The only two Wii Revolution titles I’ve gotten around to picking up so far are Zelda and ExciteTruck. Zelda is a topic that I have difficulty dredging up the appropriate words for. It’s an excellent game that almost everyone will enjoy, even though the controls on the Revolution version display the kind of tired, inside-the-box thinking that developers are going to have to learn to get around when porting classic genres over to this new medium.

ExciteTruck, on the other hand, is a bit more complex. It has a pretty distinct learning curve that’s going to throw off people expecting to pick it up and go the same way they did with Wii Sports. Hell, for the longest time I wasn’t even steering the damn thing right. If you think about holding the remote in both hands with the top side facing the ceiling, you tilt the controller like an airplane banking as opposed to rotating it like you might the steering wheel on a school bus, which is still a control scheme I sometimes have difficulty with.

The game itself revolves around what could be considered “style points” — which you accumulate for big jumps, drifting, driving haphazardly through trees, etc. — and not on actually winning the race, though you do receive points for that. This means there’s accommodation for more than one driving style, although there is a certain minimum level of trick performance you’ll have to squeeze out if you want to go anywhere. My friend Lantius and I have actually turned the game into somewhat of a cooperative effort through some rather unorthodox methods. He has the exact kind of sloppy driving that translates into big points whereas I have a kind of strange precision that nets a lot of first place finishes, and so we’ll actually have him start off on a track to wrack up a healthy base of points before handing off to me to net the big points for winning. If you’re the sort of person who’s tolerant of watching other people play, it’s a pretty good way to spend the evening with your buddies.

Again, however, I’m finding myself miffed at the lack of even basic online multiplayer that Microsoft successfully taught me to expect. I understand the time concerns that forced Nintendo’s hand in terms of a release schedule, but when a corporate entity is trying to convince me that they really get it and are into this hip “connectivity” thing that the kids are so crazy about, this isn’t exactly starting our relationship off on the right foot.

Like many of you, I own an HD-capable television and was thus disgusted with Nintendo’s choice to put old-fashioned composite cables in-box with the Revolution, apparently because it made better financial sense than simply packing in an RF adapter and hiring men to hang around game retailers punching consumers in the balls. This would have been merely slightly irritating and not hand-stapled-to-the-forehead ridiculous if they hadn’t grossly miscalculated the demand on component cables and completely sold out before the damn console even hit shelves. If you’re on the hunt for component cables right now, here’s what Nintendo’s online store has to say about it:

Orders entered prior to Wednesday, November 22, 2006 will be shipped on or after November 28. Orders entered on or after Wednesday November 22, 2006 will ship when our new quantities arrive (week of December 18, 2006).

Please note: The Component Video Cable will also be available at select retail outlets (GameStop, Best Buy, Circuit City) starting in mid-December.

I had an order placed on Monday the 20th, and I can confirm that I got an email tonight confirming my cables had been shipped, so all is not lost. Still, I feel bad for any poor bastards who may have to wait past Christmas to get theirs. As Gamespot’s cable comparison shows, it brings quite a bit of visual clarity to the table.

On a related note, I’m going to try and go back to the Revolution name, and I encourage you to come with me on this journey. It’s the bloggers that ruined it for me. If I see one more headline using “Wii” as a cutesy homonym, I’m going to stab someone in the fucking jaw.

There’s four new videos over at Wii.com of some guys playing Twilight Princess. Again, let’s be clear that this video is of them and not of the game itself, though in my mind that’s a good thing. I don’t need any more videos or screenshots of the game itself, because I’ve been playing with that level of graphic processing power for about five years now and so I have a pretty good idea what it fucking looks like. The innovation is in how you control the damn thing, and that’s exactly what I want to watch.

For example, the aforementioned Zelda videos are telling me that someone got it right when they suggested adding more freehand controls, and this video of the Wii Double Agent port tells me that I don’t need to pick up that stinker anytime soon.

And the new name is…

Yeah, it doesn’t make any fucking sense to me, either. If your codename is cooler than anything your marketing gurus can come up with, just stick with it, I say.

