IR allows you to move the cursor around your TV screen. In other words, it plays like a light gun game, where the cursor can move to each of the corner of the screen, and that’s how your character actually turns and aims.

Games like Borderlands, DOOM, and Splatoon all move the screen itself, not the cursor - so your reticle stays in the middle of the screen, and the motion is 1:1 controlling your view.

It sounds like a subtle enough difference, but in practice it feels and controls terribly with a Pro Controller versus a Joy Con (and especially versus a Wiimote), due to the lack of “pointing” a Pro Controller. It’s honestly really hard to explain via text. I highly encourage you to just try it on Dolphin.

Back to Prime 3, there are also a lot of little weird motion control things throughout the game, like inserting the Wiimote into a hole turning it like a key. These are minor gameplay things that could be sloppily emulated across a variety of control schemes, or even macro’d to a button, but it would take a non-insignificant amount of development work to get something like that working and easily understandable.

None of this is impossible, but it’s just so very unlikely, especially given how little effort Nintendo puts into some of these collection ports. It makes for a worse gameplay experience than the original, and that is an absolute fact, because you no longer have the exact control mechanisms that the original hardware had. The best that can be done is emulating those controls, which we’ve seen is usually awkward.

Side note, this is very possibly why Galaxy 2 wasn’t included in the collection. In Galaxy 1, 90% of the pointer controls were optional (collecting and shooting star bits) and the required gameplay sections (like the floaty blue stars) had you ONLY using pointer controls, so it was feasible to translate those controls to less-polished gyro/stick emulation.

However, in Galaxy 2, we have the addition of Yoshi, and a ton of sections that require you to use pointer controls while still controlling Mario. This is super easy to do with two Joy Cons and would work fine, but it would be near impossible to map that to a stick, and would be awkward as hell with portable gyro controls.