The Wii’s revolutionary motion-detecting remote let designers create some unique ways to interact with videogames. It also allowed designers to create really, really annoying ways to interact with videogames. Here are my choices for five Wii remote gestures that should never have existed.
5. Button Pushing When a Gesture is Better
Come on people, it’s the Wii! When an avatar is using his hands, players should get to make the same motion. If I’m playing a driving game, don’t have me steer with the joystick! If I’m wielding a sword, let me swing my remote! If I wanted to push a button to slice someone’s head off I’d be playing every other console ever made.
The Accused: Rygar: The Battle of Argus, Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s Wheelie Breakers
4. Gesturing When a Button Press is Better
Games that fail to take advantage of natural opportunities for the Wii remote are annoying, but games that throw in completely senseless gesturing just because it’s a Wii game are even worse. When gesturing to perform an action feels awkward and pointless, that’s a sign that it shouldn't be done at all.
The Accused: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Aya and the Cubes of Light, Red Steel, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
3. The Forward Thrust
Thrusting your hand forward, as you would if stabbing something, is, in theory, a perfectly natural thing to want to do in a Wii game. The problem? It usually doesn’t work. How is it that game designers didn’t notice how difficult it was for the Wii to read a straight forward or back gesture? The Wii MotionPlus fixed the thrusting issue, but there are still way too many non-MotionPlus games that ask us to jab forward.
The Accused: Cursed Mountain, Tenchu: Shadow Assassins, Metroid Prime 3, Red Steel.
2. The Waggle
One of the things I have always most disliked in video games is the carpal tunnel syndrome-inducing repeating button press, in which players are required to push a button as fast as they possibly can to make the avatar perform an action (the most annoying aspect of 2008’s otherwise excellent Prince of Persia). In Wii games, that button mashing has been replaced with the odious waggle, in which players must shake the remote as fast as they can. Sure, it was funny in No More Heroes, and can sometimes work in small doses, but overall this is just one exhausting, annoying, overused gesture.
The Accused: Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, Cursed Mountain.
1. Arm Pumping
Some time early on in the history of the Wii, someone decided that the best way to simulate running or biking would be to have players pump their arms up and down. There are just a few problems with this. First off, pumping your arms up and down feels nothing like riding a bike. Second, it’s really exhausting if done for more than about 15 seconds. And lastly, it’s just not fun.
The Accused: Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games, games I’ve blocked from my memory.
