Gizmodo has contacted Nintendo for comment. Watch this space.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the shoot-n-run-n-solve-puzzles genre - preferring to either just run and shoot, or take my time with puzzle games that don’t involve shooting. This iteration of Zelda has me entranced by the quality of the graphics (normally noticeably inferior to those on the XBox 360 and PSIII) and the sheer playability. Sure, it has some tricky puzzles, but these don’t usually get in the way (and if they do, there are always the “hints” sites!).

See the wikipedia article for more information.

I used to love shoot-em-up games like this - loved DooM and Quake all to bits in my mis-begotten youth. Red Steel allows me to feel like I am young again - the playing experience is what I’ve been missing every time I’ve tried to play one of the successors to Quake.

It is probably the hardest game I’ve enjoyed playing on the Wii - it is sooo easy to die, but that is OK, because if I am silly enough to run into a room surrounded by men with machine pistols on all sides, I deserve it.

See the wikipedia article for more information.

I’m looking for a pure experience of battle from this kind of game, and while this is the closest thing to it that I have found, there is still something missing - I feel a little lost every time I have to stop and think about the puzzles. Fight, fight, fight, yay, but now you have to stop fighting and find some kind of key, aarrgh! Where did the fighting go?

Because this game is cross-platform in a big way, the wikipedia article is quite extensive.

What’s not to love? It is playable, it is fun, and it is a low-impact way to test your skill against the Wii without killing anything.

For more information, see the wikipedia article. It is interesting to note that a lot of the larger game review sites gave it a low score for playability - it probably didn’t appeal to their hair-trigger reflexes.

 Gottlieb Pinball Classics for the Wii is extraordinary - it faithfully reproduces the classic tables of the 1960s through to the 1990s - and reproduces the game playing experience (if you use the nunchuk controller you have a button in each hand). It meets all my Wii criteria - it is fun, it is intuitive, and it has an easy progression from the starter tables up through to the harder ones.

For more details, check out the wikipedia article.

Here’s what CNet has to say about the Wii’s success:

Nintendo’s new strategy is two-pronged. Making the Wii cheaper and easier to play than its rivals attracts a broader range of new customers, including people who never bought a game machine before. With Wii, Nintendo has avoided one mistake it made with GameCube, which was competing with its wealthier rivals on expensive technology-driven performance. While Wii lacks the speed and graphics of PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Wii sets itself apart with novel ideas like its wireless motion-sensor controller that gets game players off the couch and jumping around.

Ground-breaking graphics? Who cares? Fun? Pick me! Pick me!

BOSTON (Reuters) - When Dr. Julio Bonis awoke one Sunday morning with a sore shoulder, he could not figure out what he had done. It felt like a sports injury, but he had been a bit of a couch potato lately.

Then he remembered his new Wii.

Bonis, 29, had spent hours playing Nintendo’s new video game in which players simulate real movements. Bonis had been playing simulated tennis.

It was not quite tennis elbow, he decided.

“The variant in this patient can be labelled more specifically as ‘Wiiitis,’” Bonis, a family practice physician, wrote in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine.

“The treatment consisted of ibuprofen for one week, as well as complete abstinence from playing Wii video games. The patient recovered fully.”

Wiiitis — pronounced “wee-eye-tis” — is the latest ailment to develop from the video game era, beginning with Space Invaders’ wrist in 1981, which was caused by the repeated button mashing required by the popular arcade game.

Reaction to the article has been varied - there is a lot of denial in reader comments on the engadget take, and technorati has 562 links to posts with this tag so far. Interesting - we’ll see whether the world comes to accept Wiiitis as a legitimate condition as more research comes to light.

Today I played Ice Age 2 for the first time, and it was a joy - none of this hold a button down on the nunchuck while waving the controller madly side to side, no, that is not side to side, it is up and down because the $%^&* is tilted, aargh, dead again BS. You run around, and if you want to jump, press A. If you want to wriggle into a hole, or dive, press C. If you want to hit something, shake the heck out of the controller. Sweet.

I still maintain that Nintendo should embrace the chaos, and accept that a lot of people who haven’t played games since DooM was new are now turning on to the wireless splendour of Wii.

The cool thing, in a very post-modern self-referential way, is that my posting on autoblogging will probably end up being autoblogged itself. Wierd