EyeToy: AntiGrav Preview

Last year one of the all time great peripherals in the history of videogames was unleashed by Sony when it introduced the Eye Toy for the PS2.  Being one of the very few peripherals in the history of our beloved hobby that actually succeeded right out of the box and wasn’t laughed into extinction, we gamers had high hopes for the little USB camera.  The promise and potential were practically limitless.  Finally we had a means to actually play games in ways that we never had.  Finally we would be able to play games that took interactivity to the extreme, incorporating our entire bodies, rather than just our hands.  Finally we might actually have a way to import perfect likenesses of ourselves into our games.  Unfortunately, promise and potential don’t mean a whole lot unless someone is trying to take advantage of them.  We got the excellent set of games that shipped with the EyeToy and some time later we got EyeToy Groove an imminently playable and fun take on the DDR craze, but beyond these two disks there hasn’t been much outside of some fun mini-games in the latest Harry Potter game and the ability to map your face into Sony’s baseball franchise.  Outside of the baseball games, each game available for the EyeToy has been more or less variations of the same game mechanics.  Fortunately, that’s about to change with the upcoming release of Sony’s AntiGrav.

The first thing most gamers will think when they first boot up AntiGrav is that it looks an awful lot like EA’s awesome SSX series.  They look very similar; you ride atop a board, and do over the top tricks off said board, but these are not necessarily bad things to emulate.  SSX is one of the greatest series of all time, so you could certainly do much worse than to be compared to SSX.  However, that’s where all the similarities end and you’ll soon find that AntiGrav is an entirely different beast.  Unlike SSX where you control your character with your controller, in AntiGrav your body is the controller.

As with every other EyeToy game the first thing you are required to do is to center your body within a generic silhouette.  From there your face will have a circle around it and the game will ask you to line up the circle around your face with first a circle on the left side of the screen, then on the right.  With that done, you are now ready to jump right into AntiGrav.  Unlike all the other EyeToy games, you will never see yourself in the game beyond the opening set up. 

In the demo you have the option to compete in a trick event or a racing event which both take place over courses reminiscent of SSX, minus the snow and ice.  You control the action on the screen just as you might actually control a board rocketing down a course in real life.  Leaning right or left will move your character in that direction, kneeling will cause your boarder to kneel, while jumping from the kneeling position will cause your boarder to jump.  Lifting your corresponding arm with a turn will sharpen the turn radius.  Lifting both arms will cause your boarder to slow and finally stop.  The accuracy and speed with which your boarder responds to your movements is incredible.  With the setup at the beginning of the game tracking only your head movements, I found it very impressive that it could accurately mimic the movements of your arms.

The courses on the preview build feature plenty of rails, obstacles, and jumps for you to negotiate.  The jumps, just like SSX, are where you’ll unleash your repertoire of tricks.  And just like real world snowboarders or gymnasts a big part of the twists and turns you accomplish is directly tied to the movements of your arms.  Twirling your arms either singly or in tandem will cause your boarder to spin, toss, and turn.  On the surface these mechanics may not seem to offer much depth in the trick set, but spend a little time with the game and you quickly find out that that isn’t the case at all.  Massive trick strings and combos open up with the greatest of ease and I rarely, if ever, have pulled off identical tricks in all my time with this early build.  The courses also offer “turbo” strips, which are pretty self-explanatory.  One area I would like to see a little more of a skill requirement and challenge in riding the rails.  The way it stands now is that it is far too easy not only to get on the rails, but also to stay on the rails.  Once on a rail, you are on there to stay until the rail ends.  Beyond that little gripe the courses on the demo are really well designed, offering plenty of challenges, branching paths, and lots of places to launch tricks from.

From a graphical standpoint, I’ve already mentioned that the game looks a lot like SSX without the snow.  The courses have more of an industrial look to them, which it fits with the games overall feel.  While the game looks good in its present state, there is certainly room for some spit and polish, which will likely be added as the game nears completion.  The boarders look good with a nice degree of detail, while the lighting effects are pretty stellar, especially the neon lights.  The animation of the boarders is very natural and smooth, no matter how big of a spaz you are.  Just to test the technology I flailed about wildly to see how the game reacted and if it could handle wild, unnatural movements, which it dealt with like a champ.

The audio of the game seems pretty “bare bones” at the moment, but with the development time left, this will no doubt be remedied.  The music included is of the industrial and techno varieties, which fit in perfectly with the concept and game world.  Beyond that, there’s really not much to report on.  What is there sounds good, there’s just not much to be heard.

Overall this game has loads of potential, with the only things lacking at this unfinished state is polish, which leads me to believe that Sony just might have something special on their hands.  It would seem that getting the technology down to where your movements are accurately rendered on screen, while having those movements lead to believable reactions within the game world would be the most challenging task in developing this game and they’ve absolutely nailed it.  Spending any amount of time with this game will no doubt leave you knowing that you’ve just partaken in a very impressive piece of technology.  AntiGrav is the logical progression of games that feature EyeToy support and if it’s only the tip of the iceberg of what we can expect in the future, we’re all in for a treat.  If you’re a fan of the EyeToy keep a close eye on this one, and if you haven’t taken the plunge with the EyeToy yet, this very well could be the game that sucks you in.