Wii will hurt you
For all I love Nintendo’s Wii and reckon it’s a work of genius, I’m really not sure about the Wiimote from an ergonomic point of view. As someone who’s had repetitive strain injury for years I’m pretty good at keeping the symptoms at bay (so RSI-inducing games such as Rayman Raving Rabbids are a no-no), but over the last week my right hand has started doing the “hello! I’m a claw!” thing anyway. It doesn’t look great, and it’s really rather uncomfortable.
The culprit? Resident Evil 4, or rather using the Wiimote for RE4. Rather alarmingly, just 20 minutes of holding the Wiimote with fingers poised over the A and B buttons is enough to give me crab hands – whereas *hours* on the Xbox don’t cause any ill-effects at all. I’m beginning to think that what’s fine for Wii Tennis – a controller with all the ergonomics of a house brick – is a really bad idea for other games.
I know some of you have Wiis and don’t have RSI (as far as I’m aware) – are you experiencing sore hands from gaming with the Wiimote?
20 Responses to “Wii will hurt you”
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Alex on July 24th, 2007
I have indeed, I suffered a bit of RSI when I worked for BT and get a bit of the old ‘claw hand’ after a long time playing Zelda or Call of Duty 3 on the Wii.
I’ll let you know how I get on with RE4 when I get it….
Gary on July 24th, 2007
Please do. My gut feeling is that it’s the wiimote but I’ve been battering the keyboard for work too. I’m staying off the Wii today just in case :)
Stephen on July 25th, 2007
Thank you for asking me to carry out this important bit of research. Please send the test Wii to my home address.
I expect to have results for you in as little as a year’s time.
mupwangle on July 26th, 2007
>>Resident Evil 4
They should’ve called it Resident Wii-vel. :-)
Martijn on July 31st, 2007
Sometimes I get a sleepy arm, becouse of lifting the wiimote up in the air for over 2 hours. But as for RSI ar hand problems I have none, even though I play a lot of WarioWare. Experience tells me it also depends on the user wheter RSI problems turn up or not.
My bet is on Nintendo also releasing a normal controller later, probably based on the one for the legacy games. Some games that are developed for multiple platforms are just never made to use a point/click system.
IceAge, Zelda, probably Resident Evil (never played that one) will all work wit a normal console controller and don’t need the pointing thing in my mind.
Squander Two on July 31st, 2007
> My bet is on Nintendo also releasing a normal controller later
They haven’t already? I am honestly amazed.
tm on July 31st, 2007
>probably based on the one for the legacy games
Exactly – there is little need to rush a ‘proper’ controller since you can use (for example) a game cube one in any situation where a pointing thing isn’t required. There are a lot of those already in circulation.
Squander Two on July 31st, 2007
Oh, right. That makes more sense. I thought Martijn meant there were none available at all. Didn’t realise the Wii was backward-compatible.
tm on July 31st, 2007
Yeah, I would expect there to be a ‘wii gamecube controller’ at some point. In fact I think I may even have seen photgraphs of a mock up once.
mupwangle on July 31st, 2007
AFAIK for it to work with the Gamecube it would have to have a wire as well as wireless. (The same reason why you need a memory card for the GC games – the hardware is still pretty seperate)
tm on July 31st, 2007
I meant a wii controller that looks and feels roughly like a gamecube one but isn’t necessarily compatible with a gamecube itself (why would it need to be?).
of course to truly use any such controller (of any kind) with a wii an alternative way of browsing around the menu is needed if you don’t want to have to swap controllers. Either that or some kind of point and click function has to be built into the controller as well – which I guess wouldn’t be that difficult since the infrastructure already exists in the wii and the ‘standard’ controller hardware I would have thought.
mupwangle on July 31st, 2007
>>(why would it need to be?).
Cos it would piss you off if you spent £30 on it and found out that you had to buy another controller if you wanted to play GC games.
tm on July 31st, 2007
But n64 games manage to use either a wii style ‘classic’ controller OR the gamecube controller ports, so cross compatibility between the different controller systems is obviously possible.
mupwangle on July 31st, 2007
Buggered if I know. ;-)
tm on August 1st, 2007
Well, how they do it is nintendo’s problem. You already pointed out the obvious issue if they don’t.
Got yourself pokemon for your DS yet?
Alex on August 4th, 2007
There already is a controller for the Wii called the ‘classic’ – I have it. It’s mostly for downloaded GC games. I also have a GC controller plugged into my Wii (it handily has all the ports the GC had, effectively making it a GC and Wii combo)
Resident Evil 4 is, I can confirm, an absolute crippler to play. I get ‘Nintendo Claw’ after about 30 minutes on it.
mupwangle on August 4th, 2007
I bought RE4 last week but haven’t even opened it yet. Been play Earth Defence Force 2017 on the 360.
Alex on August 4th, 2007
Having never played the previous ones I found the learning curve to be rather steep but now I’ve got the hang of kicking the heads off the necks of zombies I’m on fire!
tm on August 5th, 2007
>There already is a controller for the Wii called the ‘classic’
uh, yeah, I know, I referred to it above.
Pog on September 27th, 2007
Using the Wii mote for any games which require “mouse like” use of it for pointing cause me to suffer from a very sore right hand after about an hour. This is much worse than any other controller I have ever used (although I do also have problems with the nintendo DS… I think they are designed for much smaller hands than mine or something).