Hidden Gem Alert!

I've had this game sitting in the hopper for the past month, begging to be played. Oh no, little Battalion Wars II, you'll have to wait, I said, as I did actual productive things in "the real world" while only playing small bits of Nintendo DS on the can.

I finally gave myself an hour or so to game yesterday, and fired this puppy up. I didn't play the first Battalion Wars, long considered a hidden gem on the Gamecube, so I didn't know what to expect here.

What I should have expected was a good looking, fun game that even made some nice uses of the Wii controls, something missing from the reviews that I read about this game when it actually came out last November.

Basically you control a trooper in third person, using the wii remote as a cursor on screen while you move your guy with the nunchuk. One small detail I really liked: when you blast baddies, the sounds that come out of the little Wii Remote speaker are pretty nifty, and make it the experience more immersive. Sometimes the sounds that come out of the tiny Wii Remote speaker are annoying, but the ray gun type affects employed here actually sound better because they come out of a small speaker!

Though you can free aim with you cursor, the action gets pretty frenetic so you'll probably use the Z button to lock on. You can also do combat rolls by tilting the nunchuck.

I don't want to get too crazy here, as I've only played the game for an hour and a half. But I really like what I'm seeing so far. This game got no press basically, and it is the exact kind of "gamer's game" experience that I know some of my fellow Wii owners are starved for.