Fact Sheet
I love motion controls. Their ascend in the mid-2000s thanks to Nintendo’s Wii is some of the biggest fun I’ve ever had with gaming. Their now decade-long slump, only partially redeemed by the niche of VR gaming and Nex Playground, is a minor tragedy for the industry. I fundamentally believe that gamepads are not the pinnacle of input evolution that just needs to be iterated. It’s a product of compromise and standartization, and eventually it has to be challenged again, or video games will stale more creatively.
Maybe I’m not getting a big-budget motion-controls renaissance any time soon, but at least I’m getting gyro in Splatoon Raiders, and not just an option tacked on in the last few weeks before the release, but the whole game realized around it. It’s non-arguably almost the best of both the motion and button-stick worlds. Almost because of a small, traditional omission for the series: it only allows horizontal stick input when gyroscope aiming is enabled.
The reason becomes clear once I think about it. Horizontally, I often require immediate ~180-degree rotations when I’m attacked from behind, and this is too swift of a turn for gyro to handle. But vertically, it’s not nearly as much: I only shoot ink at the ground in front of me, and only some salmonids are aerial. But some is not none! Raiders introduces a helpful bot-follower that launches me in the air, leading to some rapid vertical aiming, something that the stick already exceeds at horizontally. Instead of slight motions, I resort to swings, and this is not pretty when dozens of enemies are coming from all directions at the same time. Resetting the vertical camera position is fine during calmer portions. But not when things get intense.
The lack of option is that more baffling because in other ways, Splatoon Raiders is very normie by Nintendo’s standards. There’s the whole modern-shooter bingo card: raids, loot, skills, upgrades, modifiers, perks, loadouts, cooldown timers. Everything has leveling. Most things are customizable. There are 3 difficulties that can be turned on at any time. Accessibility with ink colors is thrown in. It’s pretty clear a product of the younger EPD generation which actually plays video games made by other people. There’s nothing wrong with letting them learn the ropes in a safe envirionment, as it’s more fun than almost anything in the looter-shooter genre.
Almost, again! This contradiction that I’m struggling with internally. Maybe I’m the hypocrite here? I’m the person who waggles the controller in Super Mario Galaxy remasters as these games were allegedly designed around attack imprecision. Imprecision isn’t bad as long as it makes the game more fun, and maybe this vertical block is part of why I had to force myself to stop playing Raiders? I don’t know. I just think this option wouldn’t hurt. But yes, I also dislike too many options. People are walking contradictions, so understandably, video games are too!
