Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Red Steel. I was excited for that game but rented instead of buying on account of the poor reviews. I've heard that you can get used to the controls, but I just couldn't play long enough for that to happen. Nothing felt right. I don't remember too well because that was right around launch and I've played so many games since then with perfect controls.

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I never got to play Red Steel, namely because of the horror stories I heard considering the controls.

The worst from what I've played goes to Sonic: Secret Rings.

Monkey ball wasn't too bad for me, there were just tricks to certain areas that took some getting used to. Don't get me wrong, I don't think any other game has made me fly into a blind rage quite like that game.

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Sonic + the Secret Rings... absolutely terrible controls

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Shrek the Third was pretty painful. Well, the whole game was and the controls did not help either

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Red Steel had awesome controls, it was the other elements of the game like voice-overs and the story line that made the game really suck. Actually the sword fighting controls were horrible, but the gun controls were exactly what i expected.

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i agree with jeremy. i had read so many bad reviews of red steel and as a result expected very little from it. but i was kind of bored one weekend and decided to rent it anyway and i have to say i kind of liked it. it definitely could have been better, but i found that the gun controls worked just fine.

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I played a little bit of "Red Steel" and wasn't impressed, especially now that I've played "RE4" and I see what "RS" could have been... Also, either "SSX Blur" was just crazy hard to master, or something could have been done to make those controls a little easier for someone who just wanted to play the game casually...

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I personally dislike Rayman Rabbid Rabbids.

I bought Red Steel for 30 bucks, well worth it, me thinks.

As for worst controls? I guess it would have to be something I haven't played, besides Rayman, everything plays "fine".

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SSX Blur was a painstaking effort of Wii-incorporated controls. I bought it based on mixed reviews. Some people said it was great, others had horrific reviews, while others were smack in the middle. Based on my playtime with the game I will agree with the horrible motion reviews. Yes, it does take some getting used to, and yes once achieved it CAN be a smooth ride. But nontheless, getting used to the controls is the tough part. Achieving uber tricks is IMPOSSIBLE. Once your uber meter is up and the rider is airborne, you must draw grotesque shapes with the wiimote which proves to be almost insanely difficult in the midst of riding. Definitely my worst!

Other titles I own with horrible controls:
Super Monkey Ball: Bananna Blitz
SSX Blur
Farcry: Vengeance

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I second the Raving Rabids and Super Monkey Ball for the worst controls.

SSX Blur is hard to master - but I never actually bothered to master it. It's just another party game where everybody can take part and fail - though miserably - very very spectacularly. After several beers the SSX Blur becomes ... killer game ;)

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Whoever decided to make Sonic move forward automatically needs to be shot.

So now I need to hold a button to NOT do something.


Only time I remember something like that ever working was Kirby Air Ride. I love that game.

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Red Steel. The guns maneuvers worked "fine" but I finally had to trade the game in after countless tries at jumping through the window at the Dojo (or whatever). I got through once and died without saving and could never jump through the window again. Actually, I had the same problem with the melee fighting in Call of Duty. Maybe I just suck at Wii controls in general.

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Sonic moves forward without doing anything?

3d sonic games disappoint... I remember when crash bandicoot first came out I thought that it was exactly like I thought sonic in 3d should be... sonic adventure was ok, but kinda lost the whole feel of sonic games by sticking him in a regular city...

rayman does have pretty bad controls...

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i've heard other people say that bananna blitz has bad controls. i don't get it. the controls were perfect. that was one of my launch titles. and it really boosted my confidence in the wii. you had absolute perfect control.

the multi player sucked. but for one player. it was a great monkey ball game.

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worst controls:

1.) super monkey ball - i can't adequately put into words how awful i felt the controls were. i kept giving it try after try but it just felt so unnatural.

2.) the bigs - swinging the bat is terrible. i'd much rather play the wiisports baseball and trade this one back in.

3.) tiger woods - as much as it pains me to write this, since i love the game, the golf club swing controls are horrendous. i've adapted myself better so i can control it, but it seems i can only swing either 110% or 56%....there's barely any middle ground.

now, personally, i love the rayman controls. i think that game is one of the best games, and it came out so early that it kept me playing it.

ssx blur was pretty great, too. i barely play the game, unfortunately, but i thought that the controls were awesome.

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I haven't had any real problems with the controls for any fps's on the Wii(except the sword fighting in RS, that sucked). Far Cry's controls were incredible (too bad everything else sucked). I thought Rayman didn't live up to it's potential, what with many of the later "60 different minigames" being repeated versions of earlier ones, but its controls were fine. I did hate Blur's controls however. Everytime I tried to throw a snowball, my dumbass/skier would do a frontflip and fall on his ass.

