Burny

Haven't they been selling practically all their Playstations at a loss when they launched? If so, what are they to do? Just sell at a competitive mass-market price at launch and hope that it will just take a year or two more to be profitable? You can't ask for a high-end gaming machine and expect that you won't have to pay the price. You could ask for more moderately powered or more focused consoles (e.g. just gaming, not trying to win the format war for Blu-Ray while at it) which are priced accordingly. That doesn't seem to be what the Playstation crowd is after though. Oh come on. What more can they do than lose money on each console sold? You want a Blu-Ray player/console before they are ready for mass market with all kinds of bells and whistles? You pay the price. Your other option is buying a XBox 360.

If by "priced decently" you mean they're not going to earn all too much by selling Vitas, then they seemingly have. Otherwise they wouldn't expect it to take up to three years until the system is profitable. Obviously there is no official information on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if memory was the corner they had to cut in order to achieve that price. The low blow is just that they're making their memory quasi-mandatory which puts the effective minimal price at 280$. Which is still rather cheap for what the Vita offers for a mobile system, if expensive by console standards.

The areas surrounding dungeons so far are completely different from what I remember of other Zelda games. Although "completely different" really means they're like intertwined dungeons you've got to traverse, partly by solving puzzles, rather than being plains or corridors you simply run through from the entrance to the exit. All dungeons up to and including the 5th are substantially more streamlined, too. I can't remember having to find more than two or three small keys in any of them. There is another extremely subtle difference: Dungeons seem to have less rooms which are individually loaded, but consist of areas, which can include several rooms that don't have to be loaded individually.

Apparently not. Otherwise I imagine there would hardly be any lamenting.

Close! Wipeout HD Fury It's a good split screen game, too.

If there's one game he should not get first - at least for the PS3 - it's Skyrim. By the time a GOTY edition containing all kinds of DLCs has been released, these issues might have been fixed, too.

Repaper Hyrule field with a cloud texture, make it only traversable with a super fast flying mount for a change, put those few chests, that were worth seeking out, onto flying islands and replace its exits with holes in the clouds, change nothing about the scale whatsoever and you have a Zelda that's no longer about, what Zelda apparently has to be about. Oh, what a little lick of paint can do to the "celebrated" Zelda formula. As for "suddenly" becoming tedious, I don't know. Both Wind Waker and Twilight Princess did their best to make the player traverse as much space as possible, and neither can be "celebrated" for filling that space with a lot of substance.

Just like Wind Waker's then. And they both share what I liked most about Wind Waker's world: a town with interesting people and side quests. Unlike in Wind Waker though, it takes about 30 seconds to travel from Skyloft to practically any point of interest in the land below, where the actual game plays out. Speaking in Wind Waker terms, those 30 seconds would be used to assign the sail and conductor's baton to buttons again, play the melody to warp somewhere and play another melody to change the wind direction. That's before the sailing has even started. I agree with the sentiment that there are too few interesting islands in the clouds and that they could've made it far more interesting than it is. It actually disappointed me at first. On the other hand, here I don't have to search for interesting islands, which I never found in Wind Waker either. They've build a great game in the areas below the clouds, and it takes mere seconds to get there. Seriously, compared to practically all "fast-travel" options in previous Zelda games, Skyward Sword's flying and skydiving to the respective bird statue is lightning fast. What is Zelda about? Having a barren Hyrule field that creates the illusion of a connected world and is in reality little more than a tedious level selection in itself? I'll take what they did in Skyward Sword (up to the fifth dungeon that is): excellent puzzle-mechanics and great pacing and challenges, even if they don't hide the strings well.

Fun, fast, uncomplicated and not in the way of the actual fun stuff. As I mentioned, Skyward Sword doesn't compare to how I invested I felt in OoT. But those were the feelings of a twelve year old, who was scared of the zombies and dropping hands, and no game has actually replicated this since. And I can't actually fault the games for being able to see "the strings", as I grow older. In everything but that fuzzy memory, Skyward Sword stacks up well to my memory of OoT and certainly to Wind Waker. Wind Waker disappointed me in too many aspects and certainly made sure that I never enjoyed the sailing, by making it clumsy and long-winded.

Different expectations, different opinions. I don't think there'll ever be a Zelda that is universally loved again. I don't know if there has ever been one either. After all, there are even those, who maintain that ALttP is the pinnacle of the series and 3D Zeldas were various degrees of boring. People just not getting into motion controls, no matter how good they are, doesn't help either. As does people experiencing faulty motion controls and blaming it on the implementation, when it's actually "homemade" problems, like blocking the sensor bar/heavy interference etc. that create those issues. If I'd start to over-analyze my few complaints with Skyward Sword or just expected it to create a similarly coherent world as OoT and MM, I probably wouldn't like it either. I'd be too busy disliking that it isn't like those other games instead of enjoying its pace, awesome boss fights etc..

