Zelda: Skyward Sandbox

Link also has a pair of projectile weapons in his arsenal: the bow & arrow and the slingshot, both returning from previous games. Both are aimed with the Wii Remote's pointer end, though in the demo, we weren't actually using the pointer; for purposes of the demo, the Remote's pointer functionality was turned off entirely and MotionPlus was instead being used to track the Remote through space.

But the way they are fired is slightly different; the slingshot fires seeds with just a button press, while the bow requires you to do a pull-back motion on the Nunchuk to string your arrow before loosing it. Holding the C button will let you zoom in your view and steady it a bit to pull off a more impressive shot. Similar to other games, the slingshot was useful for taking out small enemies but didn't have much impact on the larger fiends, but arrows as usual wreaked destruction wherever they landed. Given the pull-back motion required for the bow & arrow, they've made the dichotomy between the two a little more interesting this time; there's finally a reason to prefer the slingshot over the bow, with the former letting you loose seeds much more quickly than you could string the bow.



We mentioned above that the demo wasn't using the Wii Remote's pointer functionality to track where you were pointing for the bow and the slingshot; the same applies to menu use. This was noticeable; it wasn't quite as smooth and quick as we're used to with the pointer. However, Miyamoto said that in spite of this choice, which was done specifically to keep things working smoothly on the show floor, the end product would use the pointer again, in the vein of Wii Sports Resort's Sensor Bar Assist, which kept the MotionPlus from drifting much by smoothly recalibrating it whenever the pointer sensor in the tip of the Remote caught a glimpse of the sensor bar. Hopefully, this also improves the responsiveness of pointing itself.

We also wanted to mention that, if you saw the demonstration with Miyamoto grumbling about wireless interference making things look like they weren't working—well, he was almost certainly right. Nobody that we were aware of experienced trouble like that again, leading us to believe that something, if not wireless interference specifically, was giving him trouble.



The Skyward Sword demo's primary purpose was to show off all the new MotionPlus-based mechanics the team is using to make the next Zelda. Story concerns were relegated to the trailer and the developer roundtable; this was specifically about the kinds of things we could expect from a mechanical perspective, and as such, we thought they had a number of neat ideas in that respect. But we didn't really get much of an idea of what the promised new structure reworkings would bring, unless you stretched things a bit to assume you'd just find bosses hiding behind doors in the field and just hop right back out the door again once you defeated them.

It felt like it was really a giant sandbox for playing with Skyward Sword's mechanics, more than anything, and it was a pretty huge sandbox, with way more packed into it than the 20-minute demo time limit could let anyone explore in full. It's telling that as we hung over some folks' shoulders over the course of the show and watched Nintendo's own demonstrators at work in places like the roundtable, we saw new areas an awful lot. The demo sort of had that Super Mario 64 castle grounds quality; in our first time in it we just felt like we wanted to stop and check all the cool stuff out as we went by.

It's also worth nothing that the new mechanics are making Matt, at least, feel a little bit like it's 1999 again and he's learning to battle effectively like he did in the original Ocarina of Time (yes, we said 1999; it took a few months for the game and system to be purchased, after all!) Nintendo made combat actually fairly difficult in this game, with enemies that change up their blocking patterns quickly and hit hard. Whether that level of difficulty remains in the end, we shall see; but it's pretty refreshing to play.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is currently slated for a release sometime in 2011. Whether it makes another show appearance before its release is up in the air, but we'll see. With all the other great games we want to play at this show releasing by holiday 2010, though, we're pretty happy that we won't have to try to cram this one in as well, because the new way it plays—even if it is all we really know about the game so far—is pretty darned compelling.