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No mention of Cooking Mama yet?! It's not that the control system itself is poor, it's just that the game seems to have a very difficult time interpreting your movements.

Admittedly, it's one of the many flaws that produce the surprising and happy result of making the game bloody hilarious, but still... ;)

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Far Cry Vengeance. Absolutely sinful

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MORTAL COMBAT ARMAGGEDON - it was just impossible to get the gestures right. I could not defeat a single opponent... SOnic was pretty good(the camera was awful). ANd of course most of wii games(3rd party) are ruined by their control scheme!

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With Monkey Ball it was a big difficult to steer to the right due to the mechanics of the wrist, but I found the tilt controls to be a perfect match for that game. I never understood why people disliked it so much, was it that people were expecting to hold the controller NES style?

Its minigames were hit or miss. The jigsaw puzzle game was fun but had too many quirks. Monkey Wars, on the other hand, blew me away with how a FPS game could control on the Wii. The whole time I played it I was imagining the potential for Metroid Prime 3. Red Steel had left such a bad taste in my mouth for Wii FPS games that I had lost hope.

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I seriously hope that the part of Monkey Ball with bad controls you're referring to is the mini-games. I had loads of fun with the single-player mode in that game.

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I'd like to go on record saying Sonic and the Secret rings was an awful game sure.. But the controls were NOT BAD. Some people just can't get around the fact that its not a side scrolling platformer. Boo Hoo. I completed the whole game, got quite a few gold medals.. but then quit playing when it got too tedious. For a game that requires you go at full speed most of the time I'm extremely glad that it wasn't required to keep pushing 'up' or control stick forward the whole game.

Phew, ok. Now Red Steel was patently awful. Swordplay was minimally controlled and I couldn't even change the gun to play left handed.. It looked like I was breaking my right wrist shooting naturally.

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I don't think anyone's mentioned Metal Slug Anthology yet. You have an option of 5 motion control schemes, all of which are terrible.

With some of the control schemes, you have to shake/flick the controller to throw a grenade. The problem is, it's difficult to press the jump or shoot buttons while you're shaking the controller, which is irritating.

Other control schemes require you to tilt the controller to move your character, which feels slow and unresponsive.

Thankfully, there's an option to use the Gamecube controller, which works well enough. The Classic controller would have been perfect for Metal Slug though.

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RE: Super Monkey Ball. At first, I thought the controls were really bad, but once I realized that you werent controlling the ball but the ground beneath it, it became waaay easier. So to all those that didnt like it, did you realize this? Give it another try, it's not that bad.

Sonic gets my vote for worst. The near 1 second delay in movement of the remote to action on screen made it completely unplayable.

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I don't get the Super Monkey Ball hating... One of my most played games, and it wasn't for the story.

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The single player Monkey Ball controls are OK. But most of the 50 mini-games are absolutely atrocious. If you can be bothered to wade through them all, you'll find a few gems, but most play like hell. In fact you could do a whole Wii Warm Up on "Worst Banana Blitz Mini-Game". Disc Golf being the most wretched in my opinion.

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Mortal Kombat was soo horrible that I had to use the GC controller. Once that was in place, the game was great.

Tiger Woods is horrible. I figured out how to get 100% but sometimes the club just swings and does a slice at like 80%. Also there is no possible way to swing a club at less than 60% that I have been able to do. Oh and don't get me started on putting. Oh the cup is 4 feet away, no problem you will put at 2 feet or 12 feet. I do so well for about 5 or 6 holes and then boom +7 on a hole and I stop playing. Wii Golf has the much better controls for golfing.

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Red steel chaps my hide. The guns controls suck, anyone who like em never used a mouse and keyboard. Super floaty and not nearly fast enough on any setting. The game should be asy but I found my self womped into boredom within 15 minutes due to the bad scheme. Sonic sucked too, mostly for the jerk the controller jump attack thing, not very responsive. Maybe the games should alow us to adjust the sensitivity to our liking.

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RRR has bad controls? IMHO I'd say that has the best controls of any Wii game I've played. Red steel was terrible, not so much due to the motion sensitivity or pointing but because a) sword fighting was very restricted in movements and b) the hand on the screen looked retarded when aiming. Zelda had completely unnecessary shaking of the Wiimote, the only thing that really took good advantage of the Wiitrols is aiming bow/boomerang/etc.

