Shake to Wiiload

First-person shooters on the Wii.

I was never one of those people who thought that the Wii's pointer would be the console's answer to mouselook (that would be dual-analog). But that doesn't mean I've not been rather disappointed in the way that FPS games are mapped to the system.

The usual (and so far, only) method of control in Wii shooters is to assign the traditional WASD strafing controls to the nunchuck analog stick and view control to the Wiimote in an attempt to mimic the way more traditional input mechanisms do it (movement on the left hand, view control on the right). The problem here is that adjusting your view with a mouse is entirely different to operating a pointer. With both mouselook and dual-analog controls, your view is moved as if the entire screen area is a mouse cursor, with your crosshairs (visible or not) always in the dead centre of the screen. Meanwhile with the Wii (or indeed the DS), in which you interact directly with the display itself, you are constrained to moving within the size and shape of the screen, and your crosshairs can be wherever you want them to be. Having the view move according to the cursor's position on the screen means that shooting is only effective in the small area in the centre which will not move the view, and that slipping slightly outside the screen will send the player character spiralling out of control at top speed.

I find it quite frustrating that the designers responsible for these interfaces have yet to attempt any alternative mapping, especially as there is one method which has occasionally appeared in console shooters that would serve to solve this problem entirely.

The problem at present is that the Wiimote is inadequate as a means of view control, so the obvious solution is to simply assign view control elsewhere - for example, the analog stick. In GoldenEye's default mapping, left and right on the analog stick pivot the view instead of strafing. This can also be seen earlier in games such as Doom, and later in games like the first two Metroid Primes. Strafing becomes a secondary motion most sensibly handled by holding a button down (Z on the nunchuck would be ideal) to revert the analog stick's functionality (as in Metroid Prime), while pitch control is either rendered unnecessary by the level design (GoldenEye), or handled automatically (Metroid Prime).

Putting all movement and view control on the left hand frees the right up for nothing but shooting, effectively turning it into a lightgun game taken off the rails.

The Wiimote isn't console gaming's answer to mouselook, it's just a different answer to the same question that mouselook answered.