Well aaron, I've just downloaded the games and have been trying them out, and personally am having no trouble with the Jestures game, ----- well no trouble in terms of sound anyway.
As regards the games in general and the mouse in particular, well i crtainly agree about the Fireman and Sword games with what's siad in the artical. In fact, sinse my mouse is one of the infra red ones with no wires at all, the sword game was particularly fun (on my fourth go I got up to 20 men killed), and i can deffinately see that expantions to games in this genre will be a good thing.
Quite a long while ago, che martin of Blind adrenaline mentioned considdering an audio mouse based beat em up when he's finished with rale racer, which would certainly be good.
while I deffinately see the point of the jestures game (I certainly like the music and D&D references), I am however having a couple of problems in actually playing the thing. Mostly I think these are due to the fact that I'm not exactly used to handling a mouse, ------ and more generally am not the most spacially coordinated person in the world anyway.
The first problem I have is one of direction. going up, down left and right with the mouse is all fine, however, like a couple of other people I'm having trouble with the diagonal motions required for the magic missile. More specifically, sinse I've got no points of reference on my desk or anywhere else, I'm not precisely sure whether the motion I'm doing is being tracked as up, right, or the diagonal. You mention in the readme that there are tones for the components of each jesture. perhaps tones for direction might help to give a precise idea of what motions are being performed.
More generally, maybe some kind of mouse motion tracker which gives the player audio feedback on what direction they're pointing the mouse might be a good thing in general, so that life time keyboard users like myself can get used to it. This could just simply be a test program, or an actual game such as audio simon, with the numbers or tones or whatever activated by the directions of mouse movement (1 streight north, 2 northeast, 3 east etc).
Also, I'm finding it slightly difficult in the jestures game to adjust to how far or fast your supposed to push the mouse to activate the various motions. quite often I've performed the cause serious wounds spell (whey is a mage performing priest spells anywa? ;D), but been too slow to hit the targit.
Obviously this is part of the game, but some sort of speed vs movement indicating test program might help me practice. in game terms this could be a golf game, or multiple move beat em up, ------- with you requiring different speeds of mouse movement to correspond to light, medium and heavy attacks and parries.
Of course a couple of these issues will probably be taken care of in the Jestures tutorial, so I'll deffinately be looking out for the next version of the game.
In general I stil think using the mouse in audio games is a good idea, but perhaps it's not precisely as intuative to long time keyboard users such as myself as it would be to others, stil, if applications are created that give the oppertunity to practice mouse use I really don't see this as a problem.
Btw, sorry for the very late response here, I've been in the process of moving into my new flat, and had multiple and painful shinanigans with setting up a broardband account here. Everything fixed now though. Also, (quite appropriately), I was at a conference last week in manchester on Disability and disadvantage regarding my Phd, and actually some of the discussion there had quite a lot of bearing on accessible games, but I'd better stop here before this goes severely Ot.
With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)