Sorry but i do not agree. Most people buy a Wii because of the wiimote controller and how Nintendo claimed it "would" work. In reality the Wiimote does not function in this manor. I was very excited to get my Wii on the UK Launch day, I loaded up Zelda for the 1st time and yes it was great BUT the wiimote swinging did not make link swing his sword in the same way during game play but merely emulated a simple button press. I eagerly purchased Red Steel for some kick ass sword fights and gun battles...if you can call that a sword fighting the well, your retarded.
The fact that games don't use the Wiimote the way it can be used is by no means a fault of the hardware itself, but a fault of the developers; unfortunately, Nintendo included. The Wiimote does work the way Nintendo claims it would. The fact that games don't use that functionality is a different matter. It may be true, but is entirely unrelated.
You mention lag. This is due to the way current games interpret the data received from the Wiimote. Instead of following your movements directly, the game waits for a predefined motion curve, that's mapped to a certain move in the game. On all consoles, all moves are pre-rendered, as short animations of your character performing the action you wanted, usually with the desired effect (striking the enemy, for example) near the end of it. On other consoles, you'd press a controller button to set the animation in motion; the Wii waits for you to swing the remote the predefined way, which of course takes longer to do than simply pressing a button. The lag stems from there: from the moment you start your swing to the moment the action has an effect. Add the filter on the motion detecting that serves to filter out coffee jitters, and you're actually mid-swing before the Wii even starts paying attention. Result: lag.
As I said somewhere before, using this method would be like replacing action buttons with a touchscreen, but having the player write "B" on it in order to attack. Recognizing a "B" stroke would set off the sprite animation of your character swinging the sword. Sounds crazy? Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is not far from that. You don't hold the sword with the stylus and have Link follow it around, you attack using predefined stylus strokes that the DS translates into actions. It works well, but it isn't as instantaneous as pressing a button would be. Yet to many, this is more fun.
Another problem with the games is the aforementioned predefined action animations. Your character isn't a real-time ragdoll model, it's a series of short pre-rendered animations triggered by a set of predefined Wiimote motions. There's only a limited amount of animations, and in a sword fighting game they are, broadly speaking, limited to four: a horizontal swing, a vertical swing, a diagonal swing, and a forward thrust. This means that no matter how you swing, what speed and strength and angle you achieve with the Wiimote, your in-game with character will only perform four predefined actions, and the hit or miss is defined as "
if (swing)
and ({enemy position - player position} < weapon range)
then (hit) = true". Not exactly master swordplay. The thing is, using standard game mechanics on a new system is a step backwards, despite the fact the new system itself is a step forward. As with using a touchscreen to write commands by hand and so play a command-line adventure (instead of developing a point and click system), waving a remote to emulate pressing buttons is wrong. The whole game control philosophy should change, not just the way of entering commands.
The Wiimote makes it possible to have your motions translated to your character directly. The character's weapon arm would have to be a ragdoll model animated in real time, so that the arm could follow your swings exactly and wouldn't be limited to a predefined set of animations, and the hit/miss/block would have to be done through collision detection on the entire body, rather than just doing the "distance && swing" operation. Super Mario Galaxy does this, it detects when opponents touch you, and regards that as a "hit". However, Mario is a chubby chunky little thing, and for purposes of collision detecting can be approximated with a sphere, while two normal shaped and sized characters with independently moving parts would be slightly more difficult. Not to mention that if you get the model wrong, the movements would be jerky and awkward, instead of the smooth, elegant pre-rendered movement animations you get in "standard" games.
This, to most developers, seems like too much work, when the majority of players are quite happy with the current situation. Hardcore gamers may be disappointed to see the potential and actual hardware capabilities of the Wii be neglected this way, but most Wii owners are just happy to see the little guy on the screen react to random Wiimote waggling, and don't demand anything more.
The thing is, in time they might. In fact, it's almost certain that they will start resenting the faults that, at the moment, they are more than happy to oversee. After the umpteenth incarnation of "Identical Minigame Madness 3" or "PS2 Port With Analogs Hacked Off And Wiimote Glued On (sub-par graphics included)", even the most avid random-wagglers will start complaining.
Luckily, developers are starting to pick up on this, and more and more games recently actually take advantage of the Wiimote as a device in its own right, not just a mouse/analog stick replacement, and more and more games have better, more natural, but most of all, more Wii-specific controls. Are things looking up? Will we actually get what we paid for? I believe so. And pretty soon, people will stop doubting that spending this amount of money on the Wii is actually worth it. I believe it is.
