Given that I’ve grown to hate motion controls, I decided a year ago that I would pass on Skyward Sword. I convinced myself I wouldn’t like it, and I knew the controls would be terrible. I bought the game, anyway. Well, the controls suck, but I was wrong about liking the game. It is the biggest, most immersive, most beautiful, best written Zelda game in existence. It took me over ten hours to get over what I didn’t like before I was comfortable enough to just lose myself in this incredible world. Ten hours is ridiculous, I know, but it was so worth it to experience the creation of the master sword in Hyrule hundreds of years before Ocarina of Time. There is a solid mixture of all the best features of almost every Zelda game here. I’m talking guard chases, mini-games, sailing, digging, side quests, and the most badass-looking Ganon ever! Plus, the new features, like the real-time complete inventory access, rock. Skyward Sword has plenty of non-controller related faults as well, but to me, they turned out to be trivial in the end. Ultimately, any Zelda fan would be sorely remiss to skip Link’s newest adventure.

Kirby’s back! And he doesn’t suck this time! Er… wait… he does suck, but that’s why this game is good. Unlike Epic Yarn, which stripped Kirby of everything that makes him who he is, Return to Dreamland is a straight-up, traditional Kirby game that’s every bit as good as his NES and SNES outings. The different hats you can wear are charming, and it’s fun to experiment with the abilities they give you. Waggle is kept to a minimum and actually makes sense in some instances (such as increasing Kirby’s suck power). The game presents a decent challenge, too. Anyone who says otherwise probably didn’t play past the first three worlds, although the real difficulty comes from hanging onto power-ups long enough to uncover secret areas. To top things off, Return to Dreamland features 4-player co-op. It’s annoying that Player 1 can’t change his/her character, though, and if Player 1 dies, everyone loses. But I’ll take this over New Super Mario Bros. any day. I’m glad I didn’t sell my Wii after all, because this game fixes so many of my misgivings.

I’m usually a big fan of on-rails shooters, but I’m having a hard time sitting down and playing this one. Maybe I’m just burned out on Wii games, or maybe it’s the unbalanced difficulty that is such a turn off. Sin & Punishment is a tough cookie… if played on Normal or Hard. Bump it down to Easy, and this turns into a very short breeze. Back on Normal, the bosses put up a frustrating fight, and I frequently found myself asking, “How can you possibly avoid these attacks?!” This is the biggest gripe I have with Sin & Punishment: too many boss battles, none of which seem to play fair. Like most on-rails shooters, the game is at its best when there are no bosses, when you’re running down the road, blasting anything and everything in your way. But you’re controlling more than just a reticule, and your character’s movement feels sluggish at all the wrong times. Even with the ability to roll, good luck dodging those bullets! While the N64 original was fun to see on the Virtual Console, Star Successor, aside from the new pointer controls, simply feels like the same old game with the same old problems.

I have very fond memories of Donkey Kong Country, so much so that a modern revision (instead of yet another re-release) should be right up my alley. But it’s a Wii game, which means Nintendo went and ruined it with waggle. I can’t count how many times I unfairly died because of the stupid Wii controls, and controls are the last thing you want to worry about in a difficult game like this. If you can look past the fact that you’ll be shaking to do things that don’t call for shaking, the level design is pretty fun, creative, and challenging in an old-school way. I especially like how DKC now offers simultaneous multiplayer, though its implementation is so pathetic, maybe it should have stayed turn-based. Diddy’s jet pack is unpredictable, making jumping a chore for poor Player 2. It’s also too easy for someone to get dragged off the screen or die, come back to life, and die again without realizing it, thus wasting a precious (and shared) life balloon. Add to this some long-winded and tiring boss battles, and you’ve got a game that disappoints on way too many levels.

The terrorists in Reload are cardboard cutouts. I’m trying to convince myself that this was an attempt to make the game kid friendly, but I have a feeling that it was just lazy development. The whole game feels like minimal effort was put into it. Every mini-game is essentially a stationary shooting gallery, and the graphics are overly simple and bland. In the levels that do get you up and moving, it’s just a matter of drifting between different posts where you must sort out the brown-shirted terrorists from the drab, yellow shirt-wearing civilians. For as dull as these training missions are, though, they actually present the most interesting portions of the game. The shooting galleries could be decent if the targets weren’t so far away, but they are too small to work well with the inaccuracy of the Wii remote. This is especially bad when playing with a friend, because the camera is pulled even farther back. The single player mode certainly isn’t broken, but there’s no getting around the fact that Reload is an extremely generic, forgettable game that does little to impress.

While Metroid: Other M is a solid Metroid game, there are some things so un-Metroid-y about it that I feel like this is the video game equivalent of “kissing your sister.” There is a lot of Metroid fan service like classic baddies (Ridley, anyone?), having to upgrade your suit, and classic weapons. Even the story was good, but I didn’t really like how it was done. For example, having my silent hero of 25 years talk all the time and take orders from someone to create a melodramatic back story really killed the unique, ethereal atmosphere that makes Metroid. I mean, Samus had all her powers but wasn’t authorized to use them. This kinda destroyed the personality I had given her. But the controls were easily the worst part of the game, especially because shooting missiles never became a smooth operation. I really struggled with whether or not I liked Other M. Ultimately, it was fun to try something different with such a formulaic Nintendo IP. It is no Metroid Prime, but it’s at least worth a play through. That doesn’t mean I’d like to kiss my sister, though…