If we had to take a gander, we'd say the reason the Eee Stick pointing device is currently not planned for the United States has little to do with its target audience -- rather, now that Nyko and Nintendo have settled the Kama wireless nunchuk lawsuit, it may not be the best time to bring a new motion-sensing, nunchuk-shaped device to market.
But assuming that you did have the chance to purchase the Eee Stick for your personal computer -- and assuming you think of it as a simple peripheral, rather than a Wii-like gaming platform -- you might actually find it fairly useful.
That's because while this is pretty much the extent of the gaming platform...
...and precious few of them use the motion sensing functionality -- that's right, "Sega Bass Fishing" is buttons-only...
...the units themselves are actually pretty slick. Slightly hefty but solid at one-quarter of a pound apiece with two AA batteries installed per stick, the devices automatically sync with one another (and presumably their 2.4 GHz USB dongle) as soon as turned on, and function as a fast, precise 2D mouse and twelve mappable keyboard buttons. Flash games are an obvious choice for the system, but with up to eight buttons on one hand with the Eee Stick controls, we could see a variety of other games being played one-handed thanks to the innovation.
Aside from a lack of plans for the Stick stateside, it seemed to me like there was only one thing keeping it from being a worthwhile input device for first-person 3D games: the fact that with no IR camera like the Nintendo Wiimote, the Eee Stick uses relative, rather than absolute positioning to determine where it's aiming. This means that whichever way you hold the the device when powering it up is the reference position from which the device will mirror your movements, and you must use the edge of the screen to push your cursor back in place if things get tweaked -- and there's very little chance we'd see any games that would use both sticks as a character's hands, as it'd be nigh impossible for the game to tell where your hands are relative to one another, or any other objects in the room.
When asked, an ASUS representative told me that the company is currently working with a pair of companies to produce original games for the Stick, but would not disclose who. Hopefully some of them will use the accelerometers -- it'd be nice to try them out next time.
January 9th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Neat - but i'm not sure it's neat enough to replace a Wii-Remote and bluetooth dongle combo for PC input - fully programmable for use on any game.
Although this is probably a lot easier to set up.
January 9th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
You lose the benefit of getting to use the word dongle when describing it, though.