Wii remote holds much more potential, says Mercury dev

The Wii remote controller has much more potential than is currently being seen in the first crop of Wii games, according to the development team at Ignition Entertainment.

But while some have argued that a portion of games using the motion sensing device rely on timing rather than gesture recognition, Ignition's studio manager, Ed Bradley, points to the fact that if it's fun in the first place, players won't care what technology is behind the game.

"Personally I think the controller is capable of translating actions far more complex and energetic than most players are interested in performing even in the privacy of their own homes," said Bradley, in an exclusive interview with our sister site Eurogamer.net.

Bradley points out that developers should never lose site of the real goal - giving players a unique gaming experience - rather than create something technically impressive that adds nothing to the final gameplay experience.

"It can certainly spew out a lot of useful info. The tricky bit is making meaningful use of it all," said Bradley.

"At the end of the day developers want players to have fun rather than impose clever mathematics on them, so if it turns out to be fun only using a simple subset of the controller's gizmos then why worry about how "proper" it is?"

The developer has been working on Mercury Meltdown Revolution for the Wii since it first pitched the idea to Nintendo at E3 2006, giving the company plenty of time to get to grips with the various Wii control methods.

Even so, Bradley revealed that early versions of the game worked well with the Wii controller, an area the developer knew would be crucial to the games success.

"This was something we earmarked a lot of time for as it's vital that it's done properly," he said. "Then to our surprise it ended up being more straightforward than we anticipated."

"It's surprisingly natural and easy to make the transition to the new control method. We've spent a lot of time tweaking dead-zones and acceleration and stuff like that but I'd say the control method worked 90 per cent perfectly the first time we tried it," he revealed.