Sony is ever the imitator, with its conspicuous releasing of wand-controlled motion detection and handhelds and soon, its handhelds with touch screen capabilities, so imagine the surprise when they released news of a patent for biometric technology--which monitors such things as heart rate, muscle tensing and sweatiness (gross!)--to be applied to their controllers. If perchance you don't know to what I'm referring (in which case you live under a rock, clearly), you can find the reveal as presented by Destructoid by clicking here.

None at all, right? You weren't surprised in the least, were you? You better not have been. Because I'm sure you've seen this before, if you've kept your finger to the pulse of the gaming world. Confused? I'll give you a hint:


Sony seems to like observing Nintendo and conjuring up ways to implement them in a theoretically better fashion. For instance, the motion control on the Move was so keen, Nintendo had to counter with the WiiMotion Plus to even have capture ratio on par with it. And now, Sony's Vita will take touch screens to a whole new level.

Need I mention the whole "taking the game away from the big screen" ordeal?

Sony is excellent at molding the already conceptualized into something improved. But by how much?

Of course, their solution is more elegant. Instead of a gaudy peripheral, it seems that the decision has been made to just incorporate the technology into the controller. Seamless. I do have to wonder if the controller will feel any different because of this.

Obviously, with this new tech an avalanche of opportunities for developers to get super creative.

I, myself, would LOVE to see a horror, survival, or horror/survival game made around these elements. Immediately Dead Space and Silent Hill come to mind. But what about a game that actually USES those traits as PART of the gameplay? A game I'd LOVE to see brought back from the crypts of the game graveyard is Illbleed.



Does the screenshot above look unfamiliar to you? If you've never played the game (or seen it played) you'll have to research on your own, but I'll summarize the features that Sony's new tech could catapult.

Ignore the four senses. Focus now on the EKG line. In Illbleed, your pulse is VERY important. If you flatline at 0, you die. If you max out at 255, you die. The level of your pulse also allows you to perform dodges. Keep calm, kiddos!

Adrenaline is very big in this game as well. It allows you to disable traps in the horrible carnival that try to kill you. (Cliché, right? This whole game is actually a cult classic, and you know what that means.) Adrenaline rushes (as detected by the biometrics) caused by horror mishaps could easily translate to more ability to save yourself from them. A keen balance?

You see what I'm driving at, right? Obviously you won't be able to mimic a flatline (barring putting down the controller) or a maxout (unless something's really wrong), so I imagine that the threshholds for death would have to change.

And of course, the people that left Climax Graphics after the CEO died would have to band together to finish the planned (but scrapped) sequel in the first place.

Disregarding speculations of that particular game, these kinds of features would be excellent if implemented in such fashions. Not to bar them from other opportunities, because the possibilities are quite grand. But of course, everyone will be obsessed with how it will work with shooters. Sad day.

It's just up to the developers of the game to seize those opportunities. And also up to the tech not to fail grandiosely as did the Vitality Sensor. But this won't be destined with the same backburner mentality as the Move, right?

...Right?