Forget Shaking, Bring Back the Button: A Proposal to Nintendo

Hey Nintendo. How are ya.

Look, I’ve become pretty anti motion-controls. I bought into it in 2006, because let’s be honest: the Wii had remarkable potential. However, nearly my entire Wii library consists of games released in that year between November 2006 and November 2007. In 2008 I bought an Xbox 360 and never looked back.

I thought motion controls pretty much ran their course. But then the next year (2009) you upped the ante with Motion Plus. True 1:1 motion. Neat. Now such a thing still wasn’t enough to convince me motion controls were all that important or superior to the good old fashioned, reliable, tried and true, traditional controller. But then now I’ve played Skyward Sword for 7 hours and I’ve started to come around again.

Don’t celebrate just yet: I still think it’s shit. I would pay obscene amounts of money just to play a Zelda game without having to move. When I play a video game, I want to sit in my chair so long, and so still, that I start to fuse with it. But I would be a lot more on board if you weren’t going in completely the wrong direction with implementation.

You, Nintendo, on the other side of the coin, have become pretty anti traditional-controls. So much so that you write off anything a simple button press could do, with shaking. Shake the Wii remote to make Donkey Kong pound the ground! Shake the Wii remote to make Mario spin! Shake the Wii remote to make Link roll! Shake the Wii remote to do this, to do that!

Shaking isn’t a miracle of motion controls. Shaking does NOT add any value to gameplay. You know what adds value to gameplay? The fact that I can swing my sword around and Link does the same, and the direction in which I attack a Deku Baba actually makes a difference. That I can control the new Beetle item piloting it through the air by tilting the Wii remote, or get air with my Loftwing by flapping it. Hell, the fact that I don’t even need the sensor bar is pretty cool, despite the fact that now I need to constantly babysit the Wii Remote Plus’s calibration. (This. Sucks.)

Combining these admittedly awesome moves with a button press for everything else would be the perfect marriage between traditional and motion controls. But you don’t seem to want any of that. Screw cohesion.

My faith isn’t exactly reassured when I read this article last night where Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma basically says they could never go back to button control. That makes me sad not only as a Zelda fan, and former Nintendo fan (yes, former), but as a traditional gamer.

With you it’s motion controls all the way, or nothing. That’s a pretty dangerous position to take, Nintendo. The keyboard didn’t go away because of the mouse. We need all these technologies to come together, because together the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

You, Nintendo, should be the one company showing the rest how to achieve synergy.