Back when Nintendo first unveiled the controller paradigm that would become the Wii, I was concerned.  My fear was that with all the remote shaking and twisting going on, making Mario run and jump would become some odd pointer-based affair.  As I originally said back in 2005, "How do I make Mario run and jump?  That's all I really want to know.  Tell me how I make Mario run and jump."  Then Super Mario Galaxy appeared, a game that went light on the pointer action compared to other Wii games.  My concerns have been calmed, but there's always that little doubt in the back of my brain that wonders if Mario's next adventure may go heavy on the pointer and light on the control stick.  Luckily, Nintendo's Yoshiaki Koizumi, director of Super Mario Galaxy, had this to say in an interview over at Game|Life:

When we first learned about the concept of the Wii, and were given prototypes, we researched exhaustively: What things are fun to do? What do people want to use it for? From those concepts, we came up with a lot of things that could certainly become games, but at the same time, most of these are not Mario games. It's not a Mario game if you're not controlling Mario moving around. So there's quite a bit of a challenge in applying a pointer function to that.

I'm happy to see that Nintendo's creative folks see the value in making Mario run and jump.  Somehow I don't think I need to worry about that anymore.