Jimquisition: Touch Waggle Touch Waggle Swipe

[GonzoGamer]

Jim,
Put it in a microwave and stand back.

It sounds like the WiiU and Vita devs should rediscover the strategy genre; that could leave a lot of room for swiping & waggling that slows down a FPS.
Or they can make a game where you run a game dev studio and you have to shake and smack every moron who comes up with a way to needlessly shoehorn tech into the game.

This just seems relevant.

 

[Redd the Sock]

You seemed very calm this week, or at least you're calmer than I am on this shit.

Yes, I'm an older gamer and as such, motion controls are at best like re-learning to walk. Not using a d-pad or joystick and buttons is very counter intuitive to someone from the Atari days. But hey, I learn, I deal. Then you spot the tacked on shit. I mean, as annoying as the DS Zelda games were, it was the whole game. One of the DS Catslevainia games had you draw glyphs at odd times, but no more annoyingly than on a short time limit at the end of a boss fight, or it gets back up to keep fighting. They were too finicky to be traced with my finger so I had to balance keeping the stylus in my hand with fighting a boss in such a way I could reposition myself to drawing with it very quickly.

Then they're the fricking gyro. Imagine my surprise playing MGS3 on 3DS laying on my side on the couch only to have Snake keep falling off branches or bridges unless I sat up and kept the system level. Ocarina of Time at lest let us turn the feature off. I can't imagine trying to play that thing with my aim twitching every time my wrists move, especially for a portable system which would only draw odd looks in public.

I know Nintendo won't be happy until it invents the holodeck, but forcing various levels of make believe does more to take me out of things than further immerse me.

 

[Pinkamena]

Anyone else seeing this?

 

[TheProfessor234]

One thing I want to add about the WiiU possibly doing it right.

For ZombiU, it forces the player to look away from the t.v. screen to access the inventory. In my mind, this is an amazing way to add tension perfectly in a survival game.

My only hope is that, as it has been stated already, people actually think about how to put in tech controls.

 

[2xDouble]

Dear Jim,

"Movies in 3D", that is all.

-2xDouble

A little more? well, alright then. 3D has been little more than a gimmick for movies for decades, and only now are people trying to incorporate it as a core medium instead of a "tech demo" (partially related to "improved technology", but that's really no excuse). People suck at finding uses for things that are cool on paper, except what they've already seen in the tech demos. So, until someone does (successfully, lest we bring up the Virtual Boy again), all we're going to see is what someone has already done.

I suspect touch and motion controls will suffer the same embarrassing lack of innovation for the same embarrassing amount of time.

 

[scw55]

DS Pokemon games are fine. You can use the touch pad to do actions in Battle.
or you can use updownleftright with A instead or B.

Even then, outside of battle, it just has extra buttons.

The Voltorb mini game in Gold and Silver Hearts and Minds was better with the touch pad, as it was a 'pen and paper' game.

 

[themilo504]

I kind of liked phantom hourglass but never mind that.

Personally I think that the best way to use touch screen controls is to make up for a lack of buttons the ds did this a lot also its nice for menus.

talking about the ds I always felt its dual screen design was ingenius allowing you to easily access your inventory or map.

a bigger issue for me is when a game wants me to move using a touch screen by using that annoying fake d-pad or analog stick it simply does not work it?s the reason why most i-pad games are shit taping and dragging to move are also annoying although it worked fine in both the ds Zelda games for some reason.

 

[Something Amyss]

This was my big problem with the DS from its release. Some of my fasvourite games barely used the touch screen, and a lot of games were hampered by it.

The Wii got more annoying, in my opinion. The 3DS doesn't seem to be as bad.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

First time i agree 100% with Jim. You have Kinetc or Move and that touch screen stuff. No developer knows how to make games for these things. They just add random pointless stuff. Like with the wii, all these minor pointless things need wiggles and shakes.....whats wrong with pressing a button? If a button press does it better why fuck about with movements that take longer than a button press? This is whats annoying me about the kinetc, the shoe horning of pointless stuff to prove the control system. Thing is these control systems are limiting in of themselves, a joypad is way more precise.

