As a programmer, I use the power of indirection all the time. While indirection grants you flexibility, it also makes things less efficient. That’s the story of LostWinds’ innovation: instead of a Jump button, you get a Swish button that makes the wind blow. You can Swish your player to jump, but you can also Swish enemies, items and scenery to do lots of other things. LostWinds replaces several special-purpose buttons with one general mechanism. That’s the elegance of indirection.

I wish it worked in LostWinds. It doesn’t, really. It seems like replacing one button with one gesture would get you the simplicity of Mario’s 1-button jump with the flexibility of Metal Gear’s 8-button CQC system. Well, you kind of get that…about 33% of the time. Another 1/3 of the time, the game misinterprets your gesture and the last 1/3, the Wii fails to register your gesture at all.

LostWinds is a platformer that is mostly about puzzles instead of action. It tries very hard to exude an indy feel: there’s a little direct story-telling but most of it is picked up along the way or, even better, exuded by sheer force of personality. There are numerous variations to the gameplay in a short amount of time. In this respect, it’s a good game. If you are interested in playing, though, you should start with the first of the two games. The second game assumes that you have already played the first.

This assumption is a problem because the learning curve on basic jumping is huge—3-4 hours for me—and since the designers assume that you have already learned how to platform in the first game, the first hour of the game plops a timer on you as you platform from safe point to safe point.

For the beginner, this is supremely frustrating in many highly innovative ways. The timer gives you about enough time to make two mistakes on the way to the next safe point. After the first mistake, you have to decide whether to keep trying. If you opt to go back to the last safe point and start over, you spend extra time. If you try a second time, the Wiimote starts buzzing madly as the timer continues to run down. But if you’re like me and only start up the Wii once a month, that means your Wiimote battery is now running down almost as fast as your timer. So you run up to the ledge, make the attempt, fail it, and run back to the safe point. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Add 5 seconds of dead time between each attempt to learn how to platform in this stupid game.

If you’re going to make players suffer like this, don’t put it at the beginning of the game! Do like Metroid’ 2 (and Mario World, and Mario Galaxy…) and at least put it partway in, after the new players have a chance to figure out the controls.

Even after I mastered the jumping, there were new and exciting ways to fail. There is a section when you have to lift 3 items to the top of the screen. These items have two salient points: (1) they are round and (2) they burn. So, unlike Our Hero, they roll around when flung upwards onto tiny platforms. Have you played the awesome game Population Tire? Imagine that 3 screens taller, made a tiny bit easier by having intermediate platforms. Except that, if you Swish too close to a torch, the tire burns up and you have to start over at the bottom. Actually, I encourage you to play Population Tire and then play the Wii version. Even though the Wii version is considerably slowed down, it’s still harder than using a mouse.

I finally learned (from watching a video walkthrough) that you can use the Guide technique to lift non-Hero items gently along a path, which minimises rolling at the end. That way you just have to worry about the fire.

A final technique that I never got good at was drawing circles. I don’t know if it’s a problem with how I hold the Wiimote, or how the software recognises the circles, or maybe just a mismatch with human physiology, but drawing circles is NOT easy. Drawing polygons is easy enough, but they’re never really round. More…squished. I have this problem in Okami too, where circles are just as important, although at least Okami pauses completely while you’re drawing instead of going into slow-motion.

So I didn’t like the gameplay. Unlike Banjo-Kazooie, which also innovated its way into an annoying game, I have a harder time disliking the game as a whole. It helps that outside gameplay, the presentation and story-telling are appealing and cute. I think the more important reason is that the innovation here isn’t inherently a bad idea (unlike “vehicle-based platformer"). It’s just crippled by a crappy input device and slightly dodgy recognition. This game would be so much better with a mouse, it’s not even funny. Seriously. I really hope it’s ported to PC at some point. If it were not a downloadable game, even 360/PS3 ports would be feasible because they could just pack in a $5 USB mouse.

One important point I take away from this is that I am just about done with the Wii. The platform, like most winning crappy-grey-box platforms, is short on inherent value compared to alternatives–good software is good in spite of the platform, not because of it. But there’s not much good software on the Wii, at least compared to 3 years into the PS2’s life. In other words, I really wish I had bought a Wii at the end of its lifetime like I did the PS2. That way I could buy only the really good games and not have to suffer through the gimmicky or unusable innovations. As I think back over every game that has used the Wiimote well so far, they would ALL (all!) be better with mouse control*. The things they do are cool, but the Wiimote is so finicky and inaccurate that in all cases, there is (1) a huge training time and (2) I am MORE likely to quit the game out of annoyance.

I’m not sure what my final opinion of the game is; I think I’d like it a lot better after a second playthrough. Maybe it’s just one of those games you have to play more than once. One thing I’m sure about: this is the last time I buy a game based solely on the Brainy Gamer’s recommendation. Our tastes are just too different. I think Michael is the typical arts professor: he values certain things highly, like emotion and innovation, and has a huge capacity to enjoy a game despite its problems. As for me, I don’t value innovation nearly as much, and I can’t ignore problems as well.

*In case you’re wondering, the list is: World of Goo, LostWinds, Metroid’ 3 and Okami.

But there’s a another list of games for which Wiimote control is peripheral. Mario Galaxy and Zelda: Twilight Princess wouldn’t lose much on a Gamecube controller except arm fatigue. And games like Fire Emblem and Smash Brothers encourage you to use a Gamecube controller.