Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
A REVOLUTIONARY DEVICE: THE NINTENDO WII REMOTE
continued
No less important than the Wii Remote's innovations are the games that support it.
Nintendo deliberately made the
Wii Sports
games that ship with the Wii easy to learn and
very forgiving. In the tennis game, for example, the player's avatar automatically runs to
where the ball will land. All the player has to do is wave the controller to deliver a fore-
hand or a backhand. The ease of playing these games has made them accessible to many
people who would never have considered playing video games before. Wii consoles have
been installed in nursing homes, because the motion-based interaction encourages elderly
people to exercise. They're also being used as physical therapy for people recovering
from injuries. Playing a Wii game is much more appealing than doing repetitive exercises.
The Wii Remote works very well in games that map a player's physical activity directly
onto the avatar's activity in the game world, such as action, sports, and driving games. It
is less successful with games that traditionally use a mouse, such as role-playing, strat-
egy, and construction and management games. If you want your players to control your
game with the Wii Remote (which works with PCs as well as the Wii itself), you should
design the game for the Wii Remote from the beginning.
Two-Dimensional Input Devices
Two - dimensional input dev ices allow the player to send t wo data values to the
game at one time from a single device.
DIRECTIONAL PADS (D-PADS)
Directional pads (D-pads) are the most familiar form of directional control mecha-
nism on game machines and are still offered by many smaller handheld machines
as the only two-dimensional input device. Console and PC controllers often supply
a D-pad in addition to a joystick to provide backward compatibility with older
software.
A D-pad is a circular or cross-shaped input device on a game controller constructed
with binary switches at the top, bottom, left, and right edges. The D-pad rocks
slightly about its central point and, when pressed at any edge, turns on either one
switch or, if the player presses between two adjacent switches, two. It can, therefore,
send directional information to the game in eight possible directions: up, down,
left, and right with each of the individual sensors, and upper-left, upper-right,
lower-left, and lower-right when the player triggers two sensors together. (In
Figure
8.2
, the cross-shaped device on the upper-left face of the controller is a D-pad.)
