After beating 1st quest for the first time...

Honestly I'm surprised how much I appreciated this game. The first few times I tried to get into it, I would get lost and confused, look at these pixels vaguely organized to look like NPCs, enemies, levels and just tune out. This time I finally settled in and it just worked. The game is infamous for being obtuse and hard to understand but between tips from the manual and in-game I think it's surprisingly straightforward, but requiring of patience. This isn't a large game but by forcing a player to really look at every tile of it's world, it makes a limited pallette of pretty much every aesthetic sense, music, visuals, colors, space, etc feel like an intimate world you come to understand only through experimentation. Every room becomes a mystery because anything that can hide a secret, needs to be investigated, and many of the limitations of the game reinforce this. Maybe you were actually slightly off with that fire when you tried to check if it was a burnable tree? You gotta check it again, thems the breaks, and that willingness to allow frustration leaves so much room for the player to interact with a tiny microcosm of 1's and 0's.

Something this game I think does directly better than a lot of future installments, reward. Tho basic, the insentive to find new shit is important to the functioning of this game. If a player simply doesn't take their time, the game's difficulty curve becomes fucked, with enemies become terrifying behemoths and even the act of exploration becomes elongated and more tedious. Future Zeldas, especially the first 4 3D ones, heart containers often felt frivilous because of how easy the combat was, new items would not to uncommonly lose a lot of use past their specific level, or be mostly used to get around barriers to exploration. Barriers exist in this, but far less, with a very large ability to do things completely out of order, The final level isn't even particularly hard to find, accessible by bombs which is a very early item that can be bought in stores, which is often as close as this game comes to "handing" you anything.

I also miss how older games such as this combined the physical with the digital in expecting the player to rely on a physical book that came with it. It gives off this sense of you beginning the adventure before even booting up the game, you are the hero being given the mission, and Link is the body through which you are actualized in order to complete that mission.

I will almost certainly revisit this to do 2nd Quest, but for now I'm excited to start Zelda II. On to the next adventure!!

First impressions after coming back to this game was intense frustration at the constant jittering of the motion sensing. It will just teleport around sometimes for little to no reason, but once I got all the senstivity settings and calibration down, this was reduced to at least managable levels. Once that was taken care of it's a decent FPS with just a few twists, one of which of course being the fact it is a motion controlled FPS. While not offering the technical precision of keyboard & Mouse or even the comfort and ease of a typical pad, but actually pointing and aiming can make even the most mediocre shooter that much more fun, and that's kinda the case here.

Considering this was a launch title for the Wii, it's remarkably accurate in following your Wii remote. I start with this, because that's going to be one of the deal breakers with nearly any Wii game, so this crosses the most basic hurdle.

A surgery sim by way of anime, Trauma Center Second Opinion, makes medicine make sense to layman enough to be very easily accessible, despite the constant medical jargon being thrown around. The entire story is told in static visual novel stills, with no voice acting, and while I don't think it does the game any favors, the soundtrack is solid, and the background art pretty to look at. There's always a sense of comfort I get from playing this game, the low key nature of the story scenes is an excellent break from the sometimes overwhelming difficulty of the surgery. The narratives contained within are universally simple but a chance to see a group of people being shonen about murdering an evil sentient virus that builds a spiderweb or some shit, is one that doesn't come up often in media in general, let alone video games

And this is just about the perfect console for Trauma Center, with the series as a whole still being one of the shining examples of creative use of the motion controls, and the series never even needed Wii Motion Plus to do it. With the razor thin margins you can get by on the hard difficulties in later missions, even something as simple as the Wiimote's pointer functionality becomes uncannily compelling, forcing me to actively watch for any shaking as I carefully reattach a vein or laser a burrowing virus-snake. Later missions forced me down from hard on a handful of occasions, but there is no restriction on changing the difficulty, so getting stuck at a certain part of the story is generally not an issue. Good luck with those X missions though, shit's locked at Xtreme difficulty, lol.

The gameplay is backed up by a banger of an OST, there aren't too many overall tracks, but all of them are good, and all of them pull their weight in setting the moods during the campaign. There's a huge change in feel between Hope Hospital and Cadeceus, and it's solely through a change of a handful of stills and music. I love how much of my imagination I need to use to flesh out the story, while still being given some very basic anchor points.

You can find this game pretty cheap for now, so I'd definitely get it and the rest of the series while the getting is good. It's about a 15 hour long campaign for a first time through, accounting for failing a lot, which is pretty good bang for your buck.