Besides Nintendo ran out of ideas of the tablet years ago on the DS when they had to resort of poorly controlled Zelda games to "prove" the concept.
Interestingly, I finally got around to playing Phantom Hourglass a few months ago and I found the controls off-putting at first but by the time I was off to my third island, I had learned them and I actually liked them. Just because you have Parkinson's disease does not mean it controls poorly. I even found myself wishing at a couple points that more games had touchscreen controls like it. It's rather disappointing that the only experience I can have of that control scheme seems to only be found in the DS Zelda games. The thought occurred to me that it was a bit like the evolution of point and click PC games from the past but with more fluid movement. Regardless, I had multiple moments of self-awareness where I thought to myself about how clever and well I had been able to adapt to the touch controls and liked them. The game has other issues but, control wise, it's actually pretty sweet unless you're a kindergarten drop-out with an obsessive compulsive disorder keeping you from learning new things or accepting change. And no I'm not talking about Ian Sane or I'd have included rage-a-holic in that description.
And while Ian Sane probably thinks every Zelda game should stick to analogue stick and D-pad controls because his over-excited, shaky, sweaty hands were somehow able to operate the controller ok for half the time that he could finish it, I actually was able to appreciate and acknowledge the genius level ability of the developers at Nintendo for implementing touch screen controls into the game. If they had implemented regular controls, he'd have found something else to complain about with in regards to that game (and there are other more worthwhile and real causes to complain about in it) so saying the controls were the only thing holding back the game and using it to bolster his other lame complaints does not actually help his credibility or help proof whatever case he is making which just seems to be that he hates everything Nintendo has made or done for a decade now.
The fact that the developers challenged themselves to actually look at the hardware and see what they could come up with for new ideas and implemented a new controls scheme so well is something I think is actually rather laudable and praiseworthy over the blanket condemnation Ian will give to anything that's different. Most other companies were, are and will be lazy when it comes to utilizing new hardware features or thinking of new gameplay ideas. Look at the mass amount of first-person shooters being released these days and the complaints of them all lacking imagination or being generically the same. I was ready to pop in Spirit Tracks and play it as soon as I finished up Phantom Hourglass but held off as I've put my backlog in order of what to play next (hello Chrono Trigger. Finally, time to see what all the fuss is about). PH got me excited about Zelda games again. I hadn't played one since Twilight Princess which is at least 6 years ago. There's an example of Nintendo doing everything Ian wants. (Although he'll object that he didn't want a re-hash of OoT even though he will complain when they don't follow the blueprint created multiple console generations ago, that "creativity" is a bullshit word and maxing out the creativity of a system would involve making full use of the hardware power, all of which Twilight Princess does.) Twilight Princess burned me out of the Zelda franchise for awhile. At that point, I'd played Link to the Past, Wind Waker, OoT and then TP in about a 2-3 year span. For me, it is another reason why his rallying cry of Nintendo needing to stick to what they did before, copy their competitors and don't try new controls or ideas is crap. Their utilizing the touchscreen and implementing controls around it made the experience fresh and I'm back on the Zelda bandwagon. It does what Ian erroneously whines it doesn't do.
Nintendo isn't perfect. They get stuff wrong. I'm not always enamoured with Wii Motion controls in some games but that doesn't mean I reject motion controls or any other type of new control style like Touch screen controls because there are also times where I am enamoured with them and think they are better than a regular control scheme. See, I look at and judge games individually on what that specific game does because I can recognize that what one game does and how it operates can be quite different from another game whether it uses the same control method or not. I can enjoy a game like Smash 3DS which pushes the hardware to its limits just like I can appreciate Crosswords 3DS or Rhythm Thief which do not and have controls that deviate from the normal push button method used in Smash 3DS. Those latter games came about thanks to companies deviating from the established blueprint and trying to use new hardware features instead of sticking to the same old.
Or maybe I can appreciate these things because I have some modicum of skill playing video games and I'm not a piss-poor gamer like Ian Sane must be since he's been unable to adapt to anything past the 64/GC era judging by his repetitious complaints. It's getting hard to tell if that is just a blatant insult or the actual truth with him.