If they're doing half as good a job as they imply, they'd need to castrate it beyond recognition to put it on a different platform than the Wii.

Let's hope it more of an Eternal Darkness and less of a Geist eh? :)

Err, no.

You'd be amazed at how much stuff the Wiimote registers and how much you CAN indeed do with it.Raid over the river looks pretty good considering it's made by a fictional company.

Everything can be done - and is best done - without the wiimote knowing where it is in relation to anything, using the accelerometers in it. Plenty of games have already used motion that way without pointing at the screen, and the gyroscopic functions used in tandem with accelerometers yield brill results. Play some No More Heroes, then fire up the fencing mini game in Secret Rings, then just imagine both of them used simultaniously.

I'm not saying it'll necessarily make a great game, litting fires here and there, but it's absolutely possible. Lack of imagination isn't a tech issue.

So you played neither but you know that imagining them together is impossible? That's an impressive deduction.

Lemme help out then.

Secret Rings merely senses how you hold the wiimote in a fixed position. Tilt it forward and you'll point the rapier downwards, back, left, right, it follows how you point the wiimote to EERILY accurate effect.

Now imagine reaching a point where you're supposed to lit a rope on fire, you hit a context sensitive button and it locks into a NMH state which has your torch responding like the rapier did from SaTSR. You might even be able to "Z-lock" strafe around to get in position, or use the nunchuk's motion controls to hunch down or adjust your height in some way. You then tilt the wiimote into the right position and hold it there to set fire to the rope.

There's no need to always go waving the torch around.

It is not a tech issue - that's just a bedtime story told to people to make them feel good about not having motion controls at all because "it really can't do much anyway". You have a ton of variables to work with, and how you use them is entirely up to your imagination and sense of what would be fun to do and what wouldn't.

I don't doubt that you understand how it works, but you do seem to lack an enthusiasm for thinking up what you can do with the way it does work.

Context sensitive things like spinning wheels in Gears to have a lift go across a chasm don't have any trouble finding the player in a 3D space. As for the wiimote sensor, the sensor isn't even used in the Secret Rings example I mentioned. It's based purely on the gyro in it.

It's no more clunky than any other context sensitive action, and it can easily be likened to holding a button to ready the bow/boomerang in Zelda, then adjusting the wiimote accordingly to perform the action. Gimmicks are at some point up to each and every one of us to define, as some would call the entire console a gimmick. Is opening cabinets in Eledees/Elebits gimmicky? Maybe it is, I dunno. To me it was a fun quirk to gameplay that I happily performed.

It's difficult to really know the setup of this game, its pacing. If it's slow, methodical and puzzly like Zack and Wiki (absolutely brilliant game by the way) then I can easily imagine the sort of solution I described. If it's more actiony then you'd obviously want something more immediate.

However, none of those are questions I set out to answer. I merely objected to your notion that it can't be successfully emulated on the Wii, and I simply reckon it can.

The whole "this and that works just as well on a normal gamepad" is a bit of a moot point too when you consider that the whole idea here is to shake up conventional controls to create something that feels different. Of course you could have simple shortcut buttons for all the shoryukens in gaming because that would arguably be "less gimmicky" than the motion you have to perform on the d-pad, but without obstacles and a BIT of jumping through hoops, games would be rediculously straight forward.

To what extent that is true for you I can't answer, but for me personally I can enjoy a methodical, somewhat "cumbersome" game if it's done in a stimulating way. Lost in Blue isn't entirely lost on me for instance.

Well it's difficult to really disagree with what you're saying, but there are a few things I'd like to point out.

For one, while I agree that a gimmick is easily defined per se, it's up to each of us to determine what does or doesn't add something to a game. I'd argue, personally, that "well implemented" and "gimmick" are opposites of the exact same thing; input mechanics. No more no less.

Much like something like chess is about limiting options, creating rules within a confined space, controls are really the same. Mario has to jump over pits, Sonic has to avoid sharp spikes, et cetera.

To level up and become strong in an RPG takes time and effort. They could stick you with all the powers at the outset because that'd be the "simple intuitive way" but that'd defeat the whole purpose.

Magnify this thinking a couple of times and move onto controls. It's easy to see how obstacles are often loaded onto the controls instead. Pressing a button to reload is all about clearing an obstacle when it could just aswell be automatic and all you had to concentrate on would be the trigger.

As I was alluding to earlier, powerful moves in fighting games could easily be put on buttons, but instead they're performed by using some elaborate motion on the d-pad.

Now, after a bizillion years of essentially doing the same things to achieve stuff, the Wii comes along and does stuff differently. This is bound to confuse and aggrevate some people as tried and true inputs are exchanged for new, sometimes a bit awkward things.

Here is where I guess we differ. To me, the actions visualised in a game are secondary, sometimes tertiary to *what you are doing* - a shell in which game mechanics are encapsulated. Looking at a gamepad you don't see *jumping, shooting, climbing, slashing, moving falling blocks around, drifting around a corner, saving the princess, killing the giants, eating a mushroom* because it's really not there to be seen. Of course, you COULD see it, but that's because we've had SO many years of jumping on A and shooting on B.

So what's gimmicky about using something else to jump and shoot? That's like always using the death of an established and loved character to make people cry in EVERY work of art because that's how you make people cry.

I simply disagree that moving actions from an established spot on your input device to another alltogether is gimmicky. It's a bad idea if it doesn't work out or isn't fun of course, but that's sort of a different matter. If you're making a bad game - regardless of how you make the character jump - then that's gonna be a bad game.

I've played a number of Wii games that are straight up ports with swapped control schemes, and those have been varying degrees of successful. Mainly they're hard to get into because your body goes "WAAH, I've seen this before and the A button used to do this and that!!", but that's just your body responding to the visual input fooling you into thinking it's the same game when it ultimately sort of isn't. SSX Blur is a brill example of a game that will put you off as long as your mind is fixed on SSX3/On Tour, but is actually really cool when you let go and get into it.

Aaaanyhow, like I said semantics aside we're pretty much agree. Well except for the whole.. me thinking this game based on this conceptual video is very much a Lost in Blue/Zack and Wiki like possibility, but that's prolly due to my openness to context sensitive actions. I think they've come a long way in the last few years and I think Twilight Princess, Resident Evil 4 and Sands of Time are a few great examples of it off the top of my head.You got me, I'm not a gamer. :D

I think the whole Wii install base thing is confusing to people because it's gotten off to such an incredible start, and a lot of that success is tied to non-gamers buying into it. If those weren't wowed we would've seen a slower rise to (prolly lesser) success for sure (look at any other console) but the notion that "gamers" don't have a Wii is starting to become a tiresome misconception.

Capcom has already put three million sellers on the Wii, two of which are essentially new IP, and more support is coming. The closest is the Wii version of Okami in.. april I think. We Love Golf was featured on this site a while ago, Monster Hunter 3 is announced as a Wii exclusive, Sengoku Basara X/Devil Kings X is coming out alongside the PS2 version this year, and rumours are circulating about Zack and Wiki and Umbrella Chronicles sequels. So yeah, I look forward to continued abandonment from capcom.