The Games

Texture Tech Demo - Absolutely mind-blowing. It's the first part of the Novint Falcon tutorial, and if you aren't sold on the power of force-feedback yet, then this will single-handedly change your mind. Each of the many textures felt how they appeared: you could feel the grooves on the bumpy texture, the tension of the ball as you pressed into the rubber texture, the slickness of the ice texture, the roughness of the sandpaper texture, and the stickiness of the molasses texture, among other things. This is something that needs to be experienced to be believed, as my words alone cannot describe the experience for you.

Ball on a String Tech Demo - The next demo featured a ball tethered to the pointer. Moving the Falcon from left to right with varying degrees of speed were translated into short swings or long ones. Similarly, the ball pulled against the tether, and the controller responded with the appropriate force. It literally felt like the controller was trying to throw itself across the table when I flung the ball with all of my strength. Quite an incredible feeling.

Catch Tech Demo - In this demo, you caught balls in a glove from a robot pitching machine. When you caught the ball in the glove, you could feel the feedback from the controller. It felt exactly like when you caught a ball in a glove in real life. Similarly, you could feel the ball bouncing off the glove if you just missed it.

Slingshot Tech Demo - Not too impressive, honestly. Basically, you had a slingshot and had to shoot little cans off a fence. Nothing too special here, as another game demo showed this capability better.

3-Point Shootout - This was a basketball game that used the Falcon to shoot the ball by determining the point of release and force put behind the shot in order to determine how the ball traveled to the hoop and how it went in. For what is basically a simple little game, this was incredibly fun and easy to play, and it mimicked the science of shooting a basketball in real life pretty well.

Home Run Smashout - This demo was basically a home-run hitting contest, and honestly, it didn't worked as well as I had hoped. The Falcon does everything the Wii remote does, just to a somewhat lesser degree. It doesn't give you the as much freedom of mobility in swinging the bat as the Wii, so I'm going to have to pass on any baseball games using the Falcon for now.