Your Move

Tiger Woods: PGA Tour 11

Golf and a cylindrical controller just itching for you to swing it around seem like such a natural fit. The only explanation for implementation as disappointing as this, then, is that it's the result of a rushed retrofitting. This isn't an afterthought, I'm guessing – it's the thought you have after you've had an afterthought.

While pointing the Move to line up shots with an overhead view is just about acceptable, and the controller has no trouble registering details like the angle you're holding it at, when it comes to the crucial business of swinging the club, the whole grand illusion has a tendency to fall apart. There's lag, there's occasional failure to register movements that the game normally never struggles with, there's no real way to apply things like spin using the Move itself, and it's almost impossible to judge the force of your shots. Judging force: silly little hats aside, that's kind of a big chunk of what golf actually is.

Compound that with the fact that there's no sense of connection with the ball and very little sense of connection with the on-screen animation, and there's scant reason to even bring up things like poor in-game instructions and the fact that Move can't be used to do stuff such as navigate through menus when you're away from the fairway. All told, it's probably easier to land membership in the Freemasons than it is to get a good round of golf playing like this. It's probably more fun, too – particularly if you have a thing about ballroom-dancing with retired police inspectors or drinking red wine out of a lamb's skull.

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When EA has a chance to make a Move golf game from the ground up, I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that most of these problems are going to disappear. It took the publisher a while to make the Wii sing, after all, and Move seems to have at least as much potential. For now, however, if golf is a good walk spoiled, then Tiger Woods with Move is a good virtual walk spoiled. PGA 11 is still an excellent game when played as intended, but with motion control integration of this quality, it becomes considerably less excellent when you put the DualShock down. Not ideal.

Resident Evil 5

With movement on the Navigation controller, shooting and stabbing on the Move, and fiddly stuff like inventory, map access and telling Shiva to please-stop-jogging-against-that-wall-people-are-starting-to-stare on the face buttons, Resident Evil 5 makes a lot of sense. On top of that, Capcom offers two different control configurations, which flip "locate partner" and "run/quick turn" between L1 and X depending on how your brain is wired up.

It's quirky, though. Rather than being used to, you know, fire the gun, the Move's trigger locks you in position and brings up the aiming reticule, and you then shoot with a stab of the Move button on top of the controller. It works better than it sounds, but with no second stick, you're still going to have to aim – and stop moving – if you want to look about very much. Some won't like the fact that you can't nudge the screen around at all by moving the targeting reticule to the edge (with gun drawn, the only way to move the screen is to use the left stick), but it does means you don't get that juddery feel a lot of motion-control shooters have whenever aiming and the camera are tied together. It's not as much of a problem as it sounds, really.

You can tweak sensitivities and enjoy some fairly pedestrian gestural stuff, mostly involving shaking (guess when) if you want to, but, while it all works well enough, you may still be left with a nagging feeling that shooters and motion controllers don't really fit together that naturally most of the time, no matter how well-intentioned everything is.