Nintendo has announced the date and price of its new MotionPlus controller. On June 8th, you’ll be able to get your hot little hands on the wiimote add-on, which clips to the bottom of your existing controller and provides a “dual-axis tuning fork angular rate sensor”, which apparently adds to the motion-sensing goodness by determining angular motion. From what they’re claiming, with MotionPlus, you get true motion-sensing of the sort we’d originally expected from the Wii.

Nintendo’s initial first-party offering that supports MotionPlus comes out on July 26th, and amongst other things, it includes a swordfighting game. If this turns out to work like myself and so many other people hope, it will open up a floodgate of similar swordfighting games. Personally, I’ve voiced my doubts about the viability of such a game, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong. Who doesn’t want to be an Obi-Wan in their own living room? Well, I guess my mom doesn’t… but still!

While the $250 for a Wii is significantly less expensive than the $300 for a XBox 360 or the $400 for a Playstation 3, when you tack on the extra $40 per controller, $20 per nunchuck, and now the extra $20 per MotionPlus add-on, that’s a potential extra $80 per person. Suddenly, the Wii isn’t so inexpensive.

Aside from Wii Sports Resort, EA has announced that Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, EA Sports Grand Slam Tennis, and EA Sports Active will support the new MotionPlus controller add-on, and there have also been a lot of rumors about Red Steel 2. While the original Red Steel was a bit of a joke when it came to motion-controlled swordplay, this one might actually be somewhat less awful.

At E3, Nintendo announced their new “Motion+” controller, and developers expressed “annoyance and betrayal” at having not been given advance notice of its existence. It will be at least six to nine months before outside game developers are able to produce games that utilize this technology. Only Nintendo first-party games will use it any time soon.

LucasArts is planning to release Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Lightsaber Duels this November. Unlike its much-hyped cousin The Force Unleashed, Lightsaber Duels will use the Wii remote for lightsaber combat. We can expect that it will not have 1:1 lightsaber combat, but rather a clumsy approximation, since without the Motion+ controller, the Wii’s motion tracking is iffy at best. I can only assume that LucasArts less than happy with Nintendo.

So let’s imagine now that next year at this time, LucasArts comes out with Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Lightsaber Duels 2: The Duelening or perhaps another developer comes out with some similar sword fighting game. With Motion+, it’s gonna be teh awesome!!1 Right?

Not so fast. As someone with practical experience in boffer combat, I’ve got a few thoughts on this.

Let’s say you swing the wiimote in an attempt to cut Darth Maul in half. He laughs at you and easily moves his lightsaber to block. On screen your lighsaber stops when it hits his. But you, standing there in your mom’s basement in your tightey whiteys, continue to swing the wiimote, completing the arc. At this point, the positions of the wiimote and the on-screen lightsaber no longer match. What happens? As a developer, how do you handle the fact that there’s no real-world resistance when a lightsaber or sword hits something? Do you make the character’s lightsaber on screen jump to the new position, ignoring the fact that to get there it would have had to pass through your enemy? That’s ugly. Do you require the player to move his Wii remote back to match its position on screen? There simply is no good solution. And while you were figuring it out, Darth Maul just made you a quadruple amputee.

While that’s certainly the most blatant problem, there’s also the issue of distance. If you were fencing for real, moving towards your enemy and dodging back are a major component. But how can you replicate footwork in a game? Unless the Wii Motion+ controller is able to accurately detect its distance from the TV/sensor bar, it’s going to be like swordfighting with your feet glued in place. And if it does use its distance from the TV/sensor bar, how can it tell a thrust from a whole-body move forward? I’d prefer my lightsaber combat with more dodging, dipping, ducking, diving, and dodging. In a video game, unless we’re talking about something like the PS3’s EyeToy, or some other camera-like device, it simply cannot be done.

So while I’ll look forward to Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Lightsaber Duels with some degree of hopefulness, I certainly will not expect great things.