Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles

Pa-rappa The Zapper

So, as I mentioned on the first page, playing Umbrella Chronicles was also my first chance to go hands on with the Nintendo Zapper – a device which lets you wield the Wii controller as a gun. Jack Thompson would be shocked that Nintendo of all companies has finally turned to the dark side.

The Zapper itself is an official low-tech solution to something which there is obviously a huge amount of demand for – just look at all those ghetto remakes on the internet if you don’t believe me. My personal favourite is the Lego Zapper.

The Zapper works very simply. The Wiimote slides into the top of the shell, where two hooks slot in behind it and hold it steady. The buttons are face up and the trigger is hidden – which isn’t a problem because a handle below has a secondary trigger on it, the mechanism for which lines up with the Wiimote.

The bottom of the Zapper has a section that unclips, exposing hooks which the excess cable can be wrapped around and leaving a recess for it to be fed out through. The nunchuck then goes at the back of the Zapper in a second handle, with a little clip which holds it in firmly. The C-stick pokes up out the top, so that it can easily be used.

The nunchuck is then held at the back and the handle below the Wiimote at the front. Then, you just point and shoot – the idea is practically idiot-proof.

Of course, just because something looks good on paper doesn’t mean that it will work very well in reality or that you won’t get a fistful of paper-cuts. Unfortunately, this is the case with the Wii Zapper in my opinion – while it looks like it should work fine, the truth of it all is that the thing is just plain painful to use a lot of the time.


Allow me to explain. The first of the many problems with the Wii Zapper is the placement of the trigger. If you think of a standard rifle or sub-machine gun then you’ll note that the trigger is always at the back – a design which works because it makes the gun more of an extension of your arm while also allowing wrist flexibility. At the same time it lets you use your free hand to steady the barrel so that you can aim better.

The Zapper doesn’t allow any of this. The trigger is at the front, which feels awkward from the off and means that your aim is naturally going to be a bit less accurate. Also, because the nunchuck is directly behind the forwards handle, there isn’t really enough room to position your wrist comfortably.

When you’ve got big man-hands like me, you’re forced into either angling your wrist weirdly along the Zapper and having to hold the whole thing fixedly at arms length or putting both your wrists at right angles and clutching the nunchuck to your sternum. Neither is comfortable and both get painful after more than ten or twenty minutes.

The second major flaw with the Wii Zapper is that it never really feels like you are using a real gun because of the awkward angle of your hands. You can’t clutch it to your soldier because you need your left hand at the back and your thumb on the C-stick. Nor can you hold it one handed in a gangsta-pimp style, as the nunchuck part of the design hurts your wrist. You can try it near your hip, but I found that that made my aim an awful lot worse and, because my right hand was forward, it felt very counter-intuitive and wrong-handed.


There are things to like about the Zapper though, like the way the C and Z buttons are still accessible and the overall aesthetic. However, in terms of actual game performance, I feel that it leaves a lot to be desired. The design also somewhat inhibits the motion-sensitive aspect of the controller – the most effective way to get a response is to shake it from the nunchuck, which means you have to get your hand off the front pretty damn fast.

The more I played with the Zapper, the more I got the impression that the controller had been deliberately designed to not be like a gun. Nintendo is a very family-friendly company and has had a strong history of editing or trimming games to make them more suitable for the mass audience – removing lots of the gore from Mortal Kombat, for example. It’s just possible that, having finally hit mass market appeal with the Wii, the company designed the Zapper to be similar to a gun in design but not in function.

Really, the Zapper doesn’t feel at all like a gun and that fact ruins the entire illusion that it was designed to create. Honestly, you’d be better off just buying yourself a box of Lego.