Nintendo Trinity on the Wii

Last mon­th’s release of Super Mario Par­ty saw the com­ple­tion of the lat­est gen­er­a­tion of Nin­ten­do’s flag­ship titles for it’s newest con­sole sys­tem: the Wii. Along with the release title of The Leg­end of Zel­da: Twi­light Princess and this August’s Metroid Prime 3: Cor­rup­tion, Mario, Link, and Samus are all present on the Wii and in three of the most amaz­ing games. Ever.

To be hon­est, I’ve not got­ten too far in any of the games, hav­ing had the time and ener­gy to only put a few hours into each one1. I have got­ten fair­ly far in each and have played them enough each to com­ment on just how amaz­ing each is.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

The Leg­end of Zel­da: Twi­light Princesrat­ed a 95 at Meta­crit­ic.

The Leg­end of Zel­da: Twi­light Princess was, of course, a launch game (and, like Super Paper Mario, a Game­cube port). In an admis­sion of my lack of com­mit­ment to gam­ing, I still haven’t fin­ished the game. All the same, it remains to be a won­der­ful­ly fun game and prob­a­bly one of the best of the Zel­da series. The con­trol scheme is pos­si­bly the least like sense­less wag­gling of the Wiimote of any Wii game yet. The spa­tial motions seem to make sense, which is good because there are quite a lot of moves to mas­ter in the game. Like almost all of the mod­ern Nin­ten­do games, this one has a great and intense sto­ry. This real­ly draws the play­er in, but does­n’t real­ly allow for casu­al gam­ing. As much as I want­ed friends to be able to jump in and play around to see how great it was, this just isn’t a game and sto­ry that allows for this sort of thing. This game is an epic nov­el that rewards atten­tion, time, and ded­i­ca­tion; much the oppo­site of many Wii games.


Metroid Prme 3: Corruption

Metroid Prme 3: Cor­rup­tionrat­ed a 90 at Meta­crit­ic.

As for Metroid Prme 3: Cor­rup­tion, I am not real­ly a fan of — nor par­tic­u­lar­ly good at — first per­son shoot­er games2. But I mean wow. This game is so much fun due to its per­fect bal­ance of shoot­ing action, explo­ration, and puz­zle solv­ing. It isn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult to explore and com­plete most of the tasks but I can imag­ine that to be tru­ly fast and effi­cient this game would require a lot more skill than I have. Effi­cien­cy is some­thing that the Metroid series has tra­di­tion­al­ly reward­ed and I sus­pect that MP3 has that aspect in it. Also, this game real­ly cap­tures a lot of the explo­ration and back-track ele­ments of the old-school Metroid games. In spite of the less­er horse­pow­er in the diminu­tive Wii when com­pared to oth­er 5th gen­er­a­tion con­soles and PCs, this game has beau­ti­ful visu­als and amaz­ing detail. I believe that this rep­re­sents the great­est first-per­son shoot­er ever created.


Super Mario Galaxy

Super Mario Galaxy – rat­ed a 97 at Meta­crit­ic.

The delayed Super Mario Galaxy was prob­a­bly one of the most antic­i­pat­ed Wii games since the con­sole’s release over a year ago. Hav­ing not had much desire to play many of the 3D Mario games, I found myself pleas­ant­ly sur­prised by this game. The con­trols and cam­era angles make play­ing the game very nat­ur­al. Galaxy has some of the same nods to Mario games of the past that Super Paper Mario does, and even much of it’s humor (though with a few less cracks in the fourth wall).

These games rep­re­sent the quin­tes­sen­tial set on the Wii with respect to Nin­ten­do’s her­itage. Of course, you still have to con­sid­er Wii Sports as an impor­tant Wii game for its demon­stra­tion of the con­trol mech­a­nisms. How­ev­er, the three games above, rep­re­sent Nin­ten­do’s advanced sto­ry-telling in com­bi­na­tion with the inno­v­a­tive con­trols, as well as pay­ing trib­ute to the char­ac­ters that put Nin­ten­do on the map.


  1. I had con­sid­ered writ­ing this arti­cle months ago, includ­ing Super Paper Mario as part of the big N Wii trin­i­ty; a game that I’ve come with­ing about ten min­utes of beat­ing (pathet­ic, huh?). How­ev­er, SPM is kind of a platform/rpg hybrid and was seen as being out­side of the true Mario lega­cy. That being said, it is an amaz­ing game and loads of fun. Also, it could be argued that the Metroid Prime series of games aren’t real­ly full-on Metroid games, either. Me, I’m just inter­est­ed in some real­ly great games, so I’ll not be too picky. []
  2. Although, I must admit that Bioshock and Por­tal look great and Halo 3 almost makes me con­sid­er buy­ing a 360 – (but not real­ly). I still can’t think of any rea­son oth­er than “cheap Blu-Ray play­er” to want a PS3 []

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

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