Moving Targets Article

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"Love's got the world in motion," trilled New Order, but even a majestically awkward John Barnes rap couldn't change the fact that we were all sadly misinformed. It was our old pal games, not soppy old love, that eventually got the world in motion. Specifically, it was Nintendo's Wii Sports, making us throw our gaming hands in the air and wave them like we just didn't care, and with the MotionPlus add-on now available, those who doggedly claimed hand-waggling control was just a temporary fad are biting into a stale sandwich of wrong.

After E3, it's no longer just Nintendo throwing money at motion control and looking for new ways to turn our entire bodies into surrogate joypads. Sony unveiled its Ann Summers take on the Wii Remote, while Microsoft gave us a glimpse into a terrifying interactive future where sallow-faced digital children will invite us to molest fish using virtual fingers.

Far from being a new trend, however, the move to motion control has been a holy grail that the games industry has chased for the better part of two decades. And it was, rather fittingly, Nintendo that got our arms twitching back in 1989 with the legendary Power Glove for the NES.

This fashionable accessory, manufactured by Mattel, not only translated hand movements and finger curls into on-screen action, it also featured a wrist-mounted control panel that allowed gamers to program their own button configurations. Even more thrillingly for the youth of the day, it was based on actual technology used by NASA - the VPL Dataglove.

Of course, there was inevitably something of a technical gulf between the enormously expensive input devices being used in simulations by a pioneering space agency and the plastic effort being sold in toyshops. Where the Dataglove used optical fibres to detect the pitch, yaw and roll of the user's hand, recognising 256 increments of finger twitch, the home version could only tell if you were rolling your hand from side to side and was limited by the meagre NES memory to accept only four levels of finger movement.

This didn't stop Nintendo marketing the Power Glove as the peripheral that would change gaming forever. It went as far as making it a central plot point in The Wizard, an utterly shameless Nintendo-endorsed movie which featured Wonder Years star Fred Savage taking his autistic videogame-whizz brother cross country to participate in a gaming tournament. Their Rain Man Jr quest is almost halted by the interference of Lucas Barton, a scheming rival who dazzles his parochial foes with the awesome Power Glove. "I love the Power Glove. It's so bad!" he famously exclaimed after showcasing his mad skillz. While he was using the late eighties street slang where bad meant good, he was ultimately proven correct by the more enduring dictionary definition in which bad just means rubbish.

The Power Glove may have looked awesome, but it just wasn't much cop as a videogame controller. Technically compatible with every NES game, only a few titles bothered to make a feature of it. The self-explanatory Super Glove Ball was the sole game to be explicitly linked to the glove, with obscure beat-'em-up Bad Street Brawler offering some exclusive moves to those wearing the contraption. There was no getting away from the fact that most gamers simply ended up using the wrist-mounted joypad for the fiddly bits and, inevitably, migrating back to the proper joypad once they'd had enough of dressing up like Tron's idiot cousin.

But the ill-fated Power Glove wasn't the only motion controller tempting NES owners in 1989. As players flexed and thrusted their fists in frustration, Brøderbund Software was claiming they had "the most amazing accessory in video game history" - a controller that you didn't even need to touch.

Brøderbund's U-Force was somehow even more bizarre than the Power Glove, and even more likely to make you look like a tit. Using a pair of infrared sensors, set at right angles to each other, it attempted to read your hand movements as you gesticulated between them. Needless to say, even TV ads drenched in dry ice couldn't mask the fact that the readable area was far too small, requiring players to keep their movements to a space roughly the size of a loaf of bread, As with the Power Glove everyone soon realised that it was far simpler - and much more effective - to stick with those old-fashioned d-pads and buttons, and the U-Force (U-U-U-Force!) swiftly sank into justifiable obscurity.

These twin failures didn't stop Konami from taking a spin on the motion control carousel a few years later. In 1991 it tried to sell a now-wary audience of NES owners on the merits of the Laserscope. Admittedly, this bit of kit had at least one advantage - it was basically a lightgun shaped like a headset, and it actually worked as advertised. It was compatible with all the same games as the NES Zapper, and came with Laser Invasion, a rather limp Operation Wolf knockoff.

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