In the Walnutdigital manga publishing
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Donkey Kong 3 (*)actionbutton.net.
Myths and Legendsgame set watch.
Age of Pirates 2: City of Abandoned Shipsplaylogic international.
Craft Servicediygamer.
The News Game: Using Neverwinter Nights To Teach Journalismgamasutra.com.
Jam Together — Thinking Inside the Boxdiygamer.
Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part One: Echolocationgame set watch.
Sawyer, Smith On Serious Gaming For Lifegamasutra.com.
The Nuance of Uncharted Character Designgamasutra.com.
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The system: small, inobtrusive.
The controller. The GameCube pad was a strange half-measure.
* Its premise: standard controllers are confusing, overly abstract, and have too many buttons, mapped too arbitrarily.
* Its solution: make the buttons more intuitive to find, and more intuitively map actions to them.
* Result: everyone was confused and annoyed.
Original games, conceived for said controller.
* Super Monkey Ball
* Pikmin
* killer7
* Luigi’s Mansion
What else?
I think it’s fair to say Metroid Prime was built around the GameCube controller. Sure, it treated the C-stick as a second D-pad, but there’s a nice parallelism in that and the game built itself around that parallelism. The game also made more natural use of that A/B/X/Y layout than pretty much anything else I can think of off the top of my head.
I’m essentially finished with Zelda:TP, after about 65 hours (large chunks of that are possibly padded with pause time), and I still get mixed up on whether to use A or B on the Wiimote to back out of menus in that. This is the one feature that the GameCube controller was sort of built around: making sure that never happened, by making clear the functions of A and B. The problem in Z:TP is that B, the normal menu-cancel button, is also the active-selectable-item button, and in the menu to swap in and out these items to the D-pad slots and the B slot, B is used to select one for placement on B, and A is used to exit the menu. This messes me up frequently.
I think there’s a similar, more inexcusable instance of bad button mapping in the Map Screen, but I can’t off the top of my head recall the buttons to offer a proper criticism. It’s somewhat of a shame that Zelda, as the flagship launch title, sets such an unfortunately mediocre precedent for how to take the easy way out in Wiimotifying the controls of multiplatform titles.
IN OTHER NEWS, in case you haven’t seen/heard about it, one of the common Wiimote mappings is using a simultaneous press of A and B to grab and move items about. It’s quite clever: it physically feels like you’re squeezing tweezers, and the software acts as if that’s what you’re doing.
Metroid Prime?
Tweezed out!
That’s what I get for trying!
Resident Evil 4
RE4 was very much designed with the GC controller in mind!
RE4 and Metroid Prime do both seem like they’d work well with the wiimote/nunchuk combo. The only issue going against it is the dual-hand crosspad thing for visors/beams. I’m sure there’s a simple way around that, though.
well, there goes my answer. i’ll try to think of another one.
got it.
kirby’s air ride.
if you haven’t played it, it’s a really fun game!
just thought i should explain a little better, in case you haven’t played it. it was basically designed from the ground up to use only one button, with the stick as a control. this one button being, of course, the huge green “A” button. i don’t know how they managed to make a racing game work using a really simplistic control scheme like that, but they did, and it’s really great.
i remember reading about it when i still subscribed to nintendo power and thought it was an awful concept. later, when i was staying in a hotel room for a week with a girl i was broken up with at the time but would marry three months later, she bought both a gamecube and kirby’s air ride.
that was a pretty nice week!