The problem with taking the Wii as a measure of whether or not shooting controls can work with a pointing device is that your complaints so far seem purely related to the limitations of the Wii pointer, which requires that the pointer’s camera sees the sensor bars leds to work. The range that supports isn’t great, and that’s what limits sensing when to turn near the edge of the screen.
With Motion+ you could point your controller at the wall behind you and it would still read correctly, thanks to its increased rotational input, and Move is even more accurate, with pretty much zero additional lag over the dualshock to boot (although if a game uses an on-screen cursor, they may smooth movement out a bit to prevent your physical trembling from making the cursor shake, but compared to the lagginess of moving your aim with a dualshock, it’s still a marked improvement). I also expect that the best input for FPS games will probably include a combination of being able to point freely on the screen and hold a button to keep the aim in the centre and move your viewpoint instead. Both of these styles of shooting are used in reality (e.g. shoot with just moving your arm, and shoot with moving both your head and your arm), and by not pressing the button immediately, you can bring your viewpoint to your aim instantly.
The thing is, great developers have done a great job at working with the limitations imposed upon them by game inputs. Back when a game controller was often little more than an analog knob you could turn, you had games like Pong, which were perfectly designed for just that. Then when you have controls that have buttons for up, left, right and down, developers designed games like Pacman. When buttons were added to these directional controllers, these could be used for jumps or shooting in addition to moving around. When the first computers with keyboards got games, you had games like text adventures that allowed you to type in text or use the keyboard for shortcuts for actions, etc… When computers got mice, pointing and clicking was added to the mix leading to all sorts of different gameplay revolving around pointing and clicking (most obvious example being a point and click adventure), but also more exotic examples like Virus (if anyone even remembers that, it was a pretty wild departure in terms of controls), Populous (I still remember pretty much exactly how and when I first saw that game at an Atari ST club and how impressed and excited I was) and the whole range of RTS games following it, and many many others.
Move forward to analog joysticks that you like so much. One of the very first analog sticks was actually created in 1982 by Atari, but the tech wasn’t reliable enough. Sony probably had the first dual analog one in 1996 for PC (supported by games like Descent), in the same year that Nintendo premiered its first analog thumbstick for the Nintendo 64 controller. A year later Sony introduced the first Dual Analog controller for the Playstation (I think Japan only), to be updated by the famous dualshock controller later the same year.
An important driver for the analog stick for Nintendo 64 and the dual analog controllers for the Playstation was the rise of 3D vector graphics. This increased the possible movement with a full dimension, but more importantly could put you into the game world in which you’d then need to control either the first person or the third person camera / direction of movement in more dimensions as well. Games like Mario 64 or Tomb Raider are very apt examles of exactly this new type of experience. Once they were there though, programmers would find interesting uses for them even in 2D, of which twin stick shooters are the most obvious examples.
First person shooters however took a little while to control well with the analog sticks. Doom was the game that popularised first person shooters on PC and came out in 1993, but it took almost a decade before first person shooters became even remotely as popular on consoles, with Halo and Socom as prime examples, and their popularity as much driven by the online gameplay as the controls. In fact, controls for fps shooters required a lot of work by developers before they became as comfortable to play on dual analog as they are today. Various dead-zone tweaks, incremental accelleration, aim-assists and a desire to play on the couch helped to work out some of the kinks and make it popular, but pick four different targets widely distributed on your screen to shoot in quick succession and someone using a mouse will still be done significantly faster than someone with an analog controller.
My point is, for all the games listed that are supposedly always superior with dual thumbstick controls or even the d-pad, they are so only because games have been designed to work with their limitations and/or play to their strengths. Heck, sometimes we’ve even forced our bodies to adapt - only recently our thumbs have taken over from our index finger as being the most used and nible, thanks to dual shock controllers, mobile phones with keypads and keyboards and so on.
Yes, buttons and controllers have unique properties that are hard to match by any other control method. Pressing a button is the most effecient way of communicating an on/off state, being the fastest and requiring the least effort, it allows your finger to rest on the button while waiting to press it, and gives you feedback on having performed the action successfully. Modern buttons on the Playstation controller are also all readable in analog mode (a property that was used a lot more back when multi-platform titles didn’t start development for a platform that lacked these features) including the d-pad (used in Gran Turismo, among others), so they even allow for pressure sensitivity in that respect.
It is easier to see these strengths though than their limitations, simply because developers work so hard at hiding them, and gamers have trained themselves for so long to adjust to them. Sometimes a new control method exposes the assists that were placed on the old control method and impression of the improvement that motion controls bring are initially obscured by mapping to the actual task in such a direct manner that a game initially becomes harder to play. Think about a racing game for instance where using a d-pad for steering is easier because the game automatically limits the angle at which you can turn your wheels and adjusts automatically for speed and the turn, where playing with the Wheel just gives you realistic control exactly as you had it in real life. Someone who is used to steering with a d-pad may be able to drive better with that for quite a while. On the other hand, someone who’s never used a d-pad but can drive a real car will be able to controll the car within a few minutes (of adjusting to the lack of 3D and gravitational feedback, among others). Give this player something like ExciteBike, Mario Kart, or Motorstorm with sixaxis controls enabled, and the translation of those real driving skills will still be almost instantaneous, because the muscle-memory required is already there and the translation required from turning a real wheel to these motions is negligible.
The biggest and most visible power to date for motion controls is its ability to capitalise on existing motor skills and muscle memory. This is what have helped give motion control games like those on the Wii their ‘casual’ image - people who never before played videogames could almost instantly pick these games up, because they connected much more closely to motor skills they already possessed. Even if the initial motion controller was somewhat limited, good design allowed for games that allowed you to input intuitive movements, even if the game only used a fraction of the actual move performed as input.
Move is a clear step up, and will greatly expand the possibilities in applying real life movements and motor skills to game situations. As an exercise, you should go through an hour or even a day of your life describing every move you make during the day while you are interacting with your environment, and think about what you are doing with just your hands. Then try to imagine a game in which you map all these actions to controller input. It’s impossible, which is why in games we’ve typically designed shortcuts in the form of macro buttons that perform certain actions in a certain way depending on context. This can be very efficient, and will always have a place, but it is also a straightjacket that prevents variation, depth, identity and freedom. Almost everyone walks, talks and moves in a slightly (sometimes dramatically) different way, but in games, you see the same set of animations getting the same set of results.
In other words, for your twin stick shooter, I can give you a version that does the same but instead of pointing the analog stick in the direction you want to shoot, you’re pointing the Move controller in the direction you want to shoot. But in addition to that, I can give you a twin Move shooter in 3D space, or any variation inbetween. And yes, you could easily say “why?”. But games once had planes that shot exclusively from left to right also, and they could have asked the same thing for a twin stick shooter.
Examples like these are legion, and I look forward to an era in which we’ll see both more games that are more immersive and intuitive, but also more powerful (two analog sticks have four axis of input, but two Move controllers 12!) and precise. There were few people who didn’t prefer Resident Evil 4 with the Wii-Mote, and I predict that Resident Evil 5 Gold with Move support will be even better received. People who played RE4 on Wii are now very excited about the possibility of Move support for Dead Space 2, although to be honest so far I have only seen Move support confirmed for its bonus content, the light-gun style Extraction (port from Wii).
I played the crap out of board games right until I was 11-12, and after that cards and chess for a long time as well. But eventually videogames started offering so much more that it became harder and harder to go back (though I’ve played a few bouts of Chess in PS Home, and of course killed too much time with Patience on the PC as well)
