I personally don’t think controllers can be replaced completely. Our fingers provide so many ways for control, each one can provide an instant input versus motion controls, which take precious seconds to execute. Fingers can also finely control the pressure of buttons and triggers or the direction of a stick. When you take that control away you completely destroy the amount of bearing we have over our games.
I have a big problem with the idea of going to motion controls. You suddenly limit the amount of input granted by fingers, but worse-off you are now depending on devices that need to take time to register and calculate your motions and interpret them as best they can. Its so imprecise and unpredictable, to me its like trying to figure out what a person is saying by having them play sharades instead of just fucking telling you with their voice (I don’t want this to sound like I want voice controls by the way, those suck too).
Its a control scheme fueled by mindless consumers and people who have no real clue how to transplant a first-person shooter into a wiimote.
I’ve played a considerable amount of the new Zelda game, Skyward Sword, but the abosolute, hands-down worst problem I have with the game is the insistence that I must wave my arm around frantically while trying to kill enemies. The controller frequently unbalances and before I know it I look like damn retard with the blade constantly pointing in the wrong direction from where I’m holding it. I don’t want this, I want a Zelda game I can sit back to and play peacefully for a few hours at a time. I don’t want to do Tae Bo every time a plant tries to kill me.
So the one thing I want to really say to the industry is: stop it. If you want to give us motion controls then fine, just don’t shove it down our throats for games that don’t need it. Keep Zelda on a real gamepad. I’m saying all of this because I can see what’s coming in the near future. The next generation of console will soon be upon us and before long even Xbox games will require motion controls from people who don’t understand how games are suppose to feel, who just want to cross-off another checkbox from their requirement list.
I love you Nintendo and the games you make, but you really screwed a lot of us gamers over here and brought us into territory we never wanted to be in. I hope someone at Nintendo HQ realizes that some people might actually want to play on a small controller on a big screen soon.
