You mentioned liking Wario Land 1 and 4. Any thoughts on Shake It?
I have tried twice to get in to Wario Land Shake It, and it’s just never clicked with me. I want to like it, I really do, but I’ll finish one or two levels and feel like I’m bored with the game.
I think it’s motion control. Which is weird, because Shake It’s motion stuff is actually pretty tame, but the whole… tilting the remote to aim canons, having to shake bags of cash, etc. It feels gimmicky and tacked on. It doesn’t add a new dimension to the gameplay or increases the fidelity of control, it’s just waggle as a dumb extra gimmicky button, and that’s exactly the kind of thing I didn’t want out of the Wii.
And, like, I feel like that highlights a problem with motion control in general? The real success of the Wii was having a mouse-like pointer available from a living-room-style environment, but all of this “We can do gestured input now!” is where motion control fails, and it’s because gestures suck.
You push a button, you know exactly what the response to that button will be. Gestures require context awareness, and even the best most powerful neural networked learning systems still don’t understand context well enough for even 80% accurate gesture detection. It’s that old baseball joke, where a pitcher looks to his coach and the coach is giving him hand signals that don’t make any sense, so the pitcher throws the wrong pitch.
Something like the Wii works great for, like, light gun shooters where you’re standing in place and pointing at objects. But as far as games that make you do literally anything else, like detecting shaking gestures or whatever, it’s terrible, and I endeavor not to interact with those games.
