(Don’t care about video games? Well…be that way).
As Saturday turned to Sunday, I stood in line with 31 other mostly male, mostly white, mostly twentysomethings, for the privilege of picking up a pre-ordered Nintendo Wii. It was wholly worth the midnight line and the one-year wait preceding.
Does anyone not know about the Wii? Nintendo, seeking to regain some of the market share it lost to the mighty Sony Playstation, has opted to sit out the graphics war for this console generation, in favor of gameplay. And to that end, they have designed the most brilliant advance in video game contollers since some forward-thinking individual first you could have buttons and joysticks on the same arcade game: a wireless, motion-sensitive remote pointer. It could have been a boondoggle of a gimmick; but it is not. Oh, how it is not.
I’ll get to gameplay in a moment, but first indulge me in a bit of rapture over how delicate and tiny everything is: everything is so delicate and tiny! The system is the size of a trade paperback, the remote is smaller than my hand from wrist to fingertip. It is like a fairy-designed video game. The nunchuck, a peripheral that plugs into the remote, is so light that it hardly seems credible it has electronics at all, let alone a motion sensor. And the sleek whitness of everything makes this, bar none, the best-looking video game console I’ve ever seen.
As to the games: so far, I’ve only played three (in what I can only call a mortall sin of omission, I have not yet opened my copy of Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz). Of these, the pack-in Wii Sports is the only weak title, and even then it suffers only for being what it was meant to be: a shallow introduction to the controller, the game that would make this the system your grandmother could play.* Of the five sports included, only two – Golf and Boxing – are simply bad. Baseball suffers from a lack of depth (you pitch, or you hit), but it’s a little addictive even so. Tennis is a good simulation: the remote is about the right weight for a light tennis racket, and swinging it back and forth feels natural in a way that e.g. swinging the remote like a bat seems “wrong.” The standout is Bowling, by far: you swing the remote like a ball, but as it is somewhere around 1/40 of the weight, it’s much easier and hence fun. You will not believe that you can put a spin on a plastic remote until you try it.
A much more exciting demonstration of the controller can be found in Rayman Raving Rabbids, a French game starring one of the most annoying characters to ever have a series of platformers. Luckily, the new game is not a platformer, but a collection of mini-games: Mario Party without the dross of being a boardgame simulation. The game was redesigned from the ground up to take the fullest advantage of the new controls, and thus we find hugely imaginative games such as using the nunchuck to pump up a firehouse of carrot juice which you aim with the remote, or drumming along to “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” to kill bunnies. Even the ideas that seem a bit more obvious – raising the controls in both hands to operate a handcart, spinning a cow around on a chain (yes, I said “more obvious”; no, I don’t know why) – are executed flawlessly. This is the game to break out when friends come over to see this strange new Wii.
Of course, the Big Deal for anyone who knows anyone about the system is The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the most anticipated launch title in Nintendo history and maybe the industry as a whole. Speaking as a longtime worshipper of the Zelda series, I had high expectations, and they were well-surpassed. To begin with, it’s beautiful: although the Wii is not much more powerful than a Gamecube (and the other games I’ve played reflect that), Zelda looks far better than I ever imagined that system capable of – rather amazing considering that it was designed for the Gamecube. It is certainly not so eye-popping as an average XBox 360 title, but the designers use the limitations of the hardware to create a painterly masterpiece.
The game itself is beyond my dreams, to such a degree that I don’t really feel qualified to comment on it just yet. It’s vast: after more than eight hours, I only managed to get about 15-18% into the game. Maybe less, it’s hard to tell. After my epic battle with The Wind Waker (which luckily took place during college & therefore my fifteen hour days, lack of eating and bathing, and fitful sleeping for a week were not permanently damaging, even though I have literally no memory of that time), I was expecting to be amazed at the game’s scope; but at a point when I’d be almost through some of the earliest games in the series, I haven’t even encountered the main plot yet. It’s huge in the most exciting way possible.
And it’s perfectly adapted to the Wii. After only a short time with the remote, I can hardly imagine how I could ever go back to using a button to swing a sword or aim a bow; this is the control scheme that 3-D Zelda has been waiting for since 1998. There is only one complaint, and it is not very large: the remote has a built-in speaker, and it is used a great deal in this game, and it sounds awful. In fact, when I was trying to think of what bleeping electronic gizmo sounds as bad as the remote speaker, I couldn’t come up with anything. Maybe those novelty talking cards, but probably not even that.
I’ve spent 30 minutes writing this, which is 30 minutes that I haven’t been playing, and that is a bad thing. Not as bad as the thick file of “to review” movies that I want to cover before Thanksgiving…ah, the responsibilities of my busy life.