Sunday, December 10, 2006
Super Mario World is no longer the best game ever made
...says me, anyway. Yes, it's true, the new (ish) Zelda game is very very good indeed, and although I've not played the original GameCube version, I don't think the game would be quite as enjoyable without the Wii remote so I'm going to say that this game makes the Wii a must-have console.
There are so many reviews of this game that you can read scattered around the web - most of them featuring scores in the 9s and occasionally, 10s, so I'm not going to critique it too much. The usual negative comments are of course related to the technical aspect of the graphics, that the game's GameCube origins show through too easily. Some of the textures are most definitely very GameCube-like and blurred, and don't make use of the more powerful Wii hardware, but it matters not, because as I've said on this very site countless times, it's the art direction and style that are more important, and this game has some really breathtaking sights and utterly brilliant colour. (Technicalities matter, of course, but not as much as those). At times, the developers manage to pull off dull, murky environments WITHOUT making them look boring and ugly. Again to repeat myself, this game is proof that you can have fairly realistic environments (without painstakingly realistic characters, however) that dont' bore the player to death.
Some of the nicest parts of the game are in the spirit-inhabited Twilight Realm, where Link somehow transforms into a wolf (they pull this off without making it look corny, don't worry) and rides around with Midna, your kick-ass little helper and Navi-replacement, on his back. My friend Adam described the Twilight Realm perfectly, it's a world that feels sort of muted and restrained and almost sad, but none of this rubs off on the player (it's not depressing to play, or anything) because it's oh so pretty. The music, oddly, has echoes of a sort of Silent Hill style in it and is nice and strange at times to hear in a Zelda game.
The controls also work near-perfectly. The Nunchuck attachment to the Wii remote is used to control Link and to lock on to enemies and other objects, and the Remote is used, as you'll probably know by now, to replicate sword movements and to aim using grappling hooks, bows and the like. It's absolutely brilliant fun, for example in a boss fight (this isn't too spoilerrific, don't worry) where you need to grab on to the creature and jab your sword down into its weak spot. The game has a calibration feature where you tell the TV exactly where the sensor bar is sitting for further accuracy, and we were both near-positive that after doing this, ALL Wii games and controls benefited from the calibration.
I don't quite agree with Gamespot's 8.8 review score of this game. I probably would, because normally I respect that site's objectivity, but the problem is that they also rated Wind Waker and Ocarina of Time 9.3 and 10 respectively. This game is better than both of these. I absolutely loved Wind Waker and its visual style, but this is the better of the two for definite. As for Ocarina of Time, I'm sure I'd have loved it back in the day, but like the majority of N64 games, I don't find it playable because the 3D has dated so terribly.
I have no idea if Twilight Princess is going to have the replayability of Super Mario World. I'd guess probably not, because it's the sort of thing you become engrossed in until you finish it or decide to replay it again, rather than the sort of game you can instantly pick up and play, but I do know that Twilight Princess is the most enjoyable experience I've had in a long time and I get the idea I'm almost nowhere near finished it yet.
Posted at 10:07 AM
