Hello Master Malstrom,

As far as Zelda goes, I’m surprised you are one of the only people
(again) to call Aonuma’s re-writing of history. He says that it is open
world now and full of freedom and that things don’t happen in the same
order, and THAT is a “clean break from the Zelda tradition”. No, it’s a
clean break from his own way of handling Zelda thus far. We all know
that old Zelda games offered non-linearity and freedom. Why are people
just nodding their head and saying “yes”?

I also cringed when he mentioned (paraphrased) “because of the open
world and how you can approach an area from multiple directions,
travelling the world is like a puzzle”. OH NO. NO PLEASE. He said how
“combat is like a puzzle” for Skyward Sword and that ended up being
terrible. The open-world is the only thing that interests me about the
game (art style is bleh). Please don’t find a way to ruin that, too. I’m
sure if someone can take the simple pleasure of exploring an open world
and somehow turning it into a puzzle, it would be Aonuma.

Also, Mario Kart is pretty great, but not if you’re playing
single-player. Or maybe I’m a bit spoiled by the fact that all of the
Grand Prix courses can be played with up to 4p locally (not sure about
online, but probably that too). Finally! So far I’ve played maybe 20
minutes “solo” and all the other races has been with other people. Sure,
not everything is unlocked from the beginning, but at least we can play
with friends and spouses right away while also unlocking stuff. Playing
MK Wii solo to unlock all the racers was a bore. You can also disable
items if you want.

While there are a few longer tracks, for the most part they’re nice and
short. I was a bit taken back, actually. It’s very different from MK
Wii, which i liked, but I think the tracks were too wide (for motion
controls) and too long. Everyone who’s played the game in my house
agrees that the tracks are much shorter than MK Wii and the roads are
narrower and there are a lot more sharp turns. It’s still an Item
Extravaganza in Grand Prix but at least you can tweak items (or turn
them off) in the normal Vs mode. And there’s still all of those
alternate paths and kites and underwater and whatnot, but I don’t mind
it so much I guess. The anti-grav is far less intrusive than I thought.
Basically when you get over the omgwow aspect of it, anti-grav tracks
offer a quick bumper-car course: when you slam into other people, you
get a boost and the other person boosts off in a random direction. It’s
pretty fun, and it keeps with the overall spirit of the game. The
shorter tracks are a huge, huge improvement for the series in my
opinion. I hate to say it, but this is a game where I’d be happy to buy
DLC tracks as they come out (as long as they’re short).

I think that is what put me off so much with Mario Kart Wii was how single player was boring. So why was single player so much more interesting in earlier games?