Gimmick Controls in Games

[Moonface]

I feel like calling these gimmick controls might be the wrong term, but I can't think of what else it would be called.

Anyway, after making a post last night talking about the inclusion of mouse controls in the new Star Fox game, I woke up today thinking about other games that have used a gimmick of a controller in some way and which ones did it well and which did it poorly.


Funnily enough, the first game that comes to my mind for this is Rayman Raving Rabbids. Originally it was made for the Wii and heavily utilized its motion controller gimmick, and while I haven't played that version to comment on if it was good or bad, what I did play was the PS2 port of the game. If you somehow don't know, the PS2 doesn't have motion controls, nor did Xbox 360 or PC, the other platforms the game was ported to. This meant that any minigame which used motion controls had to be changed to now use either button inputs or the analogue sticks, and for the most part it was actually okay, except for the very first minigame which still lives in my head rent free to this day.

That page claims the PS2 version uses the L2 and R2 buttons. I call bullshit because I know for a fact when I played that level it required moving the analogue sticks up and down in alternating fashion (so move one up and one down, then reverse) as quickly as you can, and it was absolutely awful. It was impossible for me to sync moving both sticks in alternate directions as fast as possible so Rayman would just struggle to move at all, and the only way I managed to beat this level was to ask my dad to take control of one stick, I took the other, and we both just wiggled them up and down as fast as we could with no care for timing and it managed to work. If there was an option to use L2 and R2 I wish I had known about it, because fuck me what an example of how horrible gimmick controls can be for a game when porting it to platforms without the same gimmicks. x.x