How I Learned to Play Skyward Sword

Posted on November 19 2011 by Djinn

The folks at Nintendo World Report have written a new article giving some helpful advice to players who might not be too familiar with the Wii motion controls of Skyward Sword. He first talks about how the motion conrols are normally picked up by the MotionPlus attachment and not the IR sensor bar and that pressing down on the D-pad will re-center the pointer. Later on he mentions how the player will eventually need to use the motion controls for other things than swinging a sword into the occasional bokoblin. There were a few things the player had to get used to to. Also he noticed a few things that might cause errors in the controls and gave some very simple solutions to the problem. There are a couple minor spoilers inside so beware. Jump in to see what they had to say.

Sometime in the first dozen hours of the game, Link receives a harp. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to most Zelda fans, as musical instruments have long been a staple of the series. To play the harp, you merely hold down the A button on the Wii Remote and swing your arm from side to side as if you are strumming the strings yourself. Much to my surprise, I found that I had difficulty getting the harp to work properly. As I moved my hand from side to side, I saw Link on screen acting as if he was having a seizure, his hands moving quickly back and forth without any real fluid motion. Eventually I got the thing to work properly, but I was perplexed by the challenge; everything else up to that point had worked beautifully.

I ran into a similar problem a few hours later when I was asked to use the Master Sword to draw an object on the screen. My pointer was jumping all over the place, the same way it does when it’s a sunny day out and I have the windows open. That’s when it clicked: Skyward Sword uses both IR *and* MotionPlus to detect the pointer. When the sunlight interferes with the IR, as happens fairly often in my house, the game experiences problems trying to reconcile how you are aiming the Remote.

To test, I held my finger over the top of the remote as I drew the object requested, and sure enough, the problems went away instantly. A few hours later I was asked to play the harp again, and tried the same trick; as long as I was physically blocking the IR detection from working, the MotionPlus picked up the slack and everything worked just fine.

You can view the rest of the article here

Honestly I think something like this is very helpful overall. The Wiimotion Plus control scheme is a very new thing to a lot of players and I would imagine quite a few of them would have questions. Or they would at least run into some problems along the way and it is nice to know that someone has already taken a look into these and decided to get the word out to the rest of us.

So what do you think? Did you think this was helpful? Are you ready t play Skyward Sword? Let us know in the comments below.

Source: Nintendo World Report

Related: Skyward Sword

~~~Recent Content Updates~~~