Anyways, the ABSOLUTE WORST WII CONTROL GAME is Need for Speed: Carbon. That game took all my hopes and dreams of fun racing games using Wiimote steering and smashed them into a wall repeatedly... much like what you do playing the game.

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Oh and being from the UK I have Mario Strikers Charged, which is really good and on the whole has neat controls, but there's one thing that's truly awful: "Shaking the nunchuk to change items". Urghh, a more gimmicky, tacky, awkward, annoying, unnecessary, contrived (not to mention inconsistent) use of the controls I have yet to see and hopefully won't see.

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Call of Duty 3
I felt drunk half the time trying to turn my guy.

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I had problems with Red Steel. It wasn't so much the actual aiming that bothered me but the zoom. To zoom in, you physically had to move the controller forward. This never seemed to work very well for me, as it was constantly jerking in and out when I was trying to focus on one person. Furthermore, in intense gunfights, I found myself getting up and walking towards the television in an attempt to just get the thing to zoom in all the way. It was so frustrating to have it seem so jumpy. Otherwise, I found the controls to be a bit rusty but not too bad.

On a sidenote, it seems I was the only one who liked Call of Duty 3 on the Wii. In fact, I loved it. Sure, it didn't necissarily control perfectly and the graphics were buggy but, to me anyways, it showed the potential of a FPS on the Wii. I found it incredibly engaging and immersive, much moreso than any other control scheme. Even the gimmicky parts I found to be enjoyable. While it certainly wasn't perfect, I feel it is highly underrated and worth a try.

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Those who say they didn't have a problem with Red Steel's controls have obviously never played any shooting games before.

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Hrm, rentals around here are crazy (I think 8 bucks for a week -- rent for a month and you could buy the game instead!) so I've actually only played 5 or 6 Wii games total. Quick breakdown:

Wii Sports -- generally good; putting in golf never seems to work right for me, and boxing just becomes a flail-athon
Zelda -- Gamecube game with mostly tacked-on motion sensing. Aiming with the pointer obviously works great.
Excite Truck -- brilliant
Harry Potter OOtP -- passable, but I wasn't bowled over like some people
Rayman -- Why the living hell did I buy this game?
Elebits -- Controls were fine, but I wasn't enthralled with the gameplay so I re-sold it.
Super Paper Mario -- No significant motion controls, other than some mini-games or attack-item effects


So, yeah, all in all I'm not super impressed with the motion control stuff right now. It'd be hard to chose a "best", but some of the "Workout" type Rayman mini games are definite contenders for "worst".

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Aside from the swordfighting, I thought the controls in Red Steel were perfect.

FarCry had the worst controls. They just flat-out didn't work half the time. Turning was slow even on highest sensitivity. Looking up/down was TERRIBLY slow. If you ever found yourself accidentally looking at the ground during the middle of a firefight (which happened far too often), you were almost guaranteed to be dead before you could get yourself looking forward again. The zooming controls were horrible (and yes, FAR, FAR worse than Red Steel). And half the time, you couldn't regenerate without accidentally jumping all over the place (usually off the edge of a cliff).

Sonic gets my vote for second-worst controls. The "tilt back to walk backwards" didn't even work half the time. You actually had to tilt it MORE than perfectly vertical to get him to back up. And the whole "jump when you RELEASE the button" never stopped being awkward. Nor did the "always move forward" (except in the earlier levels).

Godfather had reasonable controls for the most part, but I did think they were overly complex (especially in regards to camera control). For those familiar with interface design, Godfather's controls were too "modal", IMO. (But I did like the "Blackhand" controls. Although, unfortunately, there was hardly ever any point in the combat where it actually mattered what type of melee attack you were using. A lost opportunity IMO, even though the controls themselves were good.)

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Whoever complains about Sonic and the Secret Rings needs to play through the whole game. Yes, the controls are deliberately nerfed at the beginning, but once you get Sonic up to a higher level, its some of the most exact, precise, tilt and accel based controls that i've experienced

I would have to call out Wii Sports: Boxing for controls that were alternately entirely unresponsive or overly sensitive. Sometimes (and i have worked around my old problem with timing in that game) when i jab, i get no response, and sometimes my right hand will twitch slightly and i'll get an unintended attack

everything else in that game (especially Tennis and Bowling) had good to great controls, but Boxing was very ecclectic

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Yeah, I'm gonna have to jump on the "Defending Sonic" bandwagon here - it's easily one of my favorite games on the Wii, especially for showing how a good game can be made using motion controls. Just because it controls totally different from any of the past games doesn't make it bad - once you level up enough to go really fast (yes, I know, that part was a terrible idea for a Sonic game) you're really glad you don't have to pay attention to telling Sonic to go forward (like Ghen said) because you're focusing on dodging, jumping, and aiming, and it's all blowing past lickity-quick.
I didn't notice any delay in the controls, other than maybe during the recoil when trying to back up. Do you mean when jumping? Because you're supposed to "charge" the jump anyway.

