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The most gimmick heavy games of the Wii era. A look back in time (feat. PS move and Kinect)


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I’m just curious what you guys remember as being some of the most gimmick heavy wii games. That era had a lot of games and many of them attempted to capitalize on the Wii’s whole motion gimmick, among other things. What stood out to you, were any of them in your eyes successful or good? Or notoriously bad?
 

For me, honestly, one of the most notable gimmick based games that wasn’t Wii Play or Wii Sports, was probably Links Crossbow Training. Does anyone else remember that one? 
 

It was that Twilight Princess spinoff that used heavily the Wii zapper 

 

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I think you could ONLY get this game new with the zapper, tho could have been standalone used maybe idk. But yeah, you basically played a on rails shooter as link going through Twilight Princess locales, and used the Wii motion controls to aiming your gun. 
 

lct.jpg

 

It was...interesting. Notable in that it’s (Twilight Princess) the only Zelda game I believe to get a spin-off outside age of calamity, but I’d even put that in a different category from this, as that’s very story driven and a pseudo sequel/prequel to already existing Zelda games. 
 

I don’t recall the game being bad or anything, but it definitely was one of those “kinda just there” games. Nothing to write home about, but not offensive or bad. As far as on rails shooters goes, it was decent, but I don’t recall it being as fleshed out as those Resident Evil on rails games. I doubt it’ll ever get a remaster (I’d have assumed had it, it would have been included somehow with Twilight Princess HD)

 

Oh yeah, there was Wii Music...yeah I’m just gonna let the E3 presentation do all the talking 

Edit: Decided, I can’t talk about this motion control era without including the Wii’s “competition” in that front, so if you guys wanna include examples from the Xbox’s Kinect or the PlayStation’s Move, go right ahead there. 

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I think Caddy does a good retrospective of the Kinect.

TL;DR After playing the games in this video, Caddy concludes that the Kinect's infamy boils down to the games it was stuck with. A lot of the Kinect's worst games were built off of:

A. Lying demonstrations

B. Slapping a recognizable name onto a Kinect game and calling it a day

Both of which share a theme; they were made by studios who care more about using the Kinect to make a quick buck than in figuring out its intricacies.

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There were tons of gimmicky games, but this one will remain the most memorable WTF game for me:

 

You are racing, then at some point you have to play a tambourine, play bowling, launch a cake at a clown's face and so, for absolutely no reason.

Because casual.

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Any piece of plastic white tat that the Wiimote could attach itself into offended me (the amount of Tennis Rackets and golf clubs... I mean... why? it does nothing to enhance the experience).

Mario Kart's Wii Wheel I always loathed as well because whilst it was Nintendo toe dipping into the waters of giving the players a more virtual immersion, it it did nothing other than act as a better way to grip the Wiimote Horizontally, and even then it wasn't the ideal way to play the game.

DK Barrel Blast is a worst offender for being a racing game designed for the Gamecube's underutilised DK Bongos before being scrapped and development shifted to the Wii. Why would you want to race by playing the game simulating Bongo drumming by throwing your hands up and down with the Wiimote and Nunchuck to turn? And second, why was the DK Bongo support not included in the game as an extra control accessibility? - There were perfectly usable GC controller ports available.
 

11 hours ago, Iko said:

There were tons of gimmicky games, but this one will remain the most memorable WTF game for me:

 

You are racing, then at some point you have to play a tambourine, play bowling, launch a cake at a clown's face and so, for absolutely no reason.

Because casual.

Was always gutted Excitebots never got a release in the UK, I adored the first Excite Truck - and this was just more of the same but bonkers.

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As much as I love Zak & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure for really scratching my graphic adventure itch in a time where those games were pretty much dead, I can't deny that it went way overboard on the Wiimote gimmicks. Using the pointer as a cursor made sense and worked great. Having to manipulate the Wiimote to perform almost any action in the game eventually got tedious, and I absolutely hate using it as a lasso for literally the final playable moment of the game. I swear that didn't work properly and is the only Wii game that actually causing discomfort to my wrist.

I'd still recommend it though, thoroughly unique and worthy of a mention in a highlights of the genre.

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I had a Kinect. It was...interesting. I enjoyed everything on it, probably because it was my first console and I had very little frame of reference in terms of quality. I had Sonic Free Riders of course, as the young Sonic fan I was, and, at the time, I pretty much loved the game. I think I got through a lot of it too. Looking back, it wasn't exactly a good game, far from it really. The controls were wonky and you had to fight for control, the roster wasn't that good, and the game had a bunch of unnecessary modes you had to do to progress. The co-op was also pretty rough from what I remember from playing it. So, not the best. The Star Wars game for the Kinect, I also remember having a lot of fun with this. I haven't played it in years but from what I remember it also suffered from bad controls but it wasn't too bad, at least the concepts of it, and a game with better motion controls that allows players to use the force is something I'd be willing to try, if done right of course. The dancing mode, however, that was just cursed. The other first party games for the Kinect, like Kinect Joyride and Kinect Adventures I remember finding boring after the first time I played them. I remember having a bit of fun with Kinect Sports but I had more fun playing Wii Sports at friends' houses. I know I had other Kinect games but they were obviously forgettable or I would've noted it here. I just find it interesting, as someone who wasn't engaged with the online gaming sphere at the time, and was coming in with an open mind. Seeing I was a kid I had disposable time and motivation to play games, I ended up trying to squeeze as much fun as possible out of it, and had fun with it despite the bad controls and lackluster games. The best game on that system was probably the Star Wars game, and I at least had fun watching playthroughs of Sonic Free Riders on Youtube. The Kinect was indeed a failed project, but I think the Switch, and current VR systems, with games like Beat Saber, are doing better at carrying on the legacy of motion controls.

