So I’ve been spending some time playing Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, and of course that came with the Wii Motion Plus, so I thought I’d share some briefs thoughts or impressions of it all with you, and then do some ranting about it all…

Here’s the Motion plus from a few angles, there are two buttons on the sides that you push in to attach or remove the motion plus to/from the Wii Controller. On the back is also a lock button that slides up to lock and down to unlock. On the bottom is the pass through for the nunchuk, it’s a little door that is attached to a string so you don’t lose it.

 

As we know the Motion Plus adds length to the Wii remote, which means a new jacket for it, thankfully Tiger Woods comes with it and if you buy it separately it comes with a jacket as well.

Here’s a couple pictures of the controller with and without the Motion Plus and in and out of the silicone jackets for comparison.

So to get the full effect of the Motion Plus I played Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 in two player mode, me of course playing both players, and using one remote equipped with the Motion Plus and one without.

Using the Wii Motion plus is amazing, the difference is like night and day, it’s just startling and amazing, I can’t say enough good things about it honestly.

With the Motion Plus equipped controller swinging the golf club is virtually one to one response with the screen, without it I had a hard time even getting the club to swing at times, without the Motion Plus equipped controller the game was frustrating at best. Hint here, if you’re planning on getting Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, make sure you get the bundle, or at least have the Motion Plus already, if not you’d better have a nice screen protector on your HDTV because you’ll be very tempted to throw the remote through the screen  many times while playing.

Bottom line here is that the Motion Plus revolutionizes the Wii Remote, it’s how it should have been in the first place, near perfect one to one reactions with the screen.

The Motion Plus is an excellent addition to the Wii Controller, too bad all of your accessories now won’t work, like that cool steering wheel, or gun grip, you’ll have to remove the Motion Plus or have a few extra controllers lying around to use with those accessories.

 

Now on to the rant that was inevitable…

The first question that comes to mind is why wasn’t this a standard feature on the Wii to begin with? Seriously though, the Motion Plus totally changes the control scheme of the Wii , but as we know, it only works with one or two games right now, and more on the way soon, with who knows what else on the horizon.

I have to wonder how hard it would be for Nintendo to come up with a firmware upgrade that will allow the Motion Plus to work with all games?!  Would it have been that hard for them to make it backward compatible to begin with?

If you’ve paid attention then you know that the Wii Motion Plus is not and most likely never will be backward compatible? Why? Well I’ll tell you why, because Nintendo wants you to buy their new stuff, so they don’t care if the Motion Plus works with the old games you have. Now this sort of ticks me off as I still like the games and I still play the games on occasion, so why shouldn’t those games benefit from the new Motion Plus? As it is the controller is sloppy without the Motion Plus, using it is a completely new experience for gameplay and controls, everything just seems to work some much more smoothly and just better overall. Why does Nintendo want to do this to their fans? They’ve got a great library of games that can truly benefit form the Motion Plus. Did they ever think that people might buy even more of the older games if they were compatible with the Motion Plus? I’m sure people out there have skipped buying games because of their experience with the jiggly controls because they just knew it was going to be a pain to play the game.

For the accessories part of it, I’ve got two steering wheels and three guns actually that are now not compatible with the Wii Controller with the Motion Plus attached to it, kinda bums me out… Nintendo knew they were releasing the Motion Plus, why haven’t we seen accessories that are compatible with it being released before it came out like every other product out there?

Now you’ve got to remove the Motion Plus every time you want to play one of those games, depending on how much you play the Wii, that can amount to a lot of removing and reattaching the Motion Plus. I have to wonder if Nintendo thought about that kind of wear and tear when they were designing it? One other note about removing and replacing the Motion Plus is that the Wii Remote might have to be recalibrated each time you do this, that sounds like a hassle to me… Basically you’ll have to have, 1,2, 4, or whatever number of controllers you have with the Motion plus and the same number without to be able to use all of the accessories you have and not have to worry about recalibrating when you switch, sounds like that could get expensive…

Is the Wii Motion Plus worth the hassle of it all? Right now no, unless of course you love golf because you won’t see any difference with any existing games while using the Motion Plus, and unless a whole slew of games comes out that are Motion Plus compatible, I see no reason to even buy one right now…

Honestly I don’t see why more fans aren’t in an uproar of this whole no backwards compatible thing? The Wii motion Plus should have shipped with the core system and I hope Nintendo starts doing this, because as is it’s not worth the $25 you’ll be spending on an accessory that adds nothing new to the system right now…

Right now there are four games that can use the Motion Plus right? Two of them are Tennis, one is Golf and the other is Wii Sports Resort, two of which I believe you can buy right now, Grand Slam Tennis and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 from EA Sports, with the others set to be released soon. Why don’t I see some ‘real’ games in there, by real I man like shooters or action oriented titles, I think there is where the Motion Plus would shine, a lightsaber duel using the Motion Plus would be awesome…

Another gripe here is that if you think about it, the Wii controller now costs about $80, that is of course including the Remote, Nunchuck and Motion Plus all together, and I think that outrageous for a game controller, it costs more than the games do… why? That price for a controller is just obscene honestly….

Back to backwards compatibility, wonder if Comex, the BaNNeRBoMB guy, might be interested in creating a hack for it? Wonder how that would fly with Nintendo?  Or maybe Team Twiizers can get to work on it since their Twilight Hack is no longer effective… I’m sure it couldn’t be too hard to to change the core of the system, like you do with the firmware updates, it would just enable the Motion Plus in all games, then again it might not be that easy huh?! Oh well… it was a thought..

 

 

So do you have the Motion Plus yet? What do you think of it? Let me know in the comments…