Nice? Oh goodie motion control with all the excess complexity we use motion control to get the hell away from. If Microsoft presnts this ugly monstrosity as competition to the clean elegant simplicity of the Wiimote I'm sure it will garner all the sales it deserves.

I think Microsoft has taken a great idea and f**ked it up. Go Figure! It is after all almost axiomatic that Microsoft takes good ideas and f**ks them up.

I'm sorry, if originality doesn't come out of your chief designer's head, exactly where would it come from? A Cracker Jack box? It doesn't matter whether or not Nintendo invented motion control; they had the vision to use it. Did Microsoft invent HD television?

Where ever originality comes from, MS and Sony could use some since instead of originality, this generation they just threw raw processing power and pixel count at the same old games. This is evidenced by their inability to grow their customer base and by this pathetic scramble to copy a technology, but not the philosophy behind it, which they don't actually understand or believe in. That's why they took a technique whose whole beauty is simplicity and the immersion from intuitive natural movement and tried to make it a part of the same old controller (Sony) or as a brand new incredibly fugly monstrosity that offers neither simplicity or natural intuitive movement.

It's sad how incredibly easy MS and Sony make it for Nintendo to completely confound and humble them. If they want to turn things around, they are going to have to do a hell of a lot better than this.

If the Wii is Grandma’s panties, it must be all the more humiliating to find that you are totally incapable of competing with it. It's like calling someone a wuss who's just totally kicked you ass. That would make you what? A double wuss? Grandpa's shorts?

Maybe:PS3=gaudy, 360=faulty, and Wii=In her panties (natural, intuitive and lots of fun)

As a 360/PS3 owner im actually excited about the motion controller i hope it really is true

I'll wait in line for this one. It looks awesome!
They've taken wiimote concept and took it to another level.
Can't wait for this one to come out!!!!!

Well, they appear to have hit the part of the market that wants more barriers to entry instead of fewer. The Darwin/Newton will clearly deliver on that, seeing as it's basically transplanted the already-overcomplicated 360 controller into an odd linked-remote format. I guess that's something, though it's certainly not as significant as getting the crowd that wants an easier entry point into gaming.

A brief history lesson is in order, I think.  Back in the day, Atari took the market by storm and introduced the simple Atari controller: 1 joystick, 1 button. Their competition responded with controllers that had 10+ buttons and more advanced joysticks. Atari still held the market majority throughout the era in spite of that. The moral of the story is: more is not better, user-friendliness is better.

Right on the MS philosophy: more is better!
LOL, I can't wait to see this fail, though I won't count the day.

Necessary LOLcats quote:

BG: "Uh...no. [Laughs] We'll watch and see. Holding two different things like that? Anyway, Nintendo...you've got to give it to them. They march to the beat of a different drummer. Sometimes that makes them incredibly right and sometimes that makes them incredibly wrong. They're certainly making a very different bet in terms of how much they're putting into the graphics this time. I do think there is a question as to whether they can get outside the young age bracket at all. That's been tough for them."

-Bill Gates answers EGM's question via 1up. Source: "Moore's Law"

This guy is smart.

A motion controller with enhanced functionality which can be used for a wider variety of functions than the Wiimote without adding arduous complexity.

 It wasn't microsoft anyway, it was a third party which designed it.

WOW. This thing generated a lot of buzz, even on these forums. Wonder if this will turn out like Virtual Boy, or the Power Glove? Those tanked the systems that tried them right? Those affected their overall sales right? Those were original ideas right? No one had tried virtual reality at that point right? Man these NBoys forget easily. MS's bread and butter is their Office Suite which no one does better., and don't say shit about Google's online stuff because it blows balls when compared features wise. Big companies never come up with the original ideas they always buy up or pay the smaller more agile companies for what they come up with. It has always been like that and will always be like that. These stories are all bullshit anyway. They would never call your persona anything with a ii on the end of it. No one is that stupid. Microsoft is not the only other person making mp3 players. Are all others copycats of Apple? There is nothing about the IPod that sets it above the others. They play music. Plain and simple. Oh, but their marketing department is brilliant and can make the public think they are cool by using them, just like they market every other Apple product. Ask someone who uses Apple products why they use it, "Because they are cool". The Atari had a joystick, all controllers nowadays are copycats of that. Even Google doesn't come up with half their shit, they purchase as many start up companies as Microsoft. Blindly following the crowd that hates the big boy. Microsoft isn't a designed to be hip with teenagers. They are a company in bed with big business and looking cool is the last thing that would sell to a company. Apple has failed to penetrate the business market in the past and now doesn't even try. They don't offer the level of customer support that is necessary for a big business to integrate their software. They know it and don't care and go after the easily manipulated. I own a Zune(won it on Live Search Club) and it does everything an IPod does that I would be looking for. Playing my music. If you have a problem with using Zune software, you have to be retarded. I hope it works and I hope they make games that utilize the controller more than the Wii. RTS games could be really easy to do on the controller, sword play could be awesome. It could also fail miserably. Who cares? There has been a massive amount of peripherals that have failed. HDDvd was mainly a tactic by Microsoft to prolong the format war so that consumers did not gravitate to either one and downloads would become the main source of recieving movies. This has yet to play out as Blu-Ray as not seen a very good adoption rate and in fact is probably mostly fueled by PS3 owners. This alone cannot help float a format into what DVD has become. Fiber optic infrastructures are just now being rolled out and once that happens, bandwidth will be more than enough to stream content. Hell, you could even stream all games. This would create cheaper productions, no more optic drives, no more disc printing. This is way of the future.

MS stole from Apple way more than Apple stole from Xerox. It's my understanding that a good comparison might be writing a book with a similar plot vs. writing one with exactly the same plot and story and events etc., but changing the names of all the people and places, and changing the MacGuffins.

On topic:

I think that a main goal of this peripheral is not to do anything for the 360, but to pave the way for the next Xbox, even though this "Xmote" will come out for the 360. My reasoning? It's simple. When was the last time Microsoft ever did anything right the first time? Their initial offerings are often complete shit and sometimes total failures. They can't afford to be stuck with a crappy motion controller as the default in their console, yet consoles have their hardware's functionality "locked in" and can't revise the controls too much.

(The PS analog sticks simply added functionality; nothing was changed of the original controls. Ditto adding rumble back into the PS3 controller. Those are the only major controller revisions I'm aware of.)

What does all that mean? Simply that Microsoft wants to use its customers as guinea pigs, which is completely consistent with standard operating procedure for them.