The Coin-Op: Why you will never be the controller [Part 2]
December 15, 2011
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.
Uzi Bazooka • Feb 24, 2012 at 9:07 am
Now, I don’t think that motion controls are ALWAYS completely terrible, despite the Kinect’s best efforts to prove me wrong. 007 GoldenEye on the Wii is a good example of this. A first-person shooter, it really showed the full potential of the Wiimote, which made it easier to aim accurately, and explore the world more freely. It recently came out under the name GoldenEye: Reloaded for the Xbox 360 and the PS3. I played the game on the Xbox, and it just wasn’t the same. Aiming was harder, and the freedom of movement was greatly reduced. The analog sticks actually made it worse, because it was so much easier just to point the ‘mote wherever you needed to shoot. Now, this could just be becasue I am not a habitual Xbox gamer, but nonetheless – the motion controls helped.
What we need are more developers who don’t treat the motion controls as some kind of gimmick (like Wii Sports or Just Dance), or who try to jam it unnecessarily into what’s already a perfectly good game (like the recently released Halo: Combat Evolved, or…well, pretty much every Wii game ever). We need more developers who can incorporate it as a natural part of gameplay.