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Bring Out Your Dead! Can Nintendo Breathe New Life into Adventure Games?
 Day of the Spectacle
Almost certainly the first generation of Wii titles will gleefully overexploit the novelty of the Wiimote, using it in every imaginable scenario whether it is appropriate or not, until the gaming public tires of it. Indeed, AWE Games has been approached by multiple publishers in the past six months who seem to embody this attitude: use the Wii controller everywhere and on everything.
I don’t know about you, but I often play games in the wee hours (that is not a pun; in a break with recent convention, there will be nary a ‘Wii’ pun in this entire article, I promise) and the last thing I want to do after midnight is thrash about trying to get the system to recognize that I’d like to pick up the crowbar, please.
In fact, this is an argument that has hounded adventure game developers before in a different guise, that of the smart cursor. I’m a huge proponent of the smart cursor in adventure games, one which is context sensitive and could in theory (much to its opponents’ dismay) parse an ambiguous action in the player’s favor automatically. In practice, this is rarely the case.
Call me a lazy gamer, but I believe that obvious and mundane actions in a game should occur with as little input from the player as possible, e.g., if I click on a door, I want it to open. I don’t want to select the open button and then click on the door, I don’t want to cycle through 8 different cursor states to find the open icon, and I imagine I’d enjoy twisting my wrist in a simulated open motion even less appealing. Skip the minutiae. A ‘no guesswork’ style of interpretation seems more appropriately saved for important actions - disarming a bomb, or picking a lock. Things that I don’t often get the chance to perform in real life.
Broken Sword
Even the most obvious application the Wii offers in the context of this article – that of Wiimote as mouse replacement – is fraught with issues. This became painfully obvious to me personally while playing Ubisoft's Red Steel. Now, I realize this is a shooter, and as such, requires both more accuracy and diligence when operating the controls than an adventure game. Nevertheless, what I found was that, since there is no ‘neutral’ position for the onscreen targeting cursor, I had to remain on my toes at all times, gripping and aiming the Wiimote without respite.
This was uncomfortable at first, and soon became unbearable. As a makeshift solution, I held the Wiimote with my thumb at the back, my elbow resting in my lap, and my forearm extended to about chin height. This shift in position may have increased my aiming accuracy, but it too became uncomfortable after a short time.
A few more half-hearted attempts later I stopped playing the game entirely. If the game had the aforementioned ‘neutral’ position, that is, if moving the Wiimote blatantly off-screen centered the target, this might not have been such a problem.
I am of the opinion that the developers of this game were ‘encouraged’ to include every motion sensing aspect of the Wiimote, whether they thought it enhanced gameplay or not. A blatant (in my opinion) example of this was the tilt sensor. Apparent out of the gate was the fact that my natural sitting/gaming position tilts the Wiimote towards my left hand at an angle of about 15 degrees. This was reflected by my on-screen gun hand, which was perpetually angled in a similar way. As far as I could tell, this added nothing to gameplay – it was simply annoying.
Is Red Steel's gun tilting really necessary?
This is not to suggest that there aren’t unique gameplay opportunities to explore via the Wiimote, just that the best suited control choices will likely be natural extensions of gameplay, not contrived elements concocted near zero hour to fulfill a quota imposed from above.
Adventure games on the Wii would be better served by a more subtle control scheme, using the motion sensors more as adjuncts than as principal players. Use the Wiimote as a mouse replacement, sure, but keep your hotspots forgiving and don’t bother translating tilt if it isn’t needed. The same basic tenets apply to the DS. For adventure games and other story driven genres at least, let the gameplay dictate the control, not the other way around.
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