Dropping The Hammer?

Nintendo's guide also told me that I had to point the giant red dot coming from the wand at my target. I never quite figured out how to keep the giant red dot on my target while swinging the wand hammer-style at the same time, but I still somehow managed to vanquish robots in Project H.A.M.M.E.R. Since I was being timed during the demo, my lovely attendant barked orders at me to keep me on pace. "Swing up, then down! You don't use the 'A' button on the super smash! There, now smash it! SMASH IT!" Once my four minutes were up, I gladly handed the controller back to her and looked for a line headed by a quieter attendant. My first experience with Wii was not a pleasant one.

As the afternoon ticked away, I realized that in order to see the big titles before the doors closed, I needed to endure the long waits. I jumped in the shortest line for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and watched those in front of me have their time. As my turn at the controls grew closer, I realized that people were swinging the sword without swinging the wand. When it was my turn to play, sure enough, the little fairy tutorial guide instructed me to hit the 'A' button to attack. That was disappointing, because I was looking forward to hacking cartoon goblins to pieces with the remote. Turns out that the wand is used more for targeting the bow and the boomerang than for hacking and slashing. So it's just kind of a laser pointer.

My assumptions about firing the bow - unfounded though they were - also turned out to be false. You don't hold up the left controller and draw the right controller back like a bowstring as I had hoped, but rather you just click a direction on the D-pad - there's actually very little movement at all. It seemed to me that all the exciting body motions one would associate with combat were relegated to buttons, and targeting was what required the motion. There was a spinning attack I could do by spinning the left-hand controller, but the regular attacking was all done just with buttons.

Just as I felt I was about to get a grasp on the controls, I was asked to step aside for the guy behind me to have a turn. Wii's controls had now frustrated me a second time.