With Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Mario Kart Wii being unleashed on the ravening hoard of Nintendo fanboys we’re (yes I include myself in that frothing mass) facing something of a drought for the rest of 2008. Unless Nintendo breaks out something spectacular at E3 ‘08 the outlook is a bleak one of cheap ports and shovelware. There is, however, some ray of hope… while Nintendo has been perfectly content to give us the dubious privilege of downloading old games that we’ve already played countless times before we’re finally getting some original downloadable content via WiiWare and one game in particular has caught the public eye — Lostwinds.

Reminiscent of the Wind Waker in style and somewhat in theme Lostwinds follows the characters Toku, a young boy with an exceptionally large head, and Enril, a wind spirit. In a sort of single player co-op you use Enril’s power over the wind (controlled by pointing the Wiimote) to aid Toku in traversing the cursed land with strategic gusts.The game looks great on the system which can be partially attributed to the art style. Games with a more stylized look definitely work better on the relatively underpowered Wii hardware (just take a look Okami).

The game is scheduled for a tentative co-release with the launch of Nintendo’s WiiWare service on May 12th but suffice to say whenever it comes out I’ll be there gleefully downloading what looks to be one of the better titles for the Wii this year (note: hype subject to change pending possible announcement of a new Zelda game by Shigeru Miyamoto at E3 08. In such a case all endorsement of upcoming Wii games will be forgotten as the fanboy masses collectively squeal like so many Japanese schoolgirls).

[The history of the Lostwinds world]

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 7:55 pm and is filed under Nintendo, Wii, wiiware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.