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Cobretti2 on 27 February 2013
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RolStoppable said:
gumby_trucker said:

This exchange reminded me of something I read a few years ago from a developer complaining about the Wii. I'll see if maybe I can dig it up, but the gist of it was about having a hard time making the most out of Wii's innovative controls due to some hardware limitations. At the time I remember thinking it sounded like the developer was saying you needed more processing power and/or memory to create meaningful implementations of gesture and motion based controls. This is also the reason the complaint stood out in my mind, as for once it seemed like a legitimate issue, and not one related to SD graphics or lack of advanced shaders.

Notice the bolded is referring  to controls and not graphics, so your rebuttle about Shin'en's technical achievements is not really relevant. At the end of the day there really was a pathetically small number of games that made successful attempts at gesture-based motion contrlols so this may be an indication that it was more difficult to achieve than it could/should have been.

My rebuttal is still relevant, because if developers were truly serious about the Wii, but held back by limitations regarding the controls, then their efforts and ambition would have still shone through in the graphics department, as well as in the overall design of the game. The third party games we've seen on the Wii were usually plagued by two or all of the following traits:

1) Lacking controls.
2) Subpar graphics.
3) Lack of content, poor game design.

The supposed issues with motion controls also don't work as a universal excuse, because it was perfectly possible to create and sell good games on the Wii that barely used motion controls or didn't use them at all. I can once again point to Resident Evil 4 that was released in mid-2007 and shattered its sales expectations. Pointer functionality was easy to implement and a selling point for shooting games. There were of course also Nintendo games that proved that you didn't necessarily need motion controls to be successful on the Wii.

At the end of the day there really was a pathetically small number of games that made successful attempts at gesture-based motion contrlols so this may be an indication that it was more difficult to achieve than it could/should have been.

Addressing this part specifically, at the end of the day there was a pathetically small number of third party games that seriously tried, whether that concerns controls, graphics or content. I could believe there was a problem with the Wii and Nintendo, if it was clear that games were held back by the machine. But all the evidence we have, the actual games, doesn't support that Nintendo is the main culprit (which is DanneSandin's claim). There's a chance that Nintendo held some tools back, but that wouldn't really matter in the big picture, because third parties clearly didn't use the tools they actually had to their full potential (it wasn't even close).


Even with limitations, Nintendo addressed this by releasing motion plus, which shows they listened to someone at least lol, but it wasn't really used.

Some game that worked well with the limitations from 3rd parties was RE4 and Godfather. Both these games worked well as effort was put in. 

This is just a couple examples where developers who tried made good controls. So others who complained clearly did not play some of these games.