I’m trying hard to enjoy Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii, but I’m having a hard time. Here’s why:

The camera is annoying. Not being able to control the camera is a serious flaw of the single stick control (nunchuck) system that the Wii has. I am constantly fighting Link to get the proper view. I am pressing the C button constantly to re-center my view, but it simply is not enough. It makes jumping puzzles where you need to align Link with the platform needlessly difficult. For the mini-bosses they should have taken a tip from Psychonauts and had the camera lock on the boss, even when you’re not targeting.

The game is super-linear. So far, anyway. I do enjoy linear games, but Twilight Princess is frustratingly so. Several times it makes you retread old ground while at the same time arbitrarily locking you out of new locations, and special-case closed locations and cutscene triggers that interrupt gameplay and move you to a new location are heavily relied upon to tell us the story. For a world that is as big as it is, TP ends up feeling incredibly small and closed.

Rookie UI mistakes So they have this new pointing device that’s relatively new, and pretty sensitive. Why oh why, when you die, do they stick small “Yes” and “No” buttons up in the upper right corner of the screen, with perhaps a 5 pixel gap between them? I just ended up quitting instead of restarting because my Wii aim is not quite up to par.

No save-anywhere. Actually, you can save anywhere, you just actually won’t be there when you reload your game, and you’ll have to work your way back through a location re-solving the puzzles you already solved just to pick up from where you left off. Come on Nintendo, this is 2007! Why the $@! can I not save where I want to and be able to be there again when I return?!

I sure hope the Phantom Hourglass is better. It looking like it’s got ten times the charm and style of the Twilight Princess.

I just updated my Wii and the new Wii News Channel was available.

The pros

• Resizable text. It uses an animated word wrapping system that makes the iPhone jealous, no less.
• Interactive Globe UI that shows news stories by location. Not sure how useful it is, but it’s got an element of coolness to it.
• Once it’s loaded there’s zero wait.

The cons

• Man, does it take forever to load
• The articles occasionally feature URLs, but they’re not clickable.
• Pretty much just standard associated press articles with the occasional photo sprinkled in. It didn’t appear to have anything in-depth.
• Did I mention it was slow to load?

Overall it’s a cool little piece of technology, a great working demonstration of what the Wii can do outside of gaming, and it may appeal to the non-gamer that Nintendo has been chasing with the Wii. But with the exception of their interactive globe, the Internet is a faster and more interactive way to get the same news, hands down. I hope Nintendo isn’t putting effort into these types of channels at the expensive of games. The news channel is not going to convert anyone.

UPDATE: subsequent uses of it have been pretty peppy, and it seems to occasionally download news even when the unit is off, which enables its speed.

On Sunday I woke up at 7:45 to get a Wii. My plan was to head over to Best Buy (which opens at 11:00) because they advertised having at least twenty in stock. On the drive over I decided to stop in and see if Target had any in stock because they open at 8:00. When I pulled into the parking lot, I was pretty shocked to see there was a huge line. They had eighty Wiis, and gave out vouchers to eighty people, I was told.

I figured if Target had eighty, then Best Buy must have hundreds. I was wrong. When I got there, there was one person in line, but there were signs saying they had already handed out vouchers for their twenty units. Defeated, I headed on home, but stopped by Gamestop just in case. I saw a small group of people outside, and decided to park the car and head on over. Read the rest of this entry

As a video game designer and a television user interface designer, I’ve been paying close attention to the Nintendo Revolution Wii with baited breath. And now that Nintendo has shown what they’ve got, I am confident that within the next five to 10 years Nintendo’s controller concept will spill out of the video game arena and become the desired input style for TV-based UIs like televisions and set top boxes. Read the rest of this entry