Bring Back The Wacky Peripherals

thegamer.com:

There was once a music game called Samba de Amigo for the Sega Dreamcast.

In this game, you played a monkey with maracas. Like most music games, this one consisted of hitting the right buttons to the beats on the screen. But unlike most music games, Samba deAmigo could be played with special, expensive maraca controllers. Think the guitars from Guitar Hero, but even more useless and you’re almost there.

And I loved it.

And I miss it.

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I miss that roughly decade and a half of wacky, unnecessarily excessive game peripherals. You know the kind. There was about a 15 year period between the rise of Dance Dance Revolution in the West to you moving apartments and realizing you’re not taking an entire Rock Band set with you for a game you’ll play once a year while drunk and lonely. That and apparently one Tony Hawk’s game’s shitty skateboard controller made every studio executive whisper, “I’m not sure if this is fucking worth it.”

Those peripherals brought in a sense of physical immersion and goofiness that’s not always easy to capture in games. Virtual Reality does a fine job of visually turning your controllers into whatever tool or weapon you need in the moment, but they still feel like controllers in your hands. There’s no illusion of what you’re holding being any physically different.

Goofy, idiotic-looking peripherals also made games into a party. If you’re reading TheGamer, you probably already think games are a party. And they are. For us. People who play games. But, again, there was a time when people you knew who never picked up a fucking PS2 controller were willing to give Guitar Hero or House of the Dead a try.

True, there are still accessories being made for Nintendo