Wii First-Person Shooters

I found another article off digg I want to talk about. This one talks about how the first person shooters on the Wii are difficult to control and suggest ways for the developers to fix this before they lose sales. I have Call of Duty 3 and I admit, it was not fun to play at first. I aimed the Wiimote at the screen directly and noticed how if you look in any direction that wasn't the center, the camera would zoom off in that direction. It wasn't fun holding the controller at the screen in an unnatural position for so long. Try holding a remote control at a TV for 30-60 minutes. I played a couple of missions and my hand cramped up and hurt the next day. Even though it was difficult to control, I surprisingly enjoyed it.

The solution on the player side is to take the Wiimote and brace it against yourself. Have it rest on your leg or something. It's much more natural and you have greater stability over where that cross hair goes. I find myself enjoying the game so much more now that it doesn't cause me pain and anguish. I even got Steph to play it and she did the same and she enjoyed it even though it made her nervous. Whenever the Wii Zapper comes out, it might improve the stability of the unbraced hand. Holding a gun at something for an extended period is creepily more natural that doing the same action with a remote. Unfortunately, the prototype displayed found at Wikipedia doesn't seem to leave much actions for the Nunchuck, but in Call of Duty 3, most of those actions have a button duplicate. Although, it would be really cool to have four of these for some kind of future multiplayer Bond game.

On the developer side, I think they should add in a little auto-aiming. I know people don't like that because they think the computers doing all the work or something, but it would help the player control the game slightly better. It's not the same as using an analog stick to aim, you physically have to point at it. Also, it would be nice to modify the look sensitivity of the Wiimote, somewhat like you can in Halo.

I don't think that first person shooters on the Wii are doomed. Gamers are just going to have to adjust better. I had to adjust to using one analog stick to move/strafe and another to look. That seemed counter-productive to me, but I see the merits of adjusting to it.