For a great control example I'll point at Chou Soujuu Mecha MG (Super Control Robot MG) by Sandlot (published by Nintendo on the DS), the same company that made a Tetsujin 28-go videogame, Robot Alchemic Drive (which had the same remote operated robot premise) and of course the Earth Defense Force games. In CSMMG you have the basic dpad controls for movement but most of the controls are on the touchscreen. These aren't just a fire button or radar operation, these are intricate mechanisms you have to interact with to get your mech to do what you want it to do. E.g. one mech has a transformable vehicle form that has a giant doom laser on top. To activate it you have to flip a row of switches (I think the Death Star firing sequence in Star Wars included a scene like that, as did a scene where He-Man prepares to fire a planetbuster missile in Masters Of The Universe). The steam-powered locomotive mech actually requires you to shovel coal into the burner and then turn the steam valves to allocate power to the steam-powered nunchakus or the cannon. On the nuke missile launcher when you activate the launch sequence you're prompted to enter a 4 digit code before it will reveal the big red "fire!" button. The pistolero mech has you reloading the revolvers by pulling cartridges from the ammo pile into the chambers of the gun. Maneuvering an electric train mech in train mode uses sliders, making it much harder to use for racing than a car mech that lets you use the throttle and brakes with the dpad so you can keep the pen on the steering wheel. The game is awesome and the cumbersome controls on some mechs actually balance them out because they're really damn powerful when fully operational (fighting against the locomotive makes it seem like an ubermech but actually operating the thing is so hard you'll probably not get to use its full power).
As for pointing at VOTOMS as another vector of "samurai infection", I'm not sure about that. While soldiers are treated as expendable it's more like the Empire of Man from Warhammer 40k, simply wasting them because it can be afforded. The first battle of Pailsen Files has about 200000 men (all in mechs) sent to certain death on a D-Day style beach landing while the final battle sees a deployment of 120 million men just from the Gilgamesh army. The actual characters aren't sacrificing their bodies, they try to stay alive at all costs and a mech is used as one of the possible weapons to get that done (and if you can't find an empty one just shoot the sensors out of one so the pilot has to look out of the hatch, then shoot him in the face). If you see the pilot as the soul and the mech as the body, sure, then it applies, even heroes get their mechs wrecked constantly and usually they fight to make the enemy's mech fall apart faster than their own, finally bailing out when the mech is destroyed but a lot of the story in the OVAs is about how having plot armor doesn't help when you've got an objective to accomplish, it only lets you come out alive but usually with everyone else dead*, the mission failed and you getting hated for using your comrades as a meatshield.
*=What can I say? I've seen it happen in Starlancer, usually the only ones to get out of a battle alive were the ones with plot shields or whose death would have made the mission fail, everyone else was dead.
I'm taking my ZGMF-X10A Freedom and you can't stop me!
