Ninja

Fall 2007, eh? Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is coming out on PC, PS3 and 360 around the same time. I wonder if they'll move their release date forward to avoid being overshadowed? I love my Half-Life, but if I could only buy one, Halo would win by a hair.

Diskoboy: there actually are Nazi U-boat submarine sims. Ubisoft's Silent Hunter series is a such, a slow-paced, strategic U-boat sim. You play as the ship's commander, completing missions, and using a compass, map and radar or perscope to slowly hunt down enemy vessels and Allied submarines. If you play in later years, when U-boats are few and the waters are swarming with allied vessels, you are more the hunted than the hunter. Silent Hunter III was an interesting game, though much too slow-paced for my tastes.

Optimus Prime:

Excite Truck and Red Steel are *launch titles*. They're built around a completely new control style that the game's developers were completely new to, and on top of that, Red Steel and (probably) Excite Truck were more than a bit rushed. The Wii's motion sensing is tricky



to write for, and it was expected that the first batch of games would have some control problems.

Red Steel was a pain to control, but I've heard that Call of Duty 3 and Metroid Prime 3 have better controls. Excite Truck's controls were a bit too sensitive.

But it's not all about which control system is the most precise; it's about which is the most fun to play. Excite Truck might be shallow, and the controls were certainly flawed, but having to tilt the controller like a mad man made the game infinitely more fun than it would have been using a standard analog controller. Zelda with the Wiimote was essentially the same experience, but the simple motion of waving your sword and aiming your bow made it feel more visceral. Super Monkey Ball is basically the same game as before, but the new control scheme makes it genuinely more fun. Some of that may be novelty, but not all of it is.

There's a reason Sony decided to put a half-assed Wii knockoff in their controller. Nintendo invented the D-pad, analog stick, and rumble pack, all of which have since become hallmarks of gaming. They've had their designs ripped off by Sega, Sony and (indirectly) Microsoft. The company knows their controls. In a few years, if the Wii succeeds, a dualshock, wavebird of controller-S might look as primitive as a NES controller or Atari joystick does today.