Nintendo Wii
Red Steel
At the Wii launch, two titles were on the minds of gamers everywhere, The Legend of Zelda and Red Steel. Despite being a third party title by French developer Ubisoft, Red Steel won over the crowds of Nintendo fans the very first time it was demoed, just because of its amazing styling and intriguing control scheme. Now that we're finally able to play it, it's easy to say the game lives up to expectations.
The first complaint many people try to levy against Red Steel is that it has poor aiming sensitivity. This is by no means a fair comment. While the control scheme may be a bit of an adjustment for most gamers who are used to using an analog stick, it's by no means hard to master and if you take your time and experiment with the sensitivity you should be able to find a setting that works for you.
Occasionally the aiming cursor will jump a few inches on the screen, which did make things a little difficult. However upon further investigation, I discovered this was the fault of the Wii Remote getting confused by the light bulb above my TV. Upon removing excess light the game controlled perfectly.
Grenades, while less refined, also take advantage of the Wii's unique controls by allowing you to toss them or roll them along the floor depending on the movement of the Nunchuk.
Sword controls are a little stiff, and not necessarily the most responsive, but provide quite the exhilarating experience, especially later on when the fights get very fast and very intense. Waving the Wii Remote in any direction will trigger one of several predefined slash animations, while waving the Nunchuk causes you to block or parry.
Aside from that the rest of the controls are standard. A focuses and you can lead forward to zoom. C Jumps, Z ducks, and the analog stick moves you around. Shaking the Nunchuk opens doors and reloads.
Some have complained about your inability to simply pull out your gun during a sword fight, while others claim that having an enemy bow down before you when you show mercy is unrealistic, but any one with those complainers simply doesn't understand Yakuza culture.
The reason you never draw your gun during a sword fight is simply because it's not an honourable action. The same holds true for the enemies bowing down and surrendering after you show mercy, it's a since of respect. The concept may seem odd to western audiences but it adds an extra layer of authenticity to game.
Granted, it doesn't quite make sense to see thugs in a car shop following these rules, but aside from one or two missions most of your battles are against Yakuza and in those cases its perfect.
Story wise you'll be getting a standard Yakuza tale of betrayal and revenge. Things start off in America where you're meeting your fiancé's father for the first time, however things quickly go to hell as you're attacked but an unknown group of Japanese men. Your fiancé gets captured and her father is left for dead.
The first four to five hours of the game deal with you tracking down your kidnapped fiancé but after you track her to Japan the story progression changes drastically. The game goes from being a straightforward linear experience, to a more opened world where you can train your sword and firearm skills and choose whichever mission you wish from an allied Yakuza clan.
Once you've gained enough support from allied Yakuzas then you'll finally be able to rescue your fiancé and restore order to the clans. It may seem a bit thin, but just like many Yakuza movies it's all about the action not the story.
For a shooter Red Steel is surprisingly long, weighing in at about 15 hours. Despite it's length the game never feels like it's running long thanks to long strings of gun battles and sword fights that make the game worth playing in the first place.
Presentation is easily the games strongest asset and while most character models are fairly bland and simple, the animations are solid and smooth. Lighting is absolutely incredible and adds and extra layer of excitement to the many explosion filled arenas of death you'll be battling in.
Cut scenes are like animated panels in a comic book and not only look incredibly cool, but keep the game grounded in the realm of fantasy so that it doesn't seem too far fetched.
Load screens on the other hand are abysmally ugly and look like they were ripped straight off the 3DO. They're generally nothing more then a static image with a spinning animated disc.
Voice work in Red Steel is far from spectacular, but the actually written dialog itself is pretty good. Sound effects on the other hand offer a rich pallet and are well positioned within the 5.1 range offered by Dolby Pro Logic II. Music can be summed up simply as Golden Eye-esque.
Unfortunately the game really bombs when it comes to multiplayer. Aiming is significantly harder and swordplay, for some unknown reason, is completely absent. The only kind of cool multiplayer feature is Killer mode where every player is given secret objectives through the Wii Remote speaker.
It's far from being a prefect experience, but thanks the control scheme and lighting effects Red Steel is a cut above the rest, even in today's world of HD gaming and realistic graphics. Unless you're hands are ridiculously unsteady you should be able to get used to the controls very quickly and with a little effort master them.
Red Steel is a must play launch title and proof that the Wii's control scheme is far more then just a gimmick.
The Legend Of Zelda
Before anything can be said about The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess there are a few points that we need to be discuss. First and foremost, the game is a port of the GameCube version so set your expectations at that level. Second, the game exists on the Wii solely to push product. Nintendo needed a name that guaranteed people were going to overlook the uncertainties of the Wii's philosophy and that name was Zelda. Unfortunately, as an introduction to Wii gaming, The Twilight Princess is a failure.
