Peter Suciu

The Wii Zapper — A Step Backward in Innovation?
December 4, 2007

Much of the success of the Nintendo Wii can be attributed to the fact that the game play appealed to the masses, and this can be owed to the innovative Wii-mote controller. I am in agreement with my good friend N’Gai Croal over at Newsweek, who recently posted on How The Video Game Industry Shot Itself in the Joystick. N’Gai goes on to say that the complexity of the controllers of the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 are so overwhelming that it could drive away casual gamers.

The Wii on the other hand is intuitive. Last holiday season I brought my Wii “home for the holidays,” and the whole family, including my 60-something parents and 60-something aunt and uncle, couldn’t get enough. About the only relative not to like it was my obnoxious 15-year old cousin, but he’s what you’d call a hardcore gamer anyway!

But in the year since the introduction of the Wii we’ve seen a lot of games that broke the traditional mold. The Wii and the Wii-mote made game developers innovate, and this was seen in driving games, action games and sports games. This is why I’m suddenly very disappointed with the new Wii Zapper, a controller accessory that was unveiled at this past summer’s E3 and finally released last month.

The Zapper isn’t actually a controller, but rather a controller shell that allows you to place the Wii-mote and Nunchuck inside. This gives you a gun-like device, but there are two major problems that I’ve encountered after trying out three recent titles that support the Zapper.

The first is the Zapper is clearly aimed at those who have never fired, or even held, a real gun (no pun intended). The Zapper requires that you use both hands, and it is typically the left hand that has the trigger, while the right hand controls movement and offers the ability to zoom in on your target. The problem I have with it is that I’m shooting off-hand. As a right-handed individual, my dominant hand should be on the trigger, but for reason the controller ignores this most basic rule.

Now I’ve agreed with the argument of former ESA president Doug Lowenstein that a game controller can no more teach you to be a marksman than it can teach you drive a Grand Prix racecar, and with the Zapper this is mostly certainly the case. I have friends who shoot competitively and they’d agree that playing with the Zapper a lot would only help to make your real world shooting skills real sloppy.

More importantly, I don’t know if we need to add the tactile feel of a gun to game play in the first place. As someone who has held and shot a real gun, I can tell you that guns need to be respected, and adding a gun-like device just strikes me as wrong, especially for a system aimed at the masses (again, no pun intended).

However, the bigger issue with the Zapper is the games and game development may in fact be taking a step backward. The Wii-mote has required developers to innovate and adapt. But the Zapper-supported games feel dumb-downed to accommodate this controller. Now, in fairness, shooters have had a bit of a tough time on the Wii, and games like Red Steel failed to deliver the promised experience with the Wii-mote and Nunchuck. So clearly Nintendo tried to solve the problem by making a specialized device for this popular genre.

But the shooting scheme aside, the games just don’t seem compelling enough. The best example is Medal of Honor Heroes 2, the latest in Electronic Arts’ popular WWII series. The game franchise has long been known for its realistic situations and settings. At least until now, that is. Instead of realistic situations and reasonably challenging computer-controller enemy soldiers, this game is populated with nearly mindless robot-like villains that charge out and must pause for you to shoot them. Although this arcade-style game play could very well appeal to many players, it isn’t the intense and realistic World War II simulation that has made this the original gold standard in action shooters.

The other Zapper compatible games, Ghost Squad and Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, offered almost the same level of dumb-downed game play, just with modern weapons. At least in the case of Resident Evil you’re shooting zombies, so that sort of explains their lack of desire to run towards you.

I’ve long complained that action shooters lack much in the way of innovation, but it is sad to see this approach of more of the same come to the Wii. Thanks to the Zapper, not only is there even less innovation with the shooters, but the device just drags down the experience as well.

Posted by Peter Suciu on December 4, 2007 | Comments (5)