Let's start with Tumble. Depth perception was a clear winner right off the bat, me being able to stack blocks with confidence without looking too much at the drop zone. This is one of those cases where stereoscopic 3D does help gameplay significantly. Coupled with the accurate 3D tracking of my hand motions, the overall sensation was akin to that (one could imagine) of an out-of-body experience, me aware of being sitting before a screen and yet feeling like I was actually somewhere else behind it. Yep, total immersion. But wait, there is more.
All the current PS3 games supporting 3D visuals offer what I might describe as some sort of "passive 3D experience". You appreciate the effect, but it kinda sits there, behind a window you can't walk through. Stuff can jump at you, but you can't jump in. You toss a penny at it, and it magically bounces back off (how odd!). It's a one-way visual feedback between the game and you.
Not so with Tumble, where you have the opportunity to move stuff back and forth that invisible wall as you see fit. Pull the Move towards you and its virtual replica comes out of the screen, floating above the carpet. Push it forward, and it goes back into the digital world it came from. Thanks to the intimate nature of the 1:1 tracking the PlayStation Move provides, the feeling of there being no barrier whatsoever between the real and the virtual world is reinforced even further. You feel like holding a magic wand capable of traversing both worlds. It's an amazing sensation. So amazing indeed, I spent like 5 minutes just pushing the controller back and forth.
Moving on to Flight Control HD, playing Firemint's little gem in 3D made me realize how much bidimensional graphics can benefit from stereoscopy. Actually, I'd go as far as saying they might benefit from it more than actual polygon based games do (!). Due to the starker contrast separating flat graphical content located at different depth levels, the overall depth perception is much easily generated and appreciated. I didn't need any perspective cues to realize the ground was pushed back from the display about the length of a stretched arm, air traffic happening between ground and screen panel. I didn't need to look at shadows to understand whenever a plane was on a descending route. Going back to the original 2D mode felt even more a dramatic of a step back compared to when doing the same with a polygons-based game. So dramatic indeed, I do still have the impression I'm missing something important whenever I fire the game up now. Sure you can call this kind of 3D effect applied to 2D content as cheap/old as you want, but wait until you see it in motion, in HD, in full color. You won't be able to go back to flat parallax.
And this is it for me today. Wish I had the money.
If you have any 3D gaming experiences or thoughts to share feel free to do so in the comments section below.
And this is it for me today. Wish I had the money.
If you have any 3D gaming experiences or thoughts to share feel free to do so in the comments section below.
