I had the chance to touch a Wii controller yesterday.  I didn’t get to see it in action at E3, so while I pretended to be nonplussed I’ve really been crying inwardly for the last several months.  That has ended.  I have taken up the sword.  I also watched a lot of Ubisoft people make fools out of themselves playing Rayman Raving Rabbids and Monster 4x4, but they were so wrapped up in tossing cows they didn’t seem to care.

I also got my hands on Red Steel for the first time and discovered that it is in fact quite enjoyable. After E3 there were some comments that the controls needed work, and reports after the Nintendo event last month said the controls had been addressed.  Wiii!  Now there’s only one problem with the controls, and this isn’t restricted to Red Steel.  It’s any Wii game that uses the nunchuck.

I’m left handed.

Screaming and mayhem echo off the concrete.  Buildings topple to the ground.  Bricks skid across the pavement like pebbles.  Robots patrol the streets with laser eyes that carve gashes in the walls of boarded up ruins.

Maybe it’s not really on the level of a robot invasion, but the observation of my dominant hand is a factor I had never considered when thinking about Wii controls. I’m accustomed to using my left thumb to control movement and my right thumb to control aiming on a controller, a hallowed tradition since sticks became fashionable.  This also holds true for the Wii controller, but there’s an additional complication.  I can’t hold the Wiimote in my right hand as apparently intended.  It feels alien.  I couldn’t hit a yakuza boss at 5 paces!

I switched the Wiimote to my left hand and breathed a sigh of relief as the enemies started dropping like exceptionally well-dressed flies.  The nunchuck was in my right hand.  Then I tried to move.  I bumped into walls, tables, doors, and potted plants.  The movement, that control guided by my left thumb since before time began, found itself answering to a new and alien master.  I can barely unload the dishwasher with my right hand, and only when heavily assisted by my left.  Now my thumb… not even my whole hand, but my wobbly thumb, is responsible for guiding me and my rad weapon through the mean streets of the Japanese underground?

It’s curled up in the corner right now, weeping at the challenge.

Seriously, though, this is something I never thought about.  How are the sinistral gamers going to get used to the Wii?  It’s unnatural for us to hold the weapon in our right hand, but I can tell you now that moving fluidly with the right thumb is no mean feet. Or feat, either.

It doesn’t turn me off to the console.  Far from it, I had a lot of fun playing it.  It is unsettling to realize that people who’ve never played videogames and have no internalized control schemes to unlearn might have an advantage over me and my gimpy digit.

- jinx

P.S. If you like free stuff - games, wiimotes with nunchucks, even a Wii - check out the DOJO of PAIN, a Red Steel club I just helped launch.  You can sign up, participate in training lessons the Sensei assigns, and earn stars that can be redeemed for Red Steel and Nintendo merchandise.  Overall, I have to say that free stuff is not a bad way to go.

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