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Recently, I was watching a number of videos and reading a lot about motion controls; particularly about the different hardware, common perceptions of motion controls, and about the ways in which motion controls have survived in the post-Wii era, and the main thing that came up was gyro aim. For the Wii, the one aspect of the motion controls that seemed to be the most widely-appreciated among players for more standard games was the IR pointer, as it didn't require much movement and it made aiming as fast and easy as it is with a mouse; arguably even faster and easier than on a mouse because of the lack of friction. For some examples of what I mean: to this day, the Wii port of Resident Evil 4 seems to be widely considered to be the best version of the game due to the pointer aiming, I came across a number of reviews of Twilight Princess where the reviewers greatly preferred aiming the bow and clawshots in the Wii version compared to the GameCube version, and I similarly saw a number of people saying that the Metroid Prime trilogy on the Wii was the best way to play those games because it put the IR pointer aiming in 3 into the first two games. In fact, a common trend seemed to be that games would be made with a standard controller (i.e. stick aiming) in mind, then the aiming would be remapped to the pointer, and aiming sections that were meant to be difficult were instead trivial. Perhaps the biggest case of this occurred during the development of an on-rails shooter game I previously never heard of called Sin and Punishment: Star Successor. An Iwata Asks revealed that the game was originally being made with a standard controller in mind, then it was converted into a Wii game during development. When Treasure: the company that made the game, gave it to Nintendo for playtesting, they (and Nintendo) fully expected Nintendo's playtesters to say it was too difficult. Instead, Nintendo's playtesters said it was too easy, and the game's difficulty ultimately was ramped up to account for the pointer aim before it was released. In the Iwata Asks, Iwata was very amused to learn about this; apparently saying to the person that told him about this, "Of all things, you told none other than Treasure to make [one of their games] more difficult?" Of course, the IR pointer wasn't carried over into later hardware, so instead, motion aiming on Nintendo consoles has been done through gyro aim, and it seems to be the one form of motion controls that's widely used across a lot of games on the Wii U and the Switch: the Wind Waker and Twilight Princess remakes, Breath of the Wild, Splatoon, almost every third-party shooter game that has a Switch port, and even Mario Odyssey (when controlling one of the tank enemies). And it's easy to see why it's so prevalent: it is a lot easier for many to do finer aiming with a gyro than just with a control stick, as it's functionally more intuitive to move the controller a little bit than to make small corrections with a stick, and it can be easily made an option that can be turned off if someone prefers to just use a control stick for aiming. However, all this made me wonder: is aiming really the only area in more standard gameplay where motion controls could be better than buttons & control sticks, or is there something else where motion controls would improve standard gameplay that normally would be done through button and stick controls? What do you think?