I Will Shake Nothing: A look into motion controls and their slow destruction of gaming

by Ward Knippling

Posted: 18-06-2009

With the big three all dipping into the shake and waggle department, are gamers the ones who will suffer? The Doc ventures into the land of Fanboy Backlash.

Greetings and Salutations, Jiggafans! As a man who formidably follows the scientific formula and has great interest in new technologies and such, I decided to delve into a relatively new concept for games: full motion control. And after my venture... I must admit, I’m not impressed. I once went to a futuristic version of 2005 where they controlled the weather with more accuracy than the postal service. What happened that could have thrown off the time stream so much that four years later, the best we can say is that we can flail our arms around at televisions?

“Undiluted crap will sell pretty well”

It started back in the eighties. Nintendo made a failed peripheral called the Power Glove that was supposed to revolutionize gaming by giving you unprecedented control over your games. What we got instead was a single glove that looks like it’s more functional as protection whilst welding shut a hole in a propane truck, and unruly dongles that were impossible to set up right. Nearly twenty years later, gamers are being forced back into this tripe not just with Nintendo, but with Sony and Microsoft, with Sony’s new controllers (whatever they’ve decided to name them) and Project Natal (which sounds gross to my ears for some reason).

When Nintendo first pitched the Wii I thought, “This could be interesting.” Nearly three full years later, I’m thinking, “This is bullshit!” The Wii marked the downfall of Nintendo’s care for their core audience. Under the guise of broadening games to a wider audience and getting casual people involved, Nintendo appears to have evolved into a company that lets pure undiluted crap onto their consoles under the idea of being family friendly. This however, is not the case. Nintendo, just like whatever company you work for, is in the business of making money. And they know perfectly well that undiluted crap will sell pretty well to people who don’t know enough to check for quality beyond a family friendly label.

This would be fine, except that it HAS been working out well for them. Incredibly well. In fact, Nintendo has been the undisputed leader in the console market since the beginning of this console generation, outselling Sony and Microsoft each an average of 2-1 the entire generation so far. Considering that Microsoft isn’t exactly doing shabby (in fact, they’re doing quite well here in the states, if not overseas so much), that’s a lot of money.

So with two years of being outsold by a competitor with inferior graphics, a weak to nearly non-existent online community, and a mountain of terrible games... you would start to ask yourself, “What the heck are they doing right, that could negate all of these wrongs?” The answer was simple: motion control.

The zombies live and are waggling in numbers

Now you can say all you want that the PS3 has had motion control since the beginning, but I view the Sixaxis in the same way I view Indiana Jones 4. It didn’t happen. I have wiped it from my mind. Have you played Lair? Did those controls feel good to you? There’s a reason why developers hardly use sixaxis, and it’s because it sucks. That’s why Sony is coming out with their new dildo controllers, to fix this problem. Microsoft is hoping that Natal with its ability to monitor your EVERY body movement, will take things up a notch in this area.

But unlike the Wii, I am throwing the bullshit flag right now.

Small-time developers the world over are singing songs of praise, “Yee Nub, Yub Nub!” Because their Wii cash crop is expanding onto Sony’s and Microsoft’s farms now too! Sony and Microsoft claim that their versions of this gimmick are so spot on that you wont need to waggle more than you have to... it picks up your movement better. But does that mean that every developer is going to say, “Oh my, this mechanic looks amazing; I am going to have to make a game about sword fighting that utilizes this to the highest degree!”? No. I guarantee you that every developer that has made a High School Musical, or a Chicken Shoot, or whatever else, is going to be gleefully rubbing their hands together, twirling their Machiavellian mustaches when they realize their market is currently expanding to the other giants. Then they will get right to work on a game that requires you to shake your arms up and down until the game is over.

And of course, Sony and Microsoft are also in the business to make money. So they aren’t going to turn down a chance to start making millions of dollars on cheaply developed games that will sell by the hundreds of thousands because they have the words, “Motion Controlled,” written on them. Especially not when those games are selling for sometimes over thirty dollars a game.

Motion controls are a gimmick that should have died in the eighties… but we all know that Nintendo is Dr. Frankenstein. They manage to get age-old franchises up and walking again every two years or so. The revamped Power Glove wasn’t so much of a surprise. But this Frankenstein story is turning into a zombie movie, where their horrible mistake has infected others, and continues to escalate, to evolve, until it is either squashed... or goes completely out of control.

Motion Controls get a 0.2 on the Jiggameter.



“DAMN DAMN!”

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.