 

[Mark B]

Right well thats the last Jq I'm watching for a while. when you spend 2 minutes complaining that you dont have enough time to make a video thats 2 minutes you could have put in the video.

Which is a shame because the points you make are valid and I normally agree with it a shame about the bullshit and the presentation.

 

[Duffeknol]

Best review of Fable: the Journey I've seen.

 

[Shiro No Uma]

When ever you have to block the screen completely to make an in game action happen it's bad design. Even though the tech is over five years old, devs still don't know what to do with it, mostly because it's not intuitive to gaming. If it doesn't enhance game play it should be used. The most simple way to have a gaming experience has always been the controller. It never takes me out of the game by having me to some motion that I might not remember as opposed to push X to rewind time.

 

[Mortamus]

I find myself quite irritated in many games for doing this. LAIR, anyone?

 

[geizr]

This is actually not a new problem. Using games to impress gamers with their technical prowess, rather than just making a fucking game, is something that has been happening in the industry for some 30+ years (I can claim that because I've been playing video games for 33+ years and seen it happen over that time). Not all games did it, but a number did. It may seem worse because, in my opinion, game devs have just become intellectually inbred over the last 15-20 years. It's part of the reason I've been getting bored of video gaming these days (well, the mainstream, triple-A ones, at any rate).

 

[Jimothy Sterling]

Right well thats the last Jq I'm watching for a while. when you spend 2 minutes complaining that you dont have enough time to make a video thats 2 minutes you could have put in the video.

But ... it wasn't a complaint? It was a set up to a joke with a hammer?

 

[RJ Dalton]

I don't have a problem with your anger, but I think your comedic timing and sense of joke structure could use some work.
For example, it probably would have been much funnier if you'd started with beating the shit out of a game disk with a hammer and then turned around and given your spiel about not wanting to appear more angry.

 

[Rad Party God]

Okami and Metroid Prime Trilogy are my absolute favorite games on the Wii. Why?, because they work.

I haven't played the PS2 version of Okami to really tell the difference between using the thumbsticks and the IR pointer of the Wii for painting, but I did played both Metroid Primes on the GameCube (finished MP1 like 10 times and MP2 like 4) and belive me, both of these games are better on the Wii, because Retro Studios got it right, the gameplay wasn't obtrusive, the gameplay flow didn't stopped, heck, it even was a bit easier than even before, thanks to the more precise controls, it's the first (and only) time where I never missed to use a regular controller and it even made me wish for more developers doing things like this.

A lightning doesn't strike twice on the same place, as they say, because even Retro didn't managed to get it right again with Donkey Kong Returns and it's craptastic waggle (awesome game, shitty waggling).

I also like Mario Galaxy 1/2 to bits and I just can't get enough of Skyward Sword, but both Okami and Prime Trilogy are my golden standard about how a "motion controlled" game should work.
[small]Granted, Okami does have it's fair share of motion issues, but the good severely outweights the bad.[/small]

 

[blackrave]

What was the game that met this cruel and unquestionably just end in this video?

Edit: Managed to stop video at the right moment- was that game SO bad? Was it simply bad or was it similar to one particular game that killed C&C franchise and had "Twilight" in its name?

 

[orangeapples]

Another thing that could make use of touch screen controls is inventory management. Navigating menus would be an awesome method of using touch controls. Or in the DS's case, use the second screen to display a minimap or radar of some sort. Using the touch screen to play the game is fine if the game was designed to be played using the touch screen i.e. Elite Beat Agents, but forcing the touch screen into a game where it doesn't belong just makes a good game bad i.e. Star Fox Command.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

I had no problems with the phantom hourglass touch controls from beginning to end. I thought it was a great method of integrating the stylus into gameplay.

And tracing the boomerang path to have it hit 3 things was kind of badass.