second part...
- My take on how to do this sort of thing right -
You don't nee don't need to have 1:1 controls for it to be very interactive or very fun, which is why 1:1 is actually very cost prohibitive. Very similar levels of immersion can be obtained from significantly less work.
Slashes - At the basic level slashes are a very easy gesture to understand, but in the context of a shifting body implementing the slashes it gets very difficult as Ben pointed out. A very simple approach to design can be implemented by simply focusing on trying to obtain a high degree of precision in the angle of the swing. From the angle of the swing we can make educated guesses as to the height (relative to the shoulder) the swing is being made from. This type of info is much easier to get than negating movement forwards and backwards and can very accurately simulate the desired sword swing.
Thrusts - I think most people understand how simple this one is at the basic level, but it is actually fairly difficult in terms of determining where the person is attempting to thrust to. The best answer to use here is to assume the screen is the body and let players thrust at screen locations in order to guide the thrust to a certain part of the body.
Blocks - This is, in my opinion, one of the harder areas to do properly, let alone well. And actually I think this is one area where 1:1 is actually a worthwhile investment of time. However within the larger picture of a game development that can still be daunting so there has to be an alternative. The only way I am seeing to do this one currently without 1:1 help is by having people hold the controller out and then press and hold a button. The angle of the wii-mote would be used as the angle of the sword to block and from there it would only respond to Y inputs allowing the block to be raised and lowered. But I still see some issues in detecting the angle properly on this one so I am not 100% happy with it. I will have to give it some more thought.
Force powers and/or magic could/would be gestures obviously and those are pretty straight forward for the most part.
Edit: Just to be clear, I am suggesting that the character in these examples would hold the sword in a preset position until these events specified above are detected which would obviously trigger the related action. So not quite 1:1 but allowing high degrees of precision.
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