#lostwinds

aka the best WiiWare game ever

I want to go on and on about this game but I don't think anyone I know (outside of my siblings) has actually played it. So I'm telling you lot instead.

The story goes that Steve Burgess from Frontier developments was watching the wind blowing leaves and thought to himself 'wouldn't it be cool if you had a Wii game where you could control the wind?'

And in fact he was right.

The game is very reminiscent of Avatar the Last Airbender (which was great because I was a huge fan of Avatar around that time): a young boy, Toku, discovers a shard of a stone which contains the wind spirit, Enril. Enril explains how she and the other elemental spirits who formed the world worked together to seal Balasar (a spirit who turned evil) in a spirit stone, but in the battle she got trapped with him too.

Balasar freed himself, breaking the stone, but she remained trapped. Thanks to Toku, she is now free too, but her power has been lost (get it? lost winds), locked away in shards of the stone which lie scattered across the land. She and Toku work together to find her lost powers and fight Balasar's darkness that threatens to corrupt and poison the world.

You control Toku with the nunchuk and Enril with the Wii remote: Toku is pretty weak and useless, but he can interact with physical objects (pulling switches, opening chests, planting seeds) while Enril can control the air, lifting Toku up to higher areas or using gusts of wind to fight enemies. It is an elegant set-up and while it can be a little frustrating at times (and what wii game isn't?), it is quite possibly the game that best uses the Wii remote (I'm talking about from an ingenuity perspective and am also excluding sports games). It also makes it rather difficult to replicate perfectly on any other console, but it was (temporarily) released on iOS and I think is currently available on PC. It's a platformer with lots of little puzzle-y things and some fighting. Most of the fights are pretty simple and you can often just as easily run past without fighting, or just blow the enemy away (without killing necessarily it).

The game had a sequel, where you have to save Toku's mother (who is an explorer and got cursed by some of Balasar's poison). This time you meet the spirit of the seasons, Sonté, and you get the power to change seasons from her. The game ends without any complete resolution though, because we still haven't faced Balasar, but the series ended there. The second game was a complete improvement over the first one, so it's such a shame it ended when they were hitting their stride. I partly blame the fact the Wii was approaching the end of its lifetime, but there was probably more to it than that.

One of the best things about the game was the art and the music. I mean, look at some of the locations:

(It's harder to find nice shots of the scenes I wanted online than I thought, so these'll do)

And the music... I reblogged the title theme, but the rest of the soundtrack is just so elegant too.

Oh yeah, and I forgot the art that shows during Enril's story of how she got trapped:

I'm also sad that there seemed to be a plan for all the spirits (fire, water, earth and seasons) to appear in a game (judging by how the first game ends), but we only meet Sonté and Enril. I wanted to meet the water spirit...

Game Soundtracks We Love: LostWinds

Hello to everyone! Thank you for joining us, on our cuppa filled gaming journey.

Last week we went with an indie title inspired by the Japanese Shinto Beliefs: Kamiko. If you missed it and want to check it out: Game Soundtracks We Love: Kamiko

We decided to jump back to 2008 this time; to a game that first arrived on Wiiware then later iOS and Steam.

Game of Choice

The game for this week was…

LostWinds e LostWinds 2: Winter of the Melodias disponibili da oggi su Steam

Frontier Developments ha reso disponibili LostWinds e LostWinds 2: Winter of the Melodias su Steam al prezzo di €9.99 ciascuno.

I due titoli possono anche essere acquistati in un unico pacchetto al prezzo di €14.99.

Nelle versioni PC si notano, inoltre, miglioramenti per quanto riguarda i controlli che sono stati aggiornati, e gli effetti grafici.

Read more…

Fonte: LostWinds e LostWinds 2: Winter…