I had a pretty nice weekend. I promised myself that I would finish Lost: Vis Domus and got really close, but I hate the game, so to avoid killing myself I put of the final three achievements until later. I did put in a good effort though and because Memorial Day weekend is so full of family get togethers I ended up having to drag my 360 to my wife's parents house to play it. I thought it would be pretty cool because we could all play together on Halo 3 or any of my wide selection of XBL Arcade games. I left Guitar Hero 3 at home on purpose because all my relatives suck so bad at the game that it is embarrasing even being in the room with them. I definitly didn't want to watch them fail on songs on easy for hours.

Anyway, after I got there I was reminded that my wife's family is not the same as my family. Where I have my siblings coming over to my house to play video games all the time, even when I bring the video games to them they're aprehensive. Even when it comes to a game like Pac Mac Championship Edition, they just looked at the controller and say it is too hard. The average complaint comes from their distaste for the dual analog sticks. They say they don't understand the whole moving and shooting thing. Well, I don't see how that relates to games like Pac Man and Bomberman, but I wanted to see if it was really all that hard for them.

I asked, maybe more like forced, my father-in-law to play a co-op campaign game on Halo 3 on easy. As soon as we could his character is looking at the ground and he is running around in circles trying to figure out how to go forward. When I explain to him the you pretty much always just hold forward on the left stick and just move your views to turn he managed to walk forward, but would continue walking until he hit a wall, then get disorientied and start walking back in the same direction he came. It was very bad. In that short time he was able to throw a grenade and kill our computer controlled team mates. That was the closest thing he had towards accomplishing anything on the stage. Of course after a few minutes he just gave up.

I thought this was perticularly sad. My father-in-law is not an avid gamer, but he does spend hours at a time playing Age of Empires on his computer. That is the only game I see him play, and he does only set the computers to the normal difficulty, but if you can manage the difficult multibutton, multi-mouse-click, control system of an RTS game, dual analog sticks shouldn't be too hard for you. You could say that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but I don't think age has anything to do with it. The problem is that there is a mental block.

Now there is the Wii. The Wii has only one analog stick and to get it you have to plug in an adaptor. I personally find the Wii controlls needlessly complicated where I have to move the controller in some sort of special motion, which is always misinterpreted to perform a regular action (like swing your sword in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess). Now maybe Zelda might be too complicated for people new to gaming, but they are more apt to try it if they have to flail their arms all around then if they use Gamecube control system which was much more acurate.

People say the Wii emulated your motions onscreen. Anyone who's used the Wii extensivly knows that this isn't true and button presses are just replaced with certain motions. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but like ALL video games, it is more about learning how to work things in the game than trying to force the game to adjust to your idea of how it should work (which is impossible). In fact this is how all new situations should be approached, but again there is that mental block. It is like the people who try to learn French by reading all the words as if they were English. Just shut-up forget what you know and learn what you don't. That is what my relatives wouldn't do.

Anyway I believe people like the Wii because it at least seems more like what they're used to. Whether it is or not depends on the game, but either way the mental block of Dual Analog Sticks are removed. They are happy to fail miserably repetedly on Wii Bowling because it at least seems like real bowling even though they are controlled in completely seperate ways. If you don't believe me, try to get me to bowl a turkey in reality and then have me try one on the Wii. I can tell you I will get the Wii one pretty easy, the real one... maybe on a good day. So despite an ever increasing number of fun and creative casual games, the xbox 360, and the PS3 (and the PS1, PS2, and original Xbox) are destined to remian unfriendly to casuals because of their "inaccesible" control schemes.