Motion controls are bland and often consist of little more then just waving the Wii Remote side to side to swing your sword. One would think that you'd at least be able to swing up and down to do a vertical slice attack, but sadly that's just not the case. All motion controls act exactly like a button press, nothing more, and were most likely chosen because there simply aren't enough buttons, not because they were a good idea.
There are a couple of interesting uses of motion control such as using a forward thrust of the Nunchuk to perform a shield bash, but even that is pretty touchy and often you'll end up doing a spin attack instead.
Aiming, the only truly effective use of the Wii Remote, is smooth and surprisingly responsive. The only downside is that if you're not pointing at the screen you'll just sort of be left there, open for attack, unlike with the analog stick where you're guaranteed to be on screen, centered and ready to fire. In the end it's really a trade off and comes down to personal preference.
Having played both the GC and Wii versions of Twilight Princess, it's really hard to say which controls feel better as the classic control scheme feels more familiar and natural, while the Wii scheme gives you a slightly easier time aiming.
Obviously, since the game is just a port it's foolish to expect full integration of the Wii's abilities, but there are so few additions that the game that it often doesn't feel like it justifies its own existence. Fortunately once you get into the heart of the adventure you'll completely forget about the lack of true Wii-ness in the title and just become captivated with the incredible world director Eiji Aonuma and his team have created.
In many ways, The Twilight Princess feels like the series has returned the master sword. Gone is the cutesy art style of The Wind Waker, gone is the overtly queer Tingle born into the series by Majora's Mask, and back is the awesome sense of adventure and excitement you felt the first felt so many years ago. Not since the stellar Ocarina of Time, has a Zelda game felt this complete, this consuming. The only thing missing is a "Hey, listen!"
As you leave your humble beginnings as a lowly stable boy and progress on your way to becoming a true Hero of Hyrule, one thing becomes immensely apparent - it's not the journey but the destination that counts.
For the better part of eight hours you'll be stuck doing annoying fetch quests in a rather lame attempt to introduce you to both the story and the new game play mechanics. It's hands down the slowest opening of any Zelda game and even the Twilight realm, while visually stunning, is a particularly boring experience.
The first time you enter the realm it's kind of cool. The staunch brown earth tones and bloom provokes feelings of hopelessness and depression. You feel the desperation and fear of the trapped souls, but you're also filled with a strong desire to over come the darkness and return light to the damned realm.
Sounds really fun and exciting now doesn't it? Too bad the game play in the twilight realm consists of little more then glorified fetch quests. All you really do is run around killing bugs that are highlighted on your map. That's it. The few puzzles that need to be solved in the realm are also ridiculously easy and provide little entertainment.
Game play as human Link remains pretty much the same as it was in every previous Zelda game. But is that really anything to complain about? Zelda has rarely been known as a series that reinvents the wheel. It success comes from taking the same base and then building upon it to make it look like something else. The story for example, while unique, still follows the traditional Zelda form. The same is true for the games many puzzles. You've seen most of them before, but the fact is they were fun and completing them again is hardly going to detract from the experience.
About eight hours into the game you gain the ability to switch between Link and Wolf-Link at will. Suddenly everything changes. No longer can simply lighting a torch solve puzzles. Instead you'll need to rely on the joint abilities of your human and wolf forms to find the proper solutions and complete the games last few dungeons. Even the final series of battles with Ganondorf require the use of both forms.
Musically The twilight Princess is nothing if not nostalgic. In addition to the traditional scores heard in every Zelda game, it also includes classic Ocarina songs such as Zelda's Lullaby as tunes the wolf can howl to call upon the spirit of a long dead great warrior. This warrior grants you secret hidden skills that make fighting all the more complex and exciting.
There was initially some concern about the darker tone the series has taken and more importantly the Teen rating it received. In some ways they were right. The game does feature some harsher elements such as the Prince of Zora dealing with his mother's execution at the hands of the Twilight King, Zant. Though the execution is not shown the ramifications of it are seen and discussed numerous times throughout the middle of the game.
When you take the time to really examine the story it does become apparent that any elements added to the game that brought it up to a Teen rating were done so in the interest of presenting a better story and not in the interest of shock attention. No smash your brains out, kill your parents, overly moody, hard rock, Warrior Within stuff going on here.
When all is said and done after nearly 20 hours of gaming, you're left feeling a sense of true success. The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess could easily be considered one of the finest games ever produced were it not for the horribly slow opening and tacked on controls that make getting to that ending so hard. It's a great game, but not the greatest game.
