Remember when the Powerglove was supposed to be revolutionary? A kids imagination running wild with fantasies about moving Link or Mario around with just a flick of the wrist , an attack with a finger twitch, and a jump with a twist it. But this was still not as intuitive partly because the Powerglove was an elephant’s turd, but also because the games weren’t built for controls other than the native controller. This is also why the gimmicks of the Wii and all of its peripherals seemed like gimmicks, because they felt like after-thoughts to the game instead of being involved in the initial inspiration of the game.
Arcade games had a better potential with these kinds of non-directional pad controllers because they had a game in mind where non-d-pad interaction was part of the core design. Light-gun games where you shoot the screen, punching games where you hit a physical pad, dancing games where you mash buttons on the floor. Having the space for peripherals outside of the d-pad helped inspire completely different genres of games or, at the very least, re-interpret the genre in a different way to help spawn different types of games.
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