From the Vault — originally published February 20, 2008. Some links, videos or prices may be out of date.
“LostWinds” is an upcoming WiiWare game by Frontier Developments. Here are some snippets from N’Gai Croal’s exclusive interview with Frontier Developments’ David Braben. WiiWare launches May 12. The following are David Braben’s comments on LostWinds.
It’s a game called LostWinds and it’s about the idea of a wind spirit that has been hidden away by a nasty guy called Balasar. But essentially looking at it as a game, it really allows us to do new things on the Wii. We now have Wii in the marketplace for a year and as a developer it takes a while to come to grips with a new system like the Wii; the wonderful combination of the remote and the nunchuck. It’s an opportunity for us to do great things with the game.
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The main character is a guy called Toku, a young boy who’s discovered this wind spirit that’s trapped in a stone. You control both Toku using the device called the nunchuck. He’s actually quite vulnerable, in terms of where he can go–also there are things in the world that are threatening–but you also control the wind spirit that he’s able to release which is called Enril. And the wind spirit is controlled by the Wiimote.
By moving the Wiimote around, in different shapes, you can create gentle breezes of wind or strong gusts, or even by twisting it around, little sort of water sticks. The game overall is designed to be a really sort of graceful, beautiful experience where you’re using these essentially two separate characters in combination, and that brings us all sorts of possibilities in the way the game works, which makes it feel very fresh.
