Editorial:Cursor Woes

From Wikia Gaming

by user Poindexter

When Nintendo integrated a point-at-screen cursor interface on the Wii, they opened the door to user interface designs not possible on console games to date (excepting, of course, those of "lightgun"-style games).

While some developers will be able to integrate the cursor sensibly, several titles have been released whose cursor-based UI elements are poorly-designed, resulting in frustrating experiences between (sometimes during) gameplay. This opinion relates a few examples of poorly-designed between-gameplay menu interaces.

In Swing Away Golf , players are required to point at an interface element, "click" with the A button once to select the element, and a second time to confirm the selection.  Contrast this with SSX Blur , which automatically selects the element as it is "hovered" over, requiring only one A button press to confirm.  This, however, leads to annoying interface lag in the multiplayer character select screen, as selecting each character for the first time causes their model to be loaded.  Because the on-screen cursors also freeze but players' hands do not, periods of lag seem to stack as cursors get updated on top of unloaded characters.

Also, Blur fails to anticipate my button-mashing through load screens, and this leads to unexpected results when there is a cursor involved. Sometimes, a load screen will fade to my cursor hovering a cancel button, and I can't stop mashing before it recognizes the input. My response to this was to mash without pointing at the screen. Having the first button highlighted by default may have seemed like good behavior for the majority of cases, but I got caught a few times accidentally mashing "Play Again" after beating a tournament event instead of continuing to the next. This problem would not have manifested itself on its cursor-savvy brother, the computer mouse, where it's not sensible nor conditioned to mash the left button. The mouse cursor also is always present, and there is no "default" action for a click over non-interactive elements.

While Swing Away 's problem lay in design, and might not have been considered a bug, EA's QA should have detected Blur 's.

Owners of Metal Slug Anthology for the Wii will sympathize with me when I wonder why I scroll through selections with the analog stick on the nunchuck, then confirm them with the A button in the other hand. Games that use the nunchuck don't leave many options for menu navigation, but the best is the cursor. SNK Playmore demonstrates this well. When players hold the Wiimote like its namesake, they expect evidence of thier pointing.

The cursor seems to be both a strength and a weakness to the Wii, and it's up to game developers to determine which side is seen. Third-party vendors can sink the ease-of-use argument for widespread adoption of the console, and all it takes is a few bad menu screens.

Nintendo could certainly have anticipated this while developing pilot titles. Moreover, they could have fixed it, by providing developers with reference interface implementations, design guidelines, or even standardized menu toolkits. While the latter is more-or-less out of the question at this point, they can still do the two former.

See also: Open letter to Early Wii Developers