I really don't see why moving forward by default is a problem. I mean, it's Sonic - standing still should be the exception. This game pulled off the sense of speed (without wrenching away the controls half time) much, much better than the 3D games (and I actually really like the Adventure games) - except for Sonic '06, of course, but that should go without saying.
The only place I can think of where there's a lot of "just keep going forward and look at the pretty visuals" - which happened a LOT in Sonic Adventure - was the first level for the sky temple area, with all the light trails. Actually, I really didn't like that level, as the parts that were inside towers really didn't work with the "constantly in motion as fast as possible" schtick. The ones with long tracks where you had to constantly jump around were great though, like the Foundry and the Pirate level.

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I'm in the +Sonic camp, too. The controls weren't bad, they were just different.
My main reason for hating Sonic was the damned menus that popped up every 5 seconds, that you had to navigate about 3/4 of the menu system EACH LEVEL. that the menu didn't auto-select the Next level, and if you just went "Bugger this, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap" you ended up on the level you'd just completed. And that stupid god-awful "Bap-bu-dap-buuh-dddaaaah!" that kept on yelling at me just to make me hate the menus a little bit more.


Otherwise the game wasn't all that bad, really.

Monkey Balls gets my vote. Why they didn't go for the "True-Tilt" like Kororinpa (bit too short, but WOW! Perfect controls!!) or Mercury Meltdown (which I'm currently enjoying, but it's not as perfect as Kororinpa) I'll never know..

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Red Steel
The controls respond well if you are in an open space. But if you are cornered in a tight space and you find yourself spinning the camera.

Wii sport (Boxing)
Sometimes it gets really difficult to mark the difference between punches.

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I have to add my voice to the others who say Banana Blitz's controls were fine for everything except the sadly-focused-upon minigames.

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Splinter Cell, ugh. You have to keep your wiimote pointed right at the middle of the screen to keep your camera still. Who thought of that one? Hand drifts a little bit.. camera starts spinning in circles.

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I'm with Jayenkai on Super Monkey Ball. I bought that game after playing through Kororinpa, expecting the same natural-feeling, nuanced control. Boy I was disappointed. Those bloody monkeys have the momentum and controllability of a greased ice cube in a hot pan. Oh, and I could never discern any system of how they jump: they land apparently randomly, but mostly into the abyss.

But horribly bad controls are not limited to the single-player game itself: what idiot is responsible for that abominable tilt-controlled menu navigation? Is he the same designer who came up with those excremental mini-game controls? Does he still work for SEGA?

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Ditto on Cooking Mama.
After playing the DS vers, then Smooth Moves on Wii, I was excited with the prospect of smooth controls and Cooking Mama WII fun. That totally didnt happen. You cant even change the controls to play left-handed.
Phooey.
Quickest turn-around resale yet.

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Worst controls I've played on the Wii were for Splinter Cell: Double Agent. the camera would float all over the place if you moved your wrist slightly, just a horrible port, I couldn't stand to play it past the first mission.

Red Steel definitely has bad DEFAULT controls, but change the sensitivity and remove the auto lock on and the controls were fine. Still a bad game, but not due to the controls.

And I think that SSX Blur is actually really easy to control. Once you boost your stats a bit you can chain ubers together withut even thinking about it.

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i bought Far Cry: Vengeance because it was $20 in the barging bin at Circuit City...and now i know exactly why it was in that bin to begin with. i usually listen to reviews but just wanted something new to play. the Virtual Console will be filling those needs from now on lol. i cant even play it its so bad. how can people live with themselves putting out trash like that?

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oh and Dragonball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2 was terrible as well. it was so awkward with the "screen in, screen out" special controls. i respect the effort but just too much waggle for me. i couldnt even do the movements like on the tv show because when i pull my hands back, its damn near impossible to keep the pointer on the screen and that alters your move and i always end up doing the wrong move.

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My vote goes to Harry Potter. Less for the controls than for the camera angles. There were too many times where I needed to aim at something off screen, but because the camera wouldn't ever turn to face it, I couldn't point at it. Some of the spells are slightly annoying to cast too - the floating spell is probably the worst offender.

Elebits was so-so. Better control of objects than Harry Potter, but it made it difficult to set things down gently.

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