San Francisco — The first downloadable Wii game I was ever shown was ‘LostWinds,’ a promising platformer from British game studio Frontier Developments. And I saw it just yesterday.
Patrick Klepek and I checked it out together, settling in with Frontier’s top designer David Braben to look at a laptop presentation in the crowded lobby of the W Hotel right near all of the major Game Developers Conference halls. Braben showed us video on a computer, not a Wii, but was kind enough to wave his hands to show us how his game would be controlled.
So… “LostWinds” is a WiiWare game. That means it will be downloadable on the Wii sometime near the date of the launch of the new service, which Nintendo announced this week will occur in the U.S. on May 12. Gamers won’t just be downloading classic games through their console anymore. They’ll be able to download new games.
“LostWinds” features what Braben considers a “third way” for Wii controls. Read on to find out what that means and why Braben thinks the game presents some interesting ideas about how beautiful and mellow a Wii action game might be.

Before “LostWinds” Braben’s company made “Thrillville: Off The Rails,” a theme park simulator that appeared last year on the Wii and was stuffed with mini-games. And he said that experience helped his developers learn which actions feel good with Wii motion controls and which don’t. Frontier’s team members have also played enough Wii games to see how controls are usually handled, either 1) shoehorned to suit Wii motion control or 2) designed to have you use sticks, buttons and/or motion to control a single character.
“LostWinds” is designed to suggest a third method of Wii control: the player’s two hands controlling two characters in two independent ways.
Here’s how it works. The game features two characters, one for your left hand, one for your right (though you can pick which is which). The player controls both simultaneously. The more prominent one is a boy named Toku, who players control with the Wii nunchuck — running him to the left and right using the controller’s thumbstick. The more useful one appears to be the wind spirit Enril, which is controlled by the Wii remote. The wind spirit is like the fairy-cursor of “The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess” or “Super Mario Galaxy,” except that it leaves a streak in the air like a Fourth Of July sparkler and offers control more akin to the brushwork in “Okami” or “Kirby Canvas Curse.”
In the video Braben showed me and Klepek, the remote was basically drawing strokes of wind that were used to hoist Toku into a jump, that sped him across the screen via a spiral stroke, that eliminated enemies by encircling them and slashing them (very “Okami”), that blew open doors and puffed water from a pond to a plant that needed to grow.
The idea for the game stemmed from a “game of the week” contest Braben said his development team used to have. “You get ideas that wouldn’t otherwise be made,” he said. This one was like that. And so when Nintendo came calling last year to tell Frontier about this upcoming WiiWare service, Braben said his team had this idea ready to slap down in front of them. “This is first and foremost a Wii game,” he told me when I asked if he’d shopped it to Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network, “And Wii Ware is a fantastic service for getting Wii games.”
The game isn’t just about innovative controls. It’s got pretty enough graphics that Braben frequently mentioned the word “beauty” to me and Klepek. “We want to make this as beautiful an experience of living in this [fictional] world,” he said. “I think that’s sometimes lost from games.” So if “LostWorlds” works right, it will draw you in. How? Braben said the sounds of the wind are key. Moving the cursor across the screen, which essentially blows the wind through grass and trees and over water and rocks, will trigger a rich soundscape. Wind sounds will emanate from your TV and your Wii remote speaker. The beauty comes, Braben said, from “the attention to detail.”
Klepek and I got Braben to play pretend. We asked him to hold his hands and show how the game is controlled. Braben’s a lefty, so he would hold the remote in his left hand. And what he showed us wasn’t the image of a Wii gamer frantically waggling the remote. Instead he moved his hands gracefully. He said the play experience may very well feel relaxing and… he said it again … beautiful.
The draw is “the loveliness of playing with the wind,” Braben said. It sounds nice.
Graphically, the game we were shown looks near to completion. And Braben told us, yes, his team would love to do downloadable expansions. But how that would work and other nuts and bolts about how WiiWare games will be available to gamers are being left for Nintendo to state. We were told that “LostWinds” is under Nintendo’s size cap for WiiWare games — a cap we’ve heard is somewhere between 40MB-50MB. That size won’t allow for many games to be saved at once on the Wii. But Braben certainly hopes his game will make the cut.
It’s beautiful enough, that’s for sure.

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