How do you measure all of those things? Sparkles? If so, how much magic has Wind Waker in kilo-sparkles? So far, Skyward Sword gives Wind Waker a good spanking in my book, if only for being nearly perfectly paced and not dragging me through the great boredom (read: ocean) that was Wind Wakers overworld. That's before considering I'm enjoying the more linear and focused dungeons, the light and fast paced exploration "puzzles" in the overworld, boss fights and the motion controls immensely, while I can't even remember half of Wind Wakers dungeons, but can distinctly remember being very disappointed in Wind Waker's lack of anything that deserves to be called a coherent land mass. In terms of music and visual consistency, I must say Wind Waker was better or more memorable at least. But after the first four dungeons, and in the new area leading up to the fifth, Skyward Sword is on par with what I remember from OoT, despite all its flaws. I must be strong and stop playing now, as it's not doing my studies much good. Will see how the game's other half stacks up to that around Christmas. It just can't beat my fuzzy twelve-year-old's memory of being completely absorbed int OoT's world though. Edit:

? I admit, it's supposed to be about shooters, but still, in terms of story progression its true for most modern games. Edit: Speaking about story progression, it's also true for Skyward Sword. The one real offender I could make out so far is:

That was the infamous Mega Man Legends 3. An early unfinished preview version should launch alongside the eShop for a small price. Apparently, it would have been used to gauge the interest in the game and decide if it was to be green lit or canceled altogether. It was just canceled.

Here is a complete "walkthrough" of the Lightning and Special Cups. The rainbow road looks brilliant. Devilish, but brilliant.

@The_Peeps @Ronnie The "drift" is an actual limit of Motion+ and I know that it can happen. However, Skyward Sword implements a kind of automatic recalibration. It requires the Wiimote to regularly "see" the sensor bar though. Is there anything in your TV setup preventing the Wiimote from recalibrating this way? E.g. direct sunlight interfering with the Wiimote's IR sensor or something blocking the sensor bar? I've never had the sword lose its calibration within 17+hrs of game time actually, so I can never quiet relate to these issues from my own experience. The only occasion where the game acted up, was what I mentioned earlier and then it was clear that inference with the IR sensor caused it. When I miss strikes, it's due to my own faults. It's usually because I didn't take the time to align them properly and "connected" swings, which naturally only really works, if the swings are on the same line in opposite directions. There isn't a way to just warp your arm to the lower right and swing diagonally to the upper left, when it was on the upper right just fractions of a second ago. That's simply the learning curve here. @Ronnie Sorry about the spoiler, but there isn't much else I could've done in the label. You still have no idea why it occurs and under which circumstances. It also is something rather early in the game. Edit: And telling when it happens, e.g. after dungeon #X, would make it more of a spoiler than it is now.

@The_Peeps

I suppose you're talking about the Hobgoblins? Their defense follows your stance and it's practically impossible to change the stance quickly enough in order to circumvent their defense, as that results in a slash. You need to wait until they attack and then you can land hits. Or you defend with the shield, which should also break their defenses for a while. Alternatively, charge at them and dispatch them before they can get up their defenses.

That's probably an initial calibration of the Wiimote's "center position" for Motion+ pointing or close to it. Did you notice how the pointer behaves completely different from the usual in-game pointer? It seems to use the IR-pointing, albeit at a far lower "refresh rate", a bit like what you have in Epic Mickey. The Motion+ usually has a certain "drift". Like in Wii Sports Resort, when you swing around wildly in table tennis, sometimes the bat's orientation will be off compared to the Wimote's orientation afterwards and you need to completely recalibrate by lying the Wiimote on a flat surface. That's definitely not necessary in Skyward Sword after you've done it once when starting the game, so there must be something at work in the background.

Sneak up on them, place the net's opening directly next to the bug and swing? Does work for me.

I've explained it once in the "spoiler"-thread, I'll quote it here once more:

Found something rather interesting this morning: The game uses the sensor bar somehow. The IR-sensor of the Wiimote was directly exposed to sunlight and the pointer in the map- and collection-screen started to jump around inexplicably. When I covered the IR-sensor with the hand, I could use the pointer again as usual. I can only speculate, but maybe they're using it to automatically recalibrate Motion+, when the Wiimote can "see" the sensor bar.