Nintendo Still Nintendo Despite Wii-volution

Nintendo has a bad habit of promising something really incredible, getting everyone worked up over it, and then pulling some truly underhanded business moves and screwing everything up.

With the Nintendo 64 it was the inflated cartridge production costs that kept third-party publishers at bay. With the GameCube it was the insurmountable “kiddie” image and even more third-party disdain. But everything was looking up for the Wii, until today.

Speaking with Japan’s Nintendo Dream magazine, Shigeru Miyamoto revealed some perplexing new changes to Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess’ gameplay. In the E3 demo the B button was used for sword attacks; the developers were worried that players may get tired after swinging their arm at the screen a few thousand times a day. Now suddenly Miyamoto has confirmed that all sword attacks will be performed by waving around the remote, citing that, “Upon actually playing it, it’s more interesting this way.”

Well sure, it’s more interesting, but does that make it fun or even tolerable? My sole worry about the Wii is that I’ll never feel like playing a game (especially something as lengthy as Zelda) if I have to practically stand in front of my TV and wave my arms around all day. With motion sensors in both the WiiWand and the Nunchuck you can’t just sit, relax and leisurely play. A few control options would be fantastic but this is Nintendo, they still refuse to give you Sound FX and Music controls in most of their games.

But even worse than some tiring Zelda controls is the prospect of cheap GameCube remakes. Still speaking to Nintendo Dream, Miyamoto reveals that, “The machine is based on GC. We’ll be upgrading the development tools, but GameCube code can be used for the most part as is. In that sense, I believe that it would be good to remake GameCube games for Wii, and that some titles would become better with the change to the Wii remote controller.”

Nintendo may not be jumping on the microtransaction bandwagon but they’ve got their own cunning ways to get gamers to pay for quickly-produced, overpriced nostalgia. They’ve already got thousands of games ready to sell through their Virtual Console and now they can just copy, paste and remap GameCube controls and call it Luigi’s Mansion Special Edition.

And what will they say when it’s been over a month since the last good Wii game? “Please preoccupy yourself with Yoshi’s Cookie or our reimagined version of Geist.” Great, I just can’t wait.