Conduit/GoldenEye Wiimote Controls

Note: These control settings were personalized for my bloated widescreen (16:9) TV that I sit fairly close to. You may get undesirable results if you use these settings on a fullscreen (4:3) TV setup, or if your Wii’s cursor behavior is already unstable due to poor sensor bar visibility, specific lighting conditions in your room, and/or your seating distance and position. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare – Reflex Edition is not a significant part of this discussion becuz the shoehorned FPS mechanics and single-player campaign are nonsense; it wasn’t worth the effort to customize the controls nor play past the tutorial stage. Call of what? Modern what? (Update: Conduit 2 controls here)

I’ve seen some player comments declaring the Wii “Pointer” controls in The Conduit and GoldenEye 007 are great or crap, or never getting them to feel “right” – ALL without adequately explaining why nor sharing their settings in detail as if it’s only a futile, individual effort they’re doomed to suffer (curse you, game! curse you, non-Nintendo developer!). What was the purpose of their interweb comments, their “discussion”? To WHINE? Yeah. To exchange ideas/info and support each other’s gaming experiences? HAH! Hell no.

So I have some info that’s useful to me and could be useful to others… =o

– The Conduit
(click to enlarge)

Handgun gameplay clips using the above settings – headshots preferred. Conduit handles it well; GoldenEye is just a trainwreck.

– GoldenEye 007

The Conduit and GoldenEye 007 both provide preset control schemes and detailed customization options that determine the Wii Remote’s cursor behavior. In reality, all their presets suck and give the impression the developers didn’t learn a thing from Metroid Prime 3: Corruption nor meet a living, breathing, “experienced” Wii player (but what do I know? I’m just a waggle-waving casual gamer to anyone concerned). At best, the “beginner” control presets are good enough for the most casual difficulty settings (dumb it down to a rail shooter disguised as an FPS). The “experienced” settings often assumed your in-game character is a sugar-charged preteen that can’t keep his head/eyes/brain still. Well son-of-a-bitch, these presets are frustrating to use and suck. Thank goodness we’re free to customize (most of) this stuff.

Trying out my controls; 100x less fun in GoldenEye. Note: 8min of repetitive movements and no action.

I’m happy with my Conduit settings. My goal was to enable quick/snappy turns, smooth camera work, and a reasonably behaved Dead Zone that provides an advantage over Metroid Prime 3’s first-generation pointer/camera. Even if the campaign’s overall design and content were lacking, I still had fun, on a basic level, navigating the stages (and indulging in headshots) since my controls comfortably melted in my hands. I was Awesome Agent Ford, not Preset Failure Ford. Then GoldenCraig finally rolled around, offered some disastrous presets, and pissed me off like Conduit did the first time (looks like Eurocom didn’t “get it” either). To play this game properly (LOL to heck with your Classic Controllers, old-gen punks), I went thru the pain of “translating” my Conduit settings; now Daniel Craig knows (at least, pretend) what it feels like to be Awesome Agent Ford.

Casual play-thru of the intro stage. Gimmicks feels great.

Maybe you’ve been wanting to ditch the presets; or find a “reasonable” scheme; or dive deep into customization, but need a better starting point – an example? See the screenshots above and give them a try, and adjust as needed.

(Didn’t it bother anyone that early/launch gameplay footage of either title looked underwhelming? When users would demonstrate their Wiimote usage and show there was nothing particularly effective or special about it? This sort of thing must be stopped. Please be serious, Wii Gamers. You can do better.)

For the remainder of this text, I’m going to discuss some details in Conduit’s/GoldenEye’s controls and rant about Activision’s Wii Remote support and implementation.

– Why won’t my Conduit experience easily transfer over to GoldenEye’s interface? Why was it NOT easy to translate? Why is there so much BS involved in making GoldenEye work as well as the 1.5 year-old game?

(4) Conduit screens vs. (9) GoldenEye screens – about double the number of screens to go thru to find what I need to get results out of Her Majesty’s GoldenBoy. This took stupidly long to set up, especially having to completely exit the freaking menu to try ANYTHING out. Conduit, a rookie effort by a rookie developer, lets you see your results within the menu as you change them. How nice of them to include that. Another thing, why don’t GoldenEye’s sensitivity sliders include numbers? Does Activision want me to forget the details of my adjustments? Am I supposed to count every left/right click on the sliders? Do they not want me to easily share my details? This is more important than sound/music volume, so why make this shit even more irritating?

