GDC 2010: Hands-On With the Move: EyePet
by VGChartz Staff, posted on 15 March 2010 / 1,294 Views
While the game's been out in Europe since October for use with the PlayStation Eye, the North American release has been delayed to coincide with the launch of the PlayStation Move later this year. We're not sure if this will be before or after the sequel releases in Europe, but we were able to play an early demo of the Move-enhanced original.
The EyePet is like having an invisible pet you can only see in a magic mirror. The mirror is your TV screen, and the pet is a cute little monkeyrat monster. You can interact with this pet with your bare hands, and I was able to flick mine all over the place. It got grumpy really fast for some reason and didn't want to play with me anymore, but luckily the Move could turn into anything it needed to be happy. I could turn it into an X-Ray scanner to scan its organs (all four of them). This let me know it was hungry. Then I could turn the Move into a can of food and pour it all over the EyePet's face, and I even got some into its food bowl.
There were several other features that the Move enabled or enhanced, like a showerhead and a blowdryer, but they mostly followed the same formula: pick an item, wait a few seconds for it to appear out of a magical portal, point it at the EyePet and pull the trigger. They were all really cute and fun timewasters for a few seconds, but I could tell it would be much more fun if there were any children around.
Right away I noticed that the EyePet was much better at interacting with the Move than with my own hands. When trying to harass it with my hand, it would experience some lag, and occasionally think my hand was part of the floor. It also thought my legs were part of the floor, as it magically walked through them a few times. Whenever I used the Move on the EyePet though, it was very fast and fluid. It always knew exactly where my hand was and where it was pointing.
One feature the Move changed was the drawing game. In the original, you can draw some shapes on a sheet of paper and give them to the EyePet by pointing your creation at the camera. With the Move you can easily draw the shape in space (like the painting game in Move Party!) and the game will detect it. This system works faster and saves paper, which can be very beneficial if you have a kid who wants to draw thousands of shapes. I was asked to draw an airplane, and I drew some really abstract shapes to try to trick the game. After it thought about this for a few seconds, the shapes appeared, snapped together into a hideous abstract plane, and my pet flew off into a minigame. I tilted the Move up and down to aim his plane into some balloons for a few seconds to try to get a high score.
Despite the inability to detect my legs, the lack of features in the demo, and the fact that this game was already released five months ago, EyePet was my favorite game that used the Move. My only complaint with the EyePet is that the game won't let me eat the little critter. Lord knows I tried.
