I was getting ready to go to Microsoft’s E3 press briefing when Nintendo decided to start raining on the Xbox 360’s parade. I got a text message from Nintendo revealing a new Wii remote add-on: The MotionPlus.

This is how the device is described at Nintendo.com:

Nintendo’s upcoming Wii MotionPlus accessory for the revolutionary Wii Remote controller again redefines game control, by more quickly and accurately reflecting motions in a 3-D space. The Wii MotionPlus accessory attaches to the end of the Wii Remote and, combined with the accelerometer and the sensor bar, allows for more comprehensive tracking of a player’s arm position and orientation, providing players with an unmatched level of precision and immersion. Every slight movement players make with their wrist or arm is rendered identically in real time on the screen, providing a true 1:1 response in their game play. The Wii MotionPlus accessory reconfirms Nintendo’s commitment to making games intuitive and accessible for everyone. Nintendo will reveal more details about the Wii MotionPlus accessory and other topics Tuesday morning at its E3 media briefing.

You know, it’s almost like Nintendo expected there to be another motion-controller announcement today that they wanted to spoil. Oh, and what game do you bet this Wii add-on comes with? A “Zelda” with more accurate sword-swinging? A music game with more accurate baton-waving?

And did Nintendo just splinter its userbase?

We’ll find out at the Nintendo E3 briefing tomorrow morning.

Everyone wants to be the next Wii.

Nintendo’s innovation has rippled through the industry, sending engineers back to the drawing board. Both Microsoft and Sony are said to be working on motion controllers.

GoLive2is taking a different approach with their motion controller, dubbed Stix. It doesn’t attach to a pre-exciting console; it attaches to the PC already in your home. They want to develop a completely free web portal full of motion-compatible games.

They just might be on the right track.

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Ever wonder how well Harry Potter would do if he had to take a job as a bartender? I’d say, pretty well if he based his training on his upcoming game for the Wii.

At a recent demo of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the new Wii title based on the upcoming movie, one of the key game features I was shown was potion mixing. The player mixes potions in a motion-sensitive mini-game. The potions you can make are needed to complete certain tasks throughout the main story.

The mechanics for potion creation were intuitive, and along the lines of what you would do when cooking in real life, if you were mixing almost any recipe. For example, if you need Harry to pour in a certain amount of armadillo bile, you angle and “pour” with the Wii controller. If the recipe in the game calls you to cool the liquid, you “fan the flames” with both the Wii controller and nunchuck. “The Half-Blood Prince” offers a range of different movements that require the player to be precise and stead in their actions, lest they be penalized for over-pouring or mixing the wrong item, the result of which is a big puff of smoke.

The control scheme motions got me thinking about other games that might benefit from this type of gameplay, and one thing game to mind immediately - mixology, otherwise known as the art of making drinks. “Cooking Mama” has had the kitchen skills covered for a few years now, but no one has gone near the bar, and this could be the perfect way to breach that. Use the pouring motions to mix a Cape Codder perfectly and you can move on to more difficult drinks like Long Island Iced Teas. The better margarita you make, the more points you get on your road to being an international bartending superstar.

Nintendo has released recipe books for the DS in Japan, perhaps they could take that idea, mix in a dash of “Brain Training,” and then combine those with Harry’s potion mixing, and create a whole new genre of bartending sims. Of course, they would have to finish it off with an “M” rating.

When I had dinner with Microsoft’s Shane Kim and Kudo Tsunoda on Monday, we talked about more than just “Gears of War 2.”

Kim is the head of Microsoft Game Studios and therefore a guy worth peppering with any gaming questions I could think of related to the Xbox 360’s Microsoft-published efforts.

Here’s some of what I asked him between bites of fish:

When will Microsoft make a game that requires and takes advantage of the Xbox 360’s hard-drive?

“You’re not likely to see a first party title that does that,” Kim said. I suggested that Microsoft had to have reached a point by now when the company could assume a large number of Xbox 360 owners have the drive. And surely the upcoming “Grand Theft Auto IV” downloadable content will require it. But still, Kim said he believed the games from MGS should be playable on all Xbox 360s and that it’s a software maker’s challenge to get the games to work without a hard drive.

Why was Microsoft just hiring new senior people for the Peter Jackson “Halo” project more than two years after it was announced?

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Whether you would enjoy “Skate It” on the Wii depends on how you feel about Wii games that can be played using what I can best describe as motion-mashing.

It’s like button-mashing, but involves swinging the Wii remote.

Shake the controller any which way while playing “Skate It” for the Wii and good things happen.

“Skate It” adapts the controls of EA’s 2007 game “Skate” fo the Wii’s motion sensitive remote. Players hold the remote in front of them, imagining that it’s a skateboard. Tilting it down or up tilts the boarder forward or back, rotating slightly left or right causes the board to turn, flicking the remote up causes an ollie (a jump), and various combos of tilting, flicking and rotating trigger basic tricks. Two buttons are used for grabs and acceleration.

I expected the controls to be challenging when I tried it Monday night at an EA event at the Supper Club in San Francisco. Visions of EA’s “SSX Blur” and it’s demand that I draw complex patterns precisely in mid-air flashed into my mind.

But “Skate It” is not that tough.

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Last week I interviewed Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto about “Wii Fit.” The interview will be used for an upcoming MTV News piece on the game.

