Lesson Learned: Motion Control's Big Assumption

The summer before second grade, I fell out of a tree on a camping trip and broke both bones in my left forearm, the ulna and radius. Ever since them my left arm has been slightly more "bowed" than my right. It's nothing crazy. I'm not a mutant or anything, but if you compared my two arms side by side, they would look a little different. However, it wasn't until very recently that I realized that my left arm has a minor limitation as well.

We have a racing title on the Wii in test now that switched up the controls from last year's version. Last year we went with holding the Wii Remote horizontally and steering like a real steering wheel. It seemed to work fine, but in this year's version, that's a secondary control scheme. The new default scheme has the player holding the Wii Remote in one hand and the Nunchuk in the other. So far, there are no problems. However, while racing, if the player wants to powerslide around a sharp corner (which is somewhat necessary throughout the game) they have to twist the Nunchuck from left to right, or vice versa, to powerslide in that direction while turning with the Control Stick. For most people this would probably be no problem, except it has been for me.

Due to my injury sustained about twenty years ago, I have trouble twisting my left arm outwards, away from my body, making left turns while powersliding nearly impossible. Since it is not a motion I do very often with my left arm (even my right for that matter), I never really put much thought into my own limitations. And my own issues are not even a real problem, as there are people out there with far more severe limitations.

As motion controls become more and more the norm and game designers look to eagerly implement them into their games, this is hopefully something that they take into consideration more often than not or risk alienating a segment of our gaming brethren. Not to say that all motion controls are bad, I just hope that they aren't shoehorned into games and then forced upon the player.

Wii: Bright or Bleak Future?

A little over a week ago, I came across a great new website: Game Producer Resource. The latest post describes Juuso's (the author) opinion on the upcoming success for the Wii.

Since I work day in and day out with the Wii, I thought I'd throw out my two cents:

I’m not as confident as you. Sales have been very strong and probably will be in the near future. But sustained growth is going to be tough.

The Xbox 360, my personal pick in the long run, and the PS3 will be better at meeting the hardcore gamer market with exceptional titles, XBLA/PSN capabilities and online gaming. The Nintendo Wii is said to try to be winning hardcore fans but attracting casual gamers as well. The casual games market is thriving, but mostly on hardware that casual gamers already own: like a computer or a cell phone. It will be a hard sell to get people to continue to purchase a $250 piece of equipment to play casual style games and that’s it. (For a far better success story, one can look to the DS.)

This leads me to another problem I see with the Wii: game line-up. Working at a third party publisher who fully intends to support the Wii, we still see it as a second tier platform. Triple A titles are going to the 360/PS3 while the Wii will get ports with tacked on Wii Remote functionality. Lackluster but strong support from third parties is going to be detrimental in the long run. Nintendo is the only company who seems to fully see the potential in their own hardware. And with a release schedule of only three or four high profile titles a year, the road ahead looks far less bright.