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There are way too many to list on the Wii because of the nature of the console.

Many sports games such as Mario & Sonic are the king of this. Since Wii Sports was popular, nearly every developer rushed out to make motion control based sports games and honestly, there weren't good. Sports Island / Deca Sports managed to make 3 games and only a couple of those minigames felt okay to play, even darts was okay and that usually is the hardest sport to recreate in a game (not accurate though) but those games failed on a technical level resembling more of a N64 game graphically at some points (e.g. the racing games) and the low framerate. The problem is that it had the "waggling" as in moving your Wii Remote up and down with the nunchuk and more often than not it doesn't recognise the movements, similarly turning your remote seems dodgy. Mario & Sonic had that, Asterix at the Olympic Games was broken (the platforming side wasn't as bad). Strangely enough Mario & Sonic London 2012 is one of the better alternatives because they tried to work out the kinks of motion controls by then.

As mentioned any game that involves moving your Wii Remote about so in a game that used a sword, you move forward to stab a character and sometimes have problems recognising it. So many games had that... For others? Tiger Woods in theory would have been perfect on the Wii but the only games that seemed to be more acceptable on the Wii are the first (07) and the last (12), the former because it was literally simplified (swing = button press) and the latter provided enough options. 08 was awful because of frameskipping (game speeding up and slowing down) and 09-10-11 had a tutorial that you couldn't always pass... The big issue? The games relied on putting the Wii Remote as close to the floor as possible and wouldn't be surprised if many Wii Remotes were broken that way...

Generally the system was this:

  • A game ported from the PS2 (or to the PS2) that had to cram motion controls because there wasn't enough buttons on the standard setup
  • The above but as an exclusive, this even applies to 1st party games such as Donkey Kong Country Returns, New Super Mario Bros. Wii (believe that you had to shake the remote to spin), Wario Land: The Shake Dimension however in most cases, shaking the remote was the added extra.
  • A game that was ported from the Gamecube but moved to the Wii mid-development e.g. Super Paper Mario, Donkey Kong Barrel Blast/Jet Race
  • A game that only worked with the Wii Remote and literally had to cram everything into the limited control scheme or just motion controls. These were very early Wii games due to developers not realising that there were alternatives however it also affected much of the library. Racing games were badly affected since motion controls are not an alternative to proper steering wheels (diehard) or controller (casual) as the sensitivity was not good enough for the experience and doesn't feel like playing the game properly. Need for Speed Undercover and The Run ironically are one of the better Wii racing games on the console just because of the classic controller option.
  • Games that only worked on the Wii MotionPlus because the standard Wii Remote wasn't good enough e.g. Wii Sports Resort, Red Steel 2, Grand Slam Tennis

The best suited Wii games outside of games that offer the classic controller are ones that are pointer based. Time Crisis would have been perfect on the system but the PS3 got those so the Wii had to settle for Transformers Cybertron Adventures. Having used the PlayStation Move, it always had problems with recognising the controls and why I didn't have it for long... FPS had problems especially ones that came from a different system e.g. Call of Duty 3, Medal of Honor Vanguard but the few that were built from the ground up such as The Conduit and kinda Metroid Prime 3 were more suitable (not Conduit 2, that game was released unfinished). Sega's light gun shooting games end up being some of the best on the console and decent/good arcade ports. A little kind of hidden gem, The Malgrave Incident is a hidden objects game that works well on the Wii and strangely Nintendo published that.

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Honestly, I don't think there's any competition. There are scores of games that fully used and were designed around motion controls despite that making the games unplayable unplayable (a la Red Steel), countless waggle fests where the entire game was just minor variations of basic hand motions but the games were shovelware minigame collections/PS2 ports to start with so who cares, a few games that were built around them and were perhaps somewhat unintuitive/clunky but charming and make it work reasonably well and immersive (like the Wii version of The Godfather, or the No More Heroes games, or some of the sports games), and a small handful where it's absolutely an improvement over any other ways to play (Resi 4, Metroid Prime).

 

 

 

The most offensive/gimmicky ones (and the ones that perfectly encapsulated why the "motion controls are the future of gaming" mocking condescension became so common so quickly) always were the ones that were entirely high quality exclusive Wii gaming experiences that were 100% built around using a normal control scheme, but then randomly and deliberately had some piece of shit unintuitive barely responsive waggle functionality mapped to one or two game actions that you had to do frequently and functionally ruined them for no reason. Both Mario Galaxy games. NSMB:W. The Zelda Wii games. DKC:R. Those were the games that made motion controls look terrible. Those were the ones that made it clear that motion controls and the system itself were just a fad. And Nintendo was usually the ones publishing them, and I'd argue Nintendo themselves were the ones who changed the narrative of the Wii into being an elaborate gimmick people lapped up for a few years, then went back to playing things on PS360.

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I’ve also heard Metroid Prime 3 was a big offender in that regard, but I never played it. Were they really as intrusive as some have said?

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On 7/8/2021 at 9:56 AM, Iko said:

There were tons of gimmicky games, but this one will remain the most memorable WTF game for me:

 

You are racing, then at some point you have to play a tambourine, play bowling, launch a cake at a clown's face and so, for absolutely no reason.

Because casual.

As gimmicky as it was, I had a lot of fun with the game lol.

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