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I decided Wii Sports could only amuse me for so long, so I went ahead and bought Zelda and WarioWare today. I've spent most of my time with WarioWare, and it's a lot of fun, though it's also nowhere near as intuitive as the GBA and DS games in the series. The different minigames use different "forms" which require you to hold the Wiimote in a specific way, and each time you come to a new one, the game comes to a halt as an explanatory screen with black-and-white line art pops up and an intentionally smarmy narrator fills you in on the specifics of that form. Often, even when you understand a form, things don't work exactly as expected; distance from the screen seems to matter a lot more in WarioWare than in other Wii games, and I've flubbed many a game because I wasn't positioned correctly. (It's also hard to use the wrist strap with some of the forms; but then again, anyone with an IQ higher than a lizard's should be able to use the remote without the strap anyway. These people who've demolished their televisions with flying Wiimotes are ******** morons.)

Fortunately, once you get the hang of the different forms and get a sense of the proper distance from the sensor bar, WarioWare plays very much like its predecessors. The wacky graphics style translates surprisingly well into 3D, and while there's a certain degree of recycling-- it wouldn't be WarioWare without a nose-picking segment-- there are enough new ideas to keep things fresh. It's also got plenty of unlockable extras, and while it's not all that tough to clear each character's first stage, the difficulty increases substantially with the second and third levels. It doesn't quite reach the heights of the first WarioWare (but to be fair, neither did Twisted or Touched), but it's still a lot of fun.

I've barely started Zelda, and I'm a little miffed that it gets off to such a slow start-- I want to explore dungeons and fight strange creatures, but I have to herd goats into a barn and get a cat back to its owner first? But apart from that, I like what I've seen so far. The controls work well, the gameplay feels like a natural evolution from previous 3D Zelda titles, and the graphics are far better than I'd expected-- I've heard a lot of complaints about this aspect of the game, but I see nothing wrong with the visuals so far. I just wish the pace would pick up a little...