Motion Controls: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

RyanDJ

September 22, 2010

I

love my job. I work for a local company helping individuals with physical and intellectual disabilities. I'm a coordinator for a program that sends workers into the community to work with people who wouldn't be able to live independently without us. We do whatever the individual needs us to: dishes, laundry, medical appointments, physical therapy, hygiene...but one of the most important jobs we have is to be their friend.

I started my job in 2006, and soon after met a new friend in one of the individuals we serve. He is close to my age, and an avid gamer. He has been enjoying his gaming systems since his family had an original Nintendo. When I first met him, he showed me some of his skills, particularly in Metroid. My friend has grown up with this series, and knows them by heart. He has pages of drawings where he has mapped out the original games and even created entire maps, enemy drawings, and storylines for new Metroid games he would like to create. I've dabbled in Metroid before, but I think he could beat the game with his eyes closed. His absolute favorite game in the series is Super Metroid. I've been helping him search out a copy of the Game Boy Metroid, as that is one he has never played, which has never been reissued, either. I find that fact amazing, as it is such an integral part of the storyline. He has also pounded his way through the later Game Boy Advance titles. One day, I found a speed run on YouTube that finished Metroid Prime: Fusion in record time. He watched that diligently, complimenting the player in their skills in the game, and learning new maneuvers to complete it.

fps (60K) When the Prime series started, my friend said he found them to be very intriguing. He suffers from vision problems, and the extra dimension was challenging at first, but he got used to the GameCube controller and even got the rewards for 100% scans and pickups through those games. It was at this point in time I met him, near the advent of the Wii.

He asked me a lot of questions about the Wii. It was exciting to see another game in the series; what was supposed to be a closing chapter of a game he had been following for ages. We went to the store and got his Wii. Plugged in the game, and got to it. I could tell, though, that it was harder for him due to his vision. The coordination of pointing at an enemy physically versus moving a cursor with a controller was daunting. After a few weeks, I went to his house to find the Wii neatly tucked away in his closet. When I asked him about it, he shrugged it off. I pried a little bit: after all, it is my job to help him be happy; I learned he was having difficulties with a boss. I encouraged him to get it out, learned the control scheme after seeing him play, and helped him get the best of his enemy. Relieved, he continued on his way.

Unfortunately, this happened again and again. He's an awesome gamer, I've seen it myself. The difficulty was in the aiming and control scheme. Eventually, he sold his Wii. Later, I saw Metroid Prime: Trilogy and rented it, thinking hopefully since they added motion control to the first two games, maybe, just maybe, they put controller support in there for all games. Alas, no dice there. He had given up on the series, interested only in any handheld releases that would be more like the old ones.

New Super Mario Brothers Wii brought him back to the system. He purchased a new system then, and I found the BOSS controller glove that made a Wiimote look like an oversized SNES controller. Helped him select those and showed him the glory of the Virtual Console, where he downloaded and re-enjoyed Super Metroid all over again. He heard about Metroid: Other M, and was at first skeptical. I knew his passion for the series, so I showed him videos, screenshots, whatever I could. He decided he would try it.

Today, I finally got to see the results. I walked into his basement, happy to see the Wii hooked up right next to a huge cardboard box filled to the brim with 8- and 16- bit games. The BOSS controller shell is still snugly gripped onto the Wiimote. He booted up the game, and I saw his classic skills return. He is in love with this game. The return-to-your-roots control scheme puts him back in the driver's seat. He's not even having much of a problem with the FPS parts, as you aren't strafing and moving while aiming. The only difficulty I saw was one I would have myself: apparently there are little sections where you are stuck in first-person mode and supposed to look at SOMEthing to advance the story. Four troopers were staring at a body on the ground and Samus was behind them...I had no idea where to turn her to advance the game. Overall, though, I was so excited to see the happiness on his face as a series returned to its roots.

So...I'm torn. I've also worked at another part of our facility with people with very profound disabilities: confined to wheelchairs, unable to manipulate the buttons on a pad. Wii Sports is a hit there, simply getting to interact with a medium they've never been able to work with before is great for them. I love motion control...but I'm scared at the marketing insistence of it. How hard would it have been to offer GameCube or Classic Controller support for Metroid Prime 3? I could have written an article just as long about this same man's attachment to Zelda (Twilight Princess was available as a GameCube game...but he's looking forward to Skyward Sword) or Castlevania (everyone's worried about a 3D Castlevania, but it's at least controller bound...unless they add Move/Kinect support).

Motion gaming as a whole is a great venue. It has allowed many people who could have never played a video game to try something new. Yet the insistence of utilizing it nearly cost a fan his favorite series, and definitely sealed him out of ever desiring to complete one of its greatest games. As Sony and Microsoft get ready to jump on the bandwagon, I put this out to all three companies...Not just for the die hard gamers who insist controllers are better...Motion controls can be good: They can add a new dimension to gaming. They can allow people with disabilities to game as they never have before. They can be bad: they may alienate people who are unable to prance around, individuals with vision problems that can't focus on a controller and a screen simultaneously very well, paraplegics who can't dance because Kinect said so, yet there's no controller option for a new game that they are aching to play. And they can be ugly: shoehorned into a new game on the chance that the company may make a few extra bucks thanks to it. Motion control definitely has a place, and in many instances, an advantage, but games need to be made for the gamers...no matter what they are capable of.