ARTICLE

MIGS 2006: Wario Ware and Zelda

By Katie . November 16, 2006 . 12:08pm

In this chapter of the Expo exposé, we’ll p-‘Wii’-view two of the other games playable back at the Summit: Wario Ware: Smooth Moves, and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

First off, it must be said that I didn’t get as much one-on-one action with these two as those in Part 1. Zelda was as maddeningly popular as ever, with some stoic adventurer always standing like a demi-god apart from jealous onlookers, and Wario Ware was attracting a lot of unwitting guinea pigs from that ‘marginal gamer’ set – but certainly they were showing signs of conversion.

Smooth Moves, which has yet a couple months to be released, appeared in demo form, where the player encountered a random sampling of 15 or so of the super-short short stages till Game Over. I was terribly fond of neither the Game Boy Advance nor the DS versions of the game, but… weird things happen when you throw a motion sensor into the mix. Cleverly, each micro-game uses the remote to unexpected ends – literally speaking, you have to constantly hold it at different ends, since in one game you’ll be pumping up a balloon with the Wiimote as handlebar, and in another, you’ll be balancing it waiter-style, flat on your open palm. In keeping with the series’ tradition of acknowledging the founding fathers, Mario Paint’s legendary flyswatting game lives once again through WW, but the uninitiated need not know that, let alone how to play a video game to get the point of these simple affairs.

Zelda, it could be said, hails from a breed diametrically-opposed to all things casual. Moving link around with the joystick and his fairy friend with the remote, instant satisfaction is derived from finally having Navi, who to no end annoyed our hero in his Ocarina-spurred adventures through Time, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, finally fallen under player control. The menus and maps come up with the first and second number buttons respectively, while ‘A’ is for action, like rolling.

The sad fact is that, as a gamer professing to be of the one same breed as this game, I got stuck. I maintain that it wasn’t entirely my fault – I’d watched a lucky person get a bird’s eye view as the hawk and fetch a basket from a stony pedestal, and I’d watched Link become the wolf and gouge him some twilight denizen behind. The problem was the part in between, the part where I had nothing but a fishing rod and hope for a slingshot, if only to shoot pebbles into pumpkins. As he waited for a bite, a relaxed Link seemed to let the camera tilt forever upwards so that plenty of sky was visible, but not so much water. Apparently the demo’s Frustration with Fishing has been sufficiently documented thus far, and I hope to try again in the full version, because by the end, I really didn’t like those fish.

But anyway, as neighbouring stands, Zelda and Wario revealed in their stark contrast an unprecedented breadth in style across a single console.