There are plenty of things to talk about when it comes to Wii shooter The Conduit, but none are more important then the controls and the absurd number of ways you can customize them.
Matt Corso, art and creative director at High Voltage, walked me through the options, which not only rival, but may surpass the level of customization found in most PC shooters.
By default, the game's controls are pretty straight forward for a Wii shooter. You move around with the thumbstick and aim and shoot with the remote. A button lets you lock onto a target for strafing, and a swing of the remote triggers a melee attack.
But you can go into customization and switch to any of three presets, or you can just create your own. Every button and action is mappable. Yes, including the motion control. While you can't completely ditch the single motion control in the game, Corso said you could always map it to something you will almost never use if it bugs you.
That's not all though, not by a long shot.
By hopping into the Remote Sensitivity settings you can manually adjust everything, everything. That means turning speed, cursor sensitivity, horizontal and vertical views, thrust sensitivity, nunchuk shake sensitivity.
You can also adjust the size of the deadzone window. The deadzone window is the invisible box that determines when the game sees your remote pointing as aiming and when it sees it as looking. If you want the game to play like a PC mouse and keyboard title just shrink that box to its smallest size. If you want it to be more like Metroid, stretch out the horizontal but keep the vertical thin. The customization is endless.
The game also lets you switch between the five difficulty settings for gameplay on the fly, so you can pause at any time and make it easier or harder.
Finally, the game's HUD is adjustable. When you drop into the settings you can click and drag the bits and pieces of the HUD to wherever you'd like to. You can also tweak the HUD's transparency.
"None of this was really hard to do," said Corso. "I felt there were these old arguments about that's not the way it's
done in console games so we shouldn't do it.
"But we decided to just giving you all of these options and settings," he said. "You can even adjust default run speeds."
And don't worry, you can't use them to make the game unplayable.
"All of the settings work well in the game, so we don't feel you can actually break it."