My first impression of the Wii Motion Plus was “so that’s it huh?”

I took a few swings as Tiger, my swing was faithfully represented and I was on my way through my first three holes.

“Feels good, plays good but what’s the big deal”

It wasn’t until I actually stopped and thought about it did I realize really how amazing Wii Motion Plus was … oh and until I switched over to Disc Golf.

See the Wii Motion Plus does what the Wii should have ALWAYS done, or at least, what we all thought the possibilities would be. Instead the last few years the Wii has languished in the land of the waggle. Developers realized they couldn’t get the levels of precision out of the hardware, so they crafted their games in such a way that a simple waggle would achieve the desired result. Case in point: my 4 year old nephew can do amazing things with Wii Sports Bowling simply by waggling the remote in a certain way. There’s no precision to what he does, just a brute amount of force and voilla, he’s bowling like a champ (and yes, maybe some of this is sour grapes for his consistent ability to kick my ass)

But the Wii Motion Plus finally gets it right. It’s fluid, smooth, and works amazingly well. I remember back to when I first played Wii Sports and said to myself “Man I can’t wait until EA gets their hands on this, imagine what they’ll do with Tiger Woods, baseball, and the like” But after playing the first two incarnations of the titles I was seriously unimpressed with the control. This year, this year is amazing.

While the swing feels great (and so does putting by the way) you really don’t realize how great Wii Motion Plus is until you try out the disc golf. You see developers have also gotten good and “guessing” what the Wiimote was doing. Sure it wasn’t faithful 1:1 movement, but developers (the good ones anyway) realized how to gloss over the shortcomings of the hardware and still make it seem like everything “just worked.” Often times this was the case in Tiger Woods, until you actually tried to swing the wiimote like a true golfclub, in which case you may have already sold your wii already – because it was awful.

But after spending about 60 seconds with Disc Golf, I was truly amazed at the precision of the Wii Motion Plus. Disc golf shows a transparent hand holding the disc to throw. When you use Wii Motion Plus it literally feels and looks like your hand has somehow reached into the television (or wall for those of you who are cool like me and have a HD projector) and is moving around in free space. I then detached the Wii Motion Plus, and the change immediately noticeable. What once was a perfect representation now made me look like I had some form of severe and crippling disease.

Seeing, and playing, is believing with this accessory. And it brought me back to a few years ago when I thought “Imagine the possibilities” with the Wii except now, they actually can become a reality. But then I got smacked upside the head with reality: This is an ADD ON accessory. I really fear that developers will be FORCED into developing their motion controls for gamers with and without the accessory (as of right now only one future release will require the accessory, that’s Red Steel 2). This is obviously going to cause some problems as developers may never be able to realize the full potential of the hardware as they will still have to craft their games to “gloss over” the Wiimote sans Wii Motion Plus.

So I still stand here thinking “Man, imagine the possibilities” and I still have that same fear that they may never truly be realized in this console generation. I suppose only time will tell.