So my woman's been watching me play Pikmin 3 lately which made her want to play Pikmin 2 (don't ask me how that works), so I hauled out the Wii, and since money's going to be tight for a few months I decided I would revisit a bunch of my Wii titles that I never finished (which is most of them).

So far I have the lukewarm take that motion controls were a mistake and we are all better off now having largely abandoned them. This is with the benefit of hindsight, and who knows what Nintendo would be if they didn't sell so many consoles via their gimmicks, but motion controls hurt almost every game that implemented them.

My first revisit was DKC Returns, which remains one of my favorite platformers from the last decade, but now I've played Tropical Freeze, where all the motion controls are optional. Rolling with a button press feels so much better than wildly shaking the Wii-mote. What previously felt like a distraction now feels like a nuisance.

The same can be said of Mario Galaxy. I didn't have much of an issue flicking the Wii-mote to perform Mario's spin-jump, but now that I can press a button in 3D All Stars I'm never going back. Whatever "immersion" motion controls brought to the table, the trade-off simply isn't worth it.

I think Metroid Prime 3 benefited the most from motion controls due to it's heavy use of the pointer functionality, though it doesn't work as well as I remember. Keeping the pointer centered while mashing buttons is putting significantly more strain on my wrist than before, likely because I'm near a decade older than I was the last time I played it. Waving the nunchuck about to use the grapple-beam is also a pain in the ass that doesn't work half the time and leaves you vulnerable. Still, the game is overall enjoyable enough that I'm excited to see how Metroid Prime 4 turns out.

And all of this came at the expense of dual-analog controls, so most of the 3D Wii titles have miserable camera controls. It also bothers me that some of these design philosophies persist in titles like Mario Odyssey, where some of the more advanced jumps are much more difficult to pull off without using the gyro controls. I'm hoping that long-term we can reap the rewards of devs experimenting with these control schemes once VR titles become more consistently interesting. Half-Life Alyx looks damn exciting but it's going to be years before I can justify throwing down the money to play it.

On a much more positive note, outside of the motion controls most of the games I've returned to hold up very well so far. If Nintendo is good at anything it's making games with longevity. I'm also surprised how good most of them look in progressive scan even on a giant 55 inch TV.