Wii MotionPlus for New Games Only

— -- Nintendo's Wii MotionPlus, a precision-remedy for its finicky Wii Remote, won't be backwards compatible, says the company. That's bad news for anyone who'd been planning to revisit oldies like Metroid Prime 3 or Super Mario Galaxy, or, you know, finally get some decent deterministic action out of Wii Sports's sloppy, pointless baseball and boxing sims.

What will it work with? New games only, all custom-tailored, a fact that reportedly torqued off certain blindsided third-party developers last summer.

Why no retroactive precision-motion love? The cynical view fingers upcoming sequels like Wii Sports Resort with its medley of frisbee, jet ski, and kendo sims. Nintendo wants you to buy new stuff, not discover the pleasures of revisiting the oldies wielding a superior control mechanism they probably could and should have shipped in the first place.

That's too bad. I was kind of counting on a backwards-compatibility option. I can't stand the wobbly, wiggly, frequently downright sloppy point-and-click action of the remote as-is. I played through the better part of Twilight Princess with the pointer feature disabled because the ball of light with fly's wings kept getting stuck in the sensor periphery. Don't get me started on point-and-squirm shooters like Call of Duty 3 (I mean before the stuff about the gameplay itself being ho-hum).

Hey Nintendo, would it really sunder reality and usher in an epoch of apocalyptic doom if you worked with your third-party pals a little more closely, maybe even reconsidered downloadable MotionPlus updates for a few of your top-rated titles?

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