The Nintendo Wii came out, just recently. It was released concurrently with Sony’s PS3 to considerable fanfare. Honestly, I thought that motion-remote thing was just a gambit to hype up whatever Nintendo actually planned on releasing. I was wrong.

To some extent, my suspicions were confirmed when I learned that the Wii-mote was actually born out of a motion-sensitive controller accessory that was planned for the GameCube. Go figure. It has gimmick written all over it.

However, Nintendo’s really serious about this. To that, I give them credit. The XBox 360 is just a better XBox. The PS3 is just an XBox 360 with BluRay and the pitifully revamped DualShock controller. The Wii really is something different though. I’m excited to pick one up, but I know that won’t happen for quite some time. It’s pretty expensive and in very high demand, and I’m busy enough to be able to live without it for quite some time. After a price-drop and some overstock though, I think that I’m more than likely going to pick one up.

With the Wii came also the first-ever Zelda title available at the launch of a Nintendo console: Twilight Princess! The only reason they’re able to do this is because of the fact that it was designed for the GameCube (seeing a pattern?). They just revamped the control scheme for the Wii-mote, delayed the GCN release, and called it something new, which irritates me.

The silver lining here is derived from a little thing called handedness. Historically, Link has been left handed, always! (With the exception of a lazy sprite-creator in A Link to the Past) However, Nintendo realized that they had configured the game for the Wii-mote (which controls Link’s sword) to be in the player’s right hand.

To make it easier, they simply mirrored the entire game. Dungeon maps, enemies, and Link himself, are all flipped across the horizontal axis. As a result, Link is now right-handed, and is fighting an army of southpaws, as opposed to the reverse which was intended. A curious thing happened after this change though. Nintendo actually reported that left-handed users had no trouble with the new control scheme.

If this is true, then the converse should’ve been true for left-handed control orientation and right-handed users, and the change would’ve been excessive and unnecessary. This entire thing made me pretty mad, because they’re sacrificing a hallmark detail of a franchise spanning more than a decade for what I still feel (in this case) boils down to a silly gimmick.

The game gains little from this added dimension of control, as it was included so late in development, and it loses one of the cool little quirks that made the hero unique. Boo Nintendo. However, the GameCube version, which I’ve had reserved for upwards of two years now, and is being released three weeks after the Wii version, and will probably be ignored because of Wii-fever, was left unscathed. Link is left-handed in that version. As a result, I feel it’s the true version, and have no qualms about waiting for it to come out, and I’ll relish playing it instead of the flawed Wii port.

So there.

Today I finished my 10-page Physics Seminar paper. It was about the end of the universe, and the several zillion different ways that it could happen, not happen, or happen but be reversed in the end. Strange stuff. Anyway, I stumbled upon the prologue to a sci-fi story I’d started to write in what must have been my freshman year of high school. It was about this end-of-the world inter-dimensional travel kind of stuff.

I hate finding cool stories I started writing and then never finished, because I enjoy my own writing so much (how narcissistic of me) that it’s frustrating to not have the end to what I think is a pretty neat idea. Bah.

One final thing:
The only thing more annoying that having to use Microsoft Windows is having to listen to Dr. Hammond bitch about having to use Microsoft Windows.

If you use Linux/Unix/OSX/etc. and you think you’re so much better than everyone else, then good for you. Just please don’t subject the rest of us to your incessant ranting about how sub-standard Windows is. I don’t care and you’re just irritating me.