Space Invaders comes 360°. Literally.

For some time now, most of us have had access to the Wiimote. Before this era of gaming, however, there were plenty of attempts at unique gamer interaction, including in the forms of the Power Glove, Light Guns, and even Sony’s Eyetoy (which now seems to have gone the way of the dinosaurs). Now, in an intriguing bid for attention, SusiGames has demoed the Susisphere: a remote-linked sphere that so far isn’t doing much more than letting vaguely interested show floor goers run around a convex dome, while blasting rotating spaceships with a mod-linked Wiimote.

The immediate question any hardcore gamer will have is obvious: is this just a novelty? Perhaps it’s a little early to say, but my vote is a definitive yes. While watching the demo for Space Invaders, I noticed that the players had to continuously run around the sphere in order to keep track of what their space ships were shooting at. One would argue that this keeps players active (certainly more so than sitting in a chair), but when you consider the risk of running into other players while trying to focus on flashing specks, the light exercise element comes out looking pale.

With a little imagination, there might be some ornamental quality to shoving one of these machines into an arcade—if there were still arcades anywhere but over-priced movie theaters. What is the future for something like the Susisphere? For two decades after the point, my friend kept his R.O.B. from the original NES for the same reason: attention. Like ice-carvings and Tablet PCs, certain objects are used to raise interest in a fledgling company. In the case of a fledgling corporate entity, it’s a ‘lookie here’ to get other companies to throw money their way, for everything from R&D to overtime. A company like Microsoft sees the Susisphere in action and may ask: “What else can they do?”

Conversation pieces aside, there will probably never be a pragmatic use for these sorts of technologies. The fact that the screen isn’t touch-interactive certainly works against it to outsiders. Space Invaders might not be the ideal game to touch and caress, but players want to feel one-upped in their experiences–not stuck using their Wiimotes to play 2D across a giant salad bowl. Maybe I’m a little harsh, but there are so many demo technologies these days that I am forced to look cautiously and consider something more important than what we could have: “Is what we have even working?”

The Wiimote is still pretty sketchy when it comes to selecting and getting motions perfectly accurate, no matter where you place the sensor bar. In an ideal world, games would be something more akin to Lawnmower Man. Since we live in this world however, I guess we will all just have to settle for demos just being demos and my WiiWheel veering me off of cliffs during crucial Mario Kart turns.