But we can’t fit everything on air and I wanted to give Nintendo fans and all Wii owners access to the full conversation before the game comes out on May 19.

Miyamoto talked to me about everything “Wii Fit” — the Balance Board, the challenge of making an exercise game in a world of un-fit people, the connections between this game and things like “Brain Age,” “Donkey Kong” and the Power Pad…

He even addressed how this game relates to “Smash Bros.” designer Masahiro Sakurai’s recent comment that it’s become hard to make new character-based games.

And he took, head-on, the challenge from hardcore gamers who say “Wii Fit” is a bad thing.

An excerpt about Super Mario’s connection to this game, or lack thereof:

MTV News: Would it have been going too far to put Mario in it and make it “Mario Fit“? Would that have ruined the feel you were trying to evoke with the game?

Miyamoto: We wanted to create it so that people of all ages could look at it and feel it was for them. I think doing that might have limited its ability.

Part One of this interview appears at MTV News.com. Part Two appears below. You can read them in either order.

Enjoy.

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When we broke the first details about Microsoft’s currently-in-development motion controller (and showed a sketch), we knew it would signal other reporters to start digging, too.

Jacob Metcalf, the same writer who revealed Bungie Studios would be going independent, contacted MTV Multiplayer about his own findings on Microsoft’s controller.

Multiplayer does not usually report on the findings of other reporters, but the similarities to our own report — including specific, unknowable details we chose to withhold from the original filing for various reasons — confirm our belief that Metcalf has encountered the same prototype revealed on MTV News.

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Over at MTVNews.com, Klepek and I answer many of the questions raised yesterday by his report about Microsoft’s answer Wii Remote-style prototype. Was that story an April Fool’s joke? Did the quotes contradict each other? And isn’t that sketch so lame that it proves the whole thing is a hoax?

If you asked any of these questions, please read the answers.

How do those little games tucked inside big games get made?

I started publishing answers to that question earlier this month, when I ran my interview with “BioShock”’s Dorian Hart about that game’s hacking mini-game.

Next up is Jake Sones, the developer at Insomniac Games chiefly responsible for the hacking mini-game in the PlayStation 3’s “Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.

The game is pretty simple. The player uses the Sixaxis motion control (or the controller’s analog sticks) to tilt a circuit board, trying to get a metal ball to bridge gaps in the circuit as a spark inexorably creeps from a starting point to its destination.

Sones volunteered to make the game after the designer of the series’ previous hacking mini-games left Insomniac Games. I wanted to know how Jake, who was given assistance by some of the programming, art and sound folks at Insomniac, came up with this game. Little did I know that we’d be talking about “Pipe Dream” again. But we did.

We also talked about early, scuttled concepts:

…one of the first concepts that we thought about was doing something like “Arkanoid” meets “Puzzle Bobble.” When we started to work out the exact mechanics of that it started to fall apart.

We even chatted, sort of, about the mini-game’s music:

Multiplayer: The music. How does the music get chosen for a “Ratchet and Clank” decryptor game?

Sones: That is an excellent question that I don’t have an answer to. It kind of just showed up one day.

Multiplayer: You didn’t put in any requests that this needs to be mellow or this needs to be frantic to freak the player out?

Sones: I talked to the audio guys and said, “Hey man we should really have some audio in here, that would be cool.” And then it showed up.

For an in-depth interview on one of the more easily overlooked aspects of game development, read on. Jake Sones was a fun guy to talk to.

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 A recent article on GamePro’s website listed 27 ways that game consoles can be saved.

Among the signs that salvation is needed is the alleged disinterest of PlayStation 3 developers in the motion controls of the Sixaxis controller:

Motion sensing: use it or lose it

The Sixaxis’s motion controls continue to be ignored by the vast majority of PS3 developers. Why is that? 

One game that has plenty of motion control is “Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.” The Sixaxis controller is used to steer tornados shot from one of Ratchet’s crazy space-guns, to direct the Lombax through his skydiving routines, to tilt the board in a mini-game based those old wooden labyrinth toys and a few other things. Motion control is not used in other parts of the game where you might expect it: to steer Ratchet’s spaceship during shooter stages or to control a ground vehicle.

How did this all come about? How did Insomniac put motion-control in the game, and how did the developers decide when to leave it out?

“Ratchet & Clank Future” creative director Brian Allgeier and I talked about this last week. Among the things I found interesting was his talk of the problems of mixing motion controls and stick controls for unified bits of gameplay.

A short interview follows. Here’s one highlight, regarding focus groups:

And we found in our focus tests that there were some people that were fans of Sixaxis and some people that were not. So we made sure to give the option to turn it off.

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What can you do in one hour of “Super Mario Galaxy“?

What could I accomplish, starting from scratch, and while pausing to jot down notes and — oh, what a bad idea — trying to snap photos?

(Note that Nintendo required that any photos include more than just the screen. I tried to show a tip of the Wiimote. And tried to snap photos while playing the game. Bad idea!)

This is how it went when I tried it on Friday morning in San Francisco at Nintendo’s summit for the company’s holiday Wii and DS games.

You are about to read a tale of inverted gravity, Wii remote shower caps, the helpfulness of a guy from IGN, lessons not learned from “Metroid Prime 3,” and how I figured out a way in “Galaxy” to cheat.

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