Sunday, January 28, 2007

Curiouser and curiouser.

It seems that there are rumblings and plans and plots to re-instate the presently-defunct Masterpiece Round Table Discussion Theater. All I need to do is obtain me a microphone for my computor, and I can join in the adventure. Exciting times. Too long has the world been without, I think.

In other news, I managed to play Twilight Princess the other day, which has convinced me more than even before that the Wii is the most awexome gaming platform ever created. There was a LOT of room for the control system to by dodgy and nonintuitive; a lot of potential for it to be overly complicated or overly simplistic; there's a close sort of middle ground that Nintendo had to walk, and they walked it as well as I knew they would. I know no better way to say this: the buttons are all in the right place. It's a vague compliment to be sure, but meaningful: consider that it's not true of any X-Box controller I've used (with excellent triggers but whose black and white buttons are woefully misplaced in the small incarnation, and which is just all wrong in the big incarnation), or either generation PlayStation controller, but WAS true of the GameCube. Nintendo knows how to design controllers... is it a tremendous surprise that all the home console controllers for the last twenty years have been incresingly upgraded adaptations of the original NES paddle? And now, they've abandoned their own design and gone off in a crazy new direction. It's a fantastic control system, and the potential for it to be grossly misused is there, of course, but it can also be used perfectly, and I have firsthand experience of that now. Gotta love the Wii.

3 Comments:

Blogger Aaron Poppleton said...

The problem, of course, comes with the fact that third party developers get frightened by the fact that all of Nintendo's first party IPs beat the shit out of the half-ass crap they put out.

Only Ubisoft has the balls to do something about it, God love 'em.

1/29/2007 5:56 AM  
Blogger Vincent Avatar said...

The problem with the Ubisoft, of course, is that they might be prone to just graft some half-assed Wii controls onto a last-gen game and release it for the Wii. Now, if the controls be nifty, I don't have a problem with this business strategy, but if they are, in fact, half-assed, then there may be cause for fisticuffs!

Twilight Princess, however, has one of the sweetest control schemes ever to grace the gaming world, and rivals the Ocarina of Time control scheme for innovation and sheer ease of use and joy.

Man, now I want to go play it.

1/29/2007 10:10 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I just bought Twilight Princess- but for gamecube. Havent played it yet.
It should still be a sick game even with OS controlls.

1/29/2007 2:46 PM  

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