The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Hands-On) (Wii) Preview

This is the one many have been waiting for

My first challenge was to get used to the new attacking techniques, which utilise the Wii controls for jabbing, spinning around and so on and so forth. Waggle your freehand controller around to slash away at the beasts that swarm you, or shake the nunchuk quickly to trigger the spin attack that sends groups flying. Just like in Mario Strikers (hands-on report: here), this became second-nature after wandering for a short while and proved to be more fun than merely tapping away frantically on a single button. You need not worry about a lack of accuracy either, as targeting makes a welcome return and you could actually practice on an inanimate scarecrow before heading into the throng of enemies ahead. If you had the patience, that is, and hey, with limited time on the game, would YOU really waste precious seconds like that? Exactly! Although maybe a quick try out of the shield manoeuvring would have been an idea, as I found out later...

There is a LOT of fun to be had with Twilight Princess, despite what a few sources will say about clunky controls. Personally, after reading some E3 reports I was suspicious of what would be here, but I was allayed very quickly as I suddenly became absorbed by the classic Zelda gameplay. But classic-with-a-twist, for I was faced with a batch of monsters shooting arrows at me like crazy. Seriously, there was barely any let-up, which made things awkward as I fumbled to whip out my bow and arrow (using the d-pad to flick easily from sword to secondary weapon), then use the motion sensor-driven arrow shooting technique. The way to do things now is to use the B-button, which is the trigger one on the freehand controller, to draw your arrow back whilst moving the whole thing about to adjust the on-screen target, yet at the same time gently nudging the analogue stick to keep your field of vision from straying away from the targets. When ready, a simple release of 'B' sends the arrow thudding into, hopefully, the enemy you were trying to aim at.

I saw many people struggle immensely with this as I had been wandering early, beer in-hand, but thankfully I was able to adapt to it quite promptly, likely due to having played the precision of Excite Truck (impressions" rel="external" class='fmlink'>http://www.cubed3.com/news/6006/]impressions here) previously, so I was used to gentle movements that did not send the camera into a crazy spin. Once despatched it was time to move on to a puzzle of sorts. I shot round the corner only to find there was a large switch in front of me. It turns out that I had to quickly don my metal boots in order to de-press it, swiftly switch back to the normal ones so I could run and jump off the edge of the nearby platform and then hastily put them back on (Link's skills are amazing

Then there was some more aiming to be done, with arrows being used to shoot through rope holding up a large wooden bridge. This again took a little time to adjust to, but was certainly not difficult to grasp after a couple of tries. What befuddled me was the whirlwind boomerang, mainly because for some reason I completely lost control of the camera when in first-person mode. All you have to do is lock on to four objects, following the points of a letter 'Z' in order (as you could see highlighted on the ground), then let fly with the crazy 'rang. The problem was that I had stood in the wrong place, too close to one particular object and everything went haywire. I blame myself, though, not the game...Overall, whilst my time was nowhere near as extensive as last year's GameCube hands-on, it was definitely clear that Nintendo had melded the Wii controls in sufficiently well and upped some of the graphical goodness to make this stand out from its GC brother. And guess what? I did not collapse on the floor from the fatigue that some developers seem to be talking about from constant wiggling and waggling! As for the fishing demo that was available, unfortunately I did not get time with it, but James might fill you in about his experience at some point.