. The platform has managed to become the best sold current generation console by attracting a wide variety of players with its motion-tracking capabilities.
These have been well integrated into games like Wii Sports, mimicking the natural movement that gamers would make when playing tennis, golf, or bowling. Still, the Wiimote and the Nunchuk are incapable, at the moment, of tracking all the movements of the players, so Nintendo started thinking about how it could improve it.
The answer is the Wii Motion Plus, which is a tricky piece of hardware. It is not a replacement for the Wiimote, as Nintendo thought that replacing all of them would be too hard. It is an add-on that screws onto it and allows the Wiimote to track motion with one-to-one precision, which is a huge improvement. Electronic Arts even said recently that the device was, if anything, over-responsive.
One problem that Wii Motion Plus poses is that it introduces two standards in the Nintendo world. Game developers will have to adapt their products in order to make sure that players can enjoy them, regardless of the type of Wiimote that they own. Of course, Nintendo is hoping that Wii Sports Resort, which is set to be bundled with a Wii Motion Plus, will sell well enough to make sure that a majority of gamers have the upgraded version.