Then I remembered GoldenEye’s shoehorned menu came from Reflex’s awful time-wasting menu. I knew something looked familiar.

– Who decided GoldenEye’s default settings were good ideas? Was there some conspiracy to make the forward-thinking Wii Remote look bad while the “last generation” controllers look good?  “Here, have a last-gen controller with this special edition riding on the popularity of an N64 title.”

You could tell something was wrong when none of the defaults worked nearly as well as a minigame in a certain Wii launch game about monkeys and balls (to recap, Jimbo arrived 4 years after Wii’s launch, 3.25 years after MP3, 1.5 years after Conduit, and 1 year after Reflex). On the marketing front, it seemed that NONE of the trailers featured any Wii Pointer gameplay demonstrated with any proficiency (I’m trying to remember if any Wii Pointer gameplay was shown AT ALL…). Same old dull anal-log gameplay dominated the hype machine.

It does make some sense, tho. If the developers can’t use the Wii Pointer properly (testers? what testers?), why should anyone else?

– GoldenEye’s controls/camera still aren’t as smooth as they could be (hint: Conduit).

GoldenEye’s Camera Look (“Tilt the view towards the Wii Remote Cursor”) is overexcited and broken, leading to the initial discomfort many people faced when using any “Experienced” preset the first time around (stay still, dammit! chill the fuck out, Bond!). Apparently, Conduit’s wacky default camera behavior was copied; but in Conduit’s case, the degree of the tilt was completely adjustable. In GoldenEye, it’s only given an On/Off switch (crap/playable). More “customization options” my ass.

Conduit’s adjustable Horizontal View (their Cursor Look) provides a separate advantage: it is a significant help to the camera fluidity when the Wii Cursor jumps in and out of the Dead Zone. Transitions across the Dead Zone borders were already gentle and gradual, but adding a little tilt really smoothens changes in the camera’s direction when the cursor wildly wipes across the screen.

In GoldenEye, exiting the Dead Zone is not gradual: it jerks to a minimum turning speed. Swinging the cursor from one side of the screen to the other is jarring, since the camera will make a sudden, dull stop (thru the deadzone) – this annoys me to no end. I suppose turning on Camera Look would improve one aspect of this, but we already know it does way more harm than good.

– Because GoldenEye’s camera and pointer aren’t as polished (and gun handling/accuracy/damage are questionable) as The Conduit, it’s dependent on its awkward-looking ADS and stuff to achieve reasonable consistency in landing shots.

Yeah, really. So congrats, Wii Gamer, you have more menus to scrape thru, none of which save you from the slow-as-hell sniper scope controls that don’t improve NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO.

– Daniel Craig holds his gun funny , whereas Conduit’s first-person presentation looks more reasonable.

I always have this feeling that shots fired in the standard view aren’t often reliable – could this be why? I find it hard to believe that Daniel is even looking down the damn thing, just turning his wrists like he’s got a VHS camcorder strapped to his forearms that would be blocking his view anyway. I know I had a tough time getting a decent photo for comparison. But Awesome Agent Ford, he’s always looking, always aiming despite being in the TV World. Aim left, and he swings his weapon to the left of the screen, giving the impression his virtual head is still paying attention.

This is why Daniel’s Wii aim sucks without ADS: he’s not even trying. How did the developers get away with this assumption?

– Pro, do you even like the new GoldenEye?

GoldenCraig’s single-player campaign is neato, providing the first worthy James Bond game experience ever. I don’t like the original GoldenEye 64; it needed refinement, so I think it became a much better game after Rare turned Bond into a woman with a British accent.

I finished the first Craig mission on 007 Classic, and I believe this should’ve been the default as it provides a decent test for your controls. But that’s as far as I got since November. Mechanically, everything about multiplayer is unappealing, from the “traditional” FPS traits to the lack of personal customization to all the locked weapons that should’ve been available once I found them in single-player. Poo, I say. I hope to finish the story before Wii2HD3D comes out. I’m suspicious about that Alec character; his hat bothers me.

Note: Screens have been enlarged for viewing purposes; screens were taken from direct feed 480p source, if not my bedroom.

Other Resources:
Hey U – Give Me Real Controls
Conduit 2 Wiimote Controls
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz FPS Videos