The point I immediately want to get to is that motion controls suck.  See, a bad control scheme can ruin a game and a bad controller can ruin a system.  Motion controls have some of the worst problems plaguing gaming today, and most of them have to do with how large the amount of work between thought and onscreen action has become.

There was a maximum of one game on the Wii that people liked, and that was Wii Sports.  I say that this is the one game because Wii Resort and Wii Fit are just Wii Sports but with some more games.  The reason for this is that motion controls bother people.  Having to wave the remote to finish quest A will never get interesting and enjoyable.

 When you make me move all you’re doing is breaking my immersion. In a correct mindset, games should be reducing all movement from thought-to-screen action.  In a perfect world I’d imagine my character doing a triple kick flip and rain down bullets on the nearest thing with a non-human face, and then it would happen. I wouldn’t actually have to do a triple kick flip and pantomime a gun while I was still in the air on the one square nanometer that Kinect makes me do it in.

See, a really good mode of control is one which directly links you to the character onscreen with as little effort as possible, because thought-to-screen action is the best possible solution for the gamer base.  For people who aren’t quite as fit as others, like say, gamers, the Kinect is rather annoying and discriminatory.

The next problem is that there has never been, and in all likelihood never will be, any sort of good game with motion controls as the main function. It’s the dumping ground for the most sickening shovelware ever made.  It’s almost insulting the kind of happy dancing games they continually put out; some of it makes me want to throw up.  Even the recent Rise of Nightmares from Sega was a sickening piece of poor horror and uninteresting plot.

Motion controls is one of the signs that gaming is running towards puberty, and I like to think that everyone is just trying to get it out of their system. Eventually we’ll get back to actually having games that are playable and everyone else will be happier for it. The gamer base would be entirely more joyous when we can move past mandatory Wii Remote waggles in Mario and can just get back to saving a princess while punching a dragon.