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While I’m waiting for the Amazon.com “Gold Box For Gamers” which begins at midnight PST, it seems like a good time to comment on completing LostWinds. This was my first WiiWare purchase, 1,000 points (10 USD) and it provide exactly 7 hours of gameplay.

• 2008-12-28 – 2hrs 54min (co-op with my wife)
• 2008-12-30 – 2hrs 12min (1/2 co-op with my wife)
• 2009-01-07 – 1hrs 15min (alone)
• 2009-01-11 – 39min (alone)

Overall, I’d say it was worth the money and a mostly enjoyable experience. It’s like a simplified Zelda game that makes good use of the Wii’s controls. The graphics are nice and colorful and the music is simple but like-able. One of the things I don’t like able the Zelda games, especially Twilight Princess, is the enormous amount of backtracking and repetition, the only purpose of which seems to be to squeeze more playtime out of the game. LostWinds has a bit of backtracking, but for the most part you’re always discovering new parts of the world. It would have been nice to have an in-game map, or at least to have the destinations labeled e.g. “head to the highest part of Withering Falls” is hard to do when there appear to be 3 waterfalls scattered about.

There enemies are trivial to beat, including the one and only “boss”, the main interest lies in figuring out how to use the controls to get where you need to go (you learn new techniques as you progress). The co-op gameplay is similar to Mario Galaxy i.e. it’s more of a 1.5 players, than 2 simultaneously. The first player uses the nunchuk and Wiimote, while the second player only needs a Wiimote.

The game ends with some more storyline and “to be continued…” appears. I guess a LostWinds 2 is in the works…