Wii Shooters - My Impressions

When the Wii was first introduced one of the main things that came to my mind was the possibilities for Shooters. Being able to use the Wiimote to control your aiming made me hope that many developers would take advantage of it and produce some awesome shooters. If you haven't noticed though, no developers have really even tried, in any genre, to make something truly awesome. With the exception of Nintendo games, most 3^rd Party games are either gimmicky excuses to use the motion features or just plain horrible. Not to long ago, I broke down a bought a Wii purely for playing Brawl. After a while of Brawl it turned a bit stale - the lag of online play along with the apparent lack of a good competitive scene (If only Brawl was more like Melee) made me lose interest. Needing an excuse to play my Wii, I turned towards a genre I've always enjoyed, shooters.

Long introduction out of the way, I looked through the lacking list of Wii Shooters searching for what seemed to be the best one. My decision came down to 2 games, Call of Duty 3 and Medal of Honor: Heroes 2. The ultimate deciding factor between these 2 games though was online play. MoH:H2 had it, COD3 didn't (WTB COD4 for Wii). So I went with MoH:H2.

Now it's time to be biased and overlook all common sense so that I can make generalizations. The controls for MoH:H2 are meh. That's all I can use to describe them - meh. They're not amazing, they're not terrible. You basically have two options, use the Wii Zapper or don't (‘Elite'). This would be nice if the game would actually let you adjust buttons. Both control schemes have a bit of an awkward feel to them, especially when it comes to throwing grenades. Basically Wii shooters can't decide if they want to be a console fps or be more like a pc fps - and the in between isn't pretty.

I think Red Steel had the closest fit to what a good Wii Shooter could be - at least control wise. Lower the starting sensitivity (I spent 10 minutes looking at the sky when I first played it), take out the sword fighting, and take out the storyline and health mechanics. Put the controls in a MoH or CoD game. Put in a generic war storyline and slap on an online multiplayer with no friend codes - MoH almost did it right, they had a lobby, a leaderboard, and everything; to bad the lag was so horrible I had to stop playing (WHEN I SHOOT SOMEONE 20 TIMES IN THE FACE WITH A SNIPER RIFLE I EXPECT THEM TO DIE) There, I've just created an amazing Wii FPS. The potential is there for the Wii, but no one wants to go for it besides Nintendo.

Apparently CoD5 has been announced that it will be on Wii, hopefully they can do it right. It just seems that the Wii controls are too gimmicky. Games are almost forced to use the motion sensor controls because there aren't enough buttons on a Wii controllers otherwise.  I'll be really excited if CoD5 does manage to make a good control scheme for Wii. Maybe even make a good Wii Zapper control scheme!

New paragraph yeye. When I bought MoH:H2 I also purchased a Wii Perfect Shot. It resembles an old school light gun and seemed like a much better option than the weird bazooka like zapper.  The main problem with the zappers/light guns/etc though is that they don't feel like you're actually shooting with them. It feels like you're aiming with another annoying control scheme; sure you have what appears to be a plastic gun in your hand - but it sure doesn't translate well. Not to mention the fact that you've limited the amount of buttons you can use again. With the zappers you can't easily access the control pad or any of the other buttons on your Wiimote - which makes weapon switching (or whatever you have assigned to those buttons) a huge pain.

Anyways here's a recap so I can end this abruptly.

-Current Wii Shooters suck
-Control Schemes are horrible
-Zappers/Light Guns are nothing special
-Pretty much no Wii Shooters have online play (wtf kind of FPS is that?)

WHAT I'M TRYING TO SAY

Help me COD5 Kenobi, you're my online hope. (And Wii Shooter hope but that doesn't fit into a bad pun now, does it?)