So I spent part of yesterday at the dentist's and part of it in the fucking ER with what is apparently psychosomatic searing hot pain through my left jaw. Woo hoo!

Despite this, I still forced myself to stay awake and set up/play with my Wii.

I got my MOTHER, who hasn't touched a video game since "Wheel of Fortune" on the NES, to play 10 frames of "Wii Sports" bowling with me and she BOWLED A STRIKE.

"Excitetruck" is a lot of fun. People are being too hard on that game. The control is really good once you complete, like, the first batch of tutorials.

And "Zelda" is... dear lord yes. I don't know why Gamespot felt the need to say the Wii controls feel tacked on. With the remote/nunchuck combo allowing me to basically have my hands wherever I want, the controls become... almost subliminal. It's really, really bizarre in a good way.

I haven't been playing it with both arms out in the front, the way the dude who demoed the game at the E3 conference did. I play it more with my right hand on my chair's arm rest, holding the remote, and my left arm on the other arm rest, raised up on the elbow. It's just really comfortable and it's like Link moves when I THINK about wanting him to move. And I have the game running right now through the packed-in RCA cables (waiting for my Component cable order from nintendo.com to ship) and it looks breathtakingly good. This game is a definite example of how good ART DIRECTION can be far more meaningful in a game than raw graphics processing power. (Side note, sometimes the two collide fairly well and we call the result "Gears of Wars" ). I feel like this is a lesson Sony still needs to learn, since most of their PS3 launch games look shiny enough, but very bland/generic design-wise. "Lair" MIGHT prove the exception to the rule for them, though.