UPDATE: There’s a short but moderately interesting interview w/ Nintendo Marketing VP Perrin Kaplan over at CNN Money’s Game Over column. If clicking that link seems wearisome, I’ll spoil the surprise for you: Kaplan reveals that they announced the name now and not at E3 so that the uproar over the name will have time to subside and gamers won’t be distracted away from the titles shown at the show. In other words, they announced it early because they expected people to hate it and they want to give people time to cool down. That’s quite the business strategy, guys.

It has been suggested that I have forgotten how to write at a fundamental level. Typically, the suggestion actually comes from myself, frequently as I am sitting on the bus idly remembering that I actually own a website. So please consider this my attempt at testing that assertion.

Just over a week ago I had the opportunity to attend Nintendo’s Gamer Summit in Redmond. I had the good fortune to make the invite list because my day job affords me a title that implies I am some kind of real journalist with actual prestige or something, even though this is false. Any time I’m at one of these press junkets, I feel like I have actually infiltrated the thing like I was Sam Fisher or something. Whenever I’m approached by someone new I fear that I have been discovered and tense up, ready to drop a smoke bomb before beating a hasty retreat. Unfortunately for everyone else, I have not yet had to employ the covert operative moves that I foolishly believe video games have trained me to perform, as there were actual video cameras at this thing and I’ve no doubt that I would have already ended up alongside the Star Wars Kid on torrent sites around the globe.

Anyway, if there was one message I took away from the two day event, it’s that Nintendo wants you to buy a DS very, very badly. Indeed, the first day was devoted entirely to the device, with a heavy focus on its miraculous new wifi capabilities. To their credit, they’re providing some very solid reasons for you to make that purchase. If you will, pause for a moment and consider what it means for me to have written that previous sentence. I have spent the entirety of my time between the unveiling of the DS at E3 2004 and the launch of Kirby’s Canvas Curse ridiculing the device, so when I tell you that I carry my DS with my everywhere while my PSP sits at home gathering dust, you need to understand the weight of such a statement. It’s certainly not a position I would have ever imagined myself in even a short time ago.

We were also the recipients of a short presentation by Nintendo’s VP of Marketing, Reggie Fils-Aime, most of which you can view for free over at IGN, if you are so inclined (you can actually see the back of my head to the left of some of the shots). He talked mostly about how the industry has become stagnant and needs “disruptive technologies” to shake things up, the idea being that while improved resolutions and more texture passes are all fine and well, they’re not the kind of innovation that will really expand the games market. It was all very interesting stuff to hear, but I can’t say that I’m totally convinced this was much more than simply towing out the company line. He quoted some interesting but incredibly bleak numbers regarding channel growth, but the problem is that they were so bleak that I eventually mistrusted them. But assuming you take the assertion that the industry’s primary demographic is becoming steadily less interested in games, it’s not too difficult to understand why Nintendo might feel that abandoning the race for HD to focus on catering to non-hardcore gamers is the way to go.

A quick aside about Reggie: Maybe I’m the only one, but I felt like he had a very commanding, intimidating presence. It could easily be the sort of thing one simply learns in business school, I honestly don’t know, but I would certainly not care to cross him. At one point during his presentation, he had set his red DS (which will be available as part of a Mario Kart bundle later this month) down on the table I was sitting at, so I reached over and grabbed it so that I might examine it and take a photo. It slowly dawned on me that I might actually be stealing his personal property, and I was immediately filled with fear. It would not surprise me to learn that he could leap over the table, snap my neck, and land like a cat in the space between Powerpoint slides.

Anyway, back to the actual games. There are a lot of good ones; too many to talk about them all in detail, really. Suffice to say, in the immediate future you’re going to want to acquire Mario Kart DS, Animal Crossing DS, and Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time. The first two of those three are an absolute blast to play over their new Nintendo WiFi service, which is perhaps the most ridiculously easy online gaming experience I’ve ever had. I have not played any of the Mario RPG games since the original Super Mario RPG, and Partners in Time has reminded me what a mistake this was. The interesting thing is that each of the buttons on the DS corresponds not to an action, but to one of the Mario brothers (Mario, Luigi, Baby Mario, Baby Luigi), which I’ve been told eventually leads to some kind of Zen state during gameplay. If I get enough time later in the week, I’ll try to make some more detailed posts regarding these titles.