Clause one, widget glee

Like so many of my number (by which I mean the self-proclaimed alpha gender and oblivious stock of the consumer plantation), I've spent the first part of my stressful advent crawl with my tongue clamped enthusiastically between my teeth scrawling inky rings around pictures in catalogues and leaving them to be discovered, attached to sticky notes emblazoned with the proviso that I will "turn gay" unless my demands of a Nintendo Wii are met with due sincerity. Unfortunately for I, the only Wii to be found were in alarming proximity to my own person and I was faced with the jarring choice of spending my own money on one of the shiny white boxes or sitting down to Christmas dinner opposite a dirty, sweaty Mungo-like colossus, eating pork dripping with a ladle and introduced to me as the family solicitors' "stock cock" whom I would be making good on my threat with after the coffee, brandy and cigars. So now I sit, anally vestal and sporting the tell tale wrist wear of Wii ownership (That's my story and I'm sticking to it). The only game I have (Discounting that trumped up hardware demo of a freebie, yes I'm talking to you Wii Sports. You and your brass gall, you and your assumption I have friends or at least enemies casual enough to swallow their bile in reverence to an evening of playing on someone else's hot console plugged into someone else's billed mains electricity and pissing on the lino around someone else's toilet. Bastards), as those of you who have read the title will hopefully be able to deduce, is effeminately named Twilight Princess. A game which I'm going to give a sort of review type thingy to now that hindsight has gleefully slapped the rose glasses from my nose and submerged me in a bucket of sobering, needle-cold water. I know it's going to be overly critical, but I've been away for a long time and tripping over an obelisk of warm fuzzy feelings and giving it a solid ball kicking is all I can do to re-establish myself to myself as a chaotic lawful figure. A figure sculpted in the image of a radical inquisitional witch hunter; purging the forces of evil and guiltlessly sacrificing anyone ignorant enough to intervene in my pursuit of the higher purpose. Think of me as Dirty Harry with anorexia and a Thesaurus.

Meine herrschaften, schenken Sie mir ihre aufmerksamkeit. Sie kommen jetzt in den interessantesten und gleichzeitig geheimsten raum meiner fabric. Meine Damen und Herren, der Inventing Room.

Clause two, the flourishing cudgel of expectation

Right, before we start let's get something straight. The Legend of Zelda (The Twilight Princess) is not a Wii game. Sure, it has to be pushed into the hungry front slot of a Wii to be played and you're paying Wii prices but it is, for all intensive purposes a Gamecube title. It suffers from Gamecube graphics created for Gamecube hardware within the limitations of Gamecube disc storage and I don't need Quincy's glittering forensic career to deduce The Legend of Zelda (The Gumdrop Herbgarden) was deliberately pushed backwards to give the release of the Wii a little bite beyond the piss awful Red Steel. Not to say that this is a bad thing, I mean the much celebrated Resident Evil 4's touchdown on the quirky system was met by an immediate usurp of the original Gamecube version. But then, Capcom got implemented to motion controller so perfectly in Resident Evil 4 whereas Nintendo seem to have taken the extended production time The Legend of Zelda (The Frilly Popsock) afforded them to sit down in front of a flipchart and discuss ingenious new ways of ripping off Ico. The motion sensor control and Wii exclusive material feels like it's been grudgingly crucified to the game with big rusty skewers, where the idea of swinging a hilt in real life translating to the sword movements of an on-screen character is certainly a very entertaining prospect it rapidly dawns that the arcs traversed by your own hand bear absolutely no correlation to Link's clumsy movements. Suddenly the scenes of awe-inspiring finesse and graceful wide swipes you imagined yourself in the eye of at the cash register are gone: replaced with the soul crushing realisation that you're to spend the duration of the game slumped in a semi-comatose state making token flicks and watching Link interoperate them with gleeful enthusiasm and having a much better time of it than you. Not that I was expecting total control of the action, but being able to pick between a triumvirate of "swing left", "swing right" and "stab" would have given me reason not to leap stingily for the cheaper Gamecube release. The further you progress along the beaten path, the more "secret moves" you find yourself walking into and there's one in particular... a feint, roll round and uppercut that becomes the only attack you're ever going to use to taken on anything and at that point combat ceases to be anything other than a nuisance.

Sadly this is not the only gripe with the motion sensor. It is merely one gripe from one gripevine of a meticulously tendered vineyard filled with peasants picking, cleaning and collecting gripes on a flat salary of one Denaro a day as if the proprietor's trying to make some clever metaphor about Heaven. Link's wolf form has an annoying tendency to leap clean over whatever it is you're trying to get it to maul, the game's has genuine difficulty in telling apart orders to spin attack and shield block due to the cheapness of the sensor in the nunchuk and the success of the two instances you're compelled to fish seem to rely more on prevailing winds and the orbital position of the planets than the confused sporadic jerking of the controller. And another thing, I realise the removal of a jump button in preference to an auto-jump feature was cited as an incredible innovation at the release of Ocarina of Time and has become a hallmark of the series but do you know what else would be a new direction for you Nintendo? Admitting you were wrong and giving me, the customer who paid money to you to play this game, the option to assign a fucking jump button. I am the master of this digital domain and when I say "jump", I want the pre-pubescent pixie under my control to say "How high?"

None of these issues make The Legend of Zelda (The Girltech Electronic Journal) unplayable buy any stretch of the imagination, they just put you in a position where at no point are you genuinely glad to have the Wiimote rather than a traditional controller. In fact the only instance where the controller really shines is in the aiming of the Heroes Bow, unfortunately the only section you're really required to use it is in some sort of caravan mini-game where Link must protect a wagon from the salving attentions of a troupe of Orcs and suicide bombing eagles. The aforementioned eagles zip out of the top of the screen mere seconds from detonating their fatal cargo and the only way to pick the things off in time, if you don't have the time or appropriate tax rebate to slough 300 cups of coffee*, is to use the auto aim which once more leaves you wondering why you didn't just save yourself £200 and get the Gamecube version. I'm aware it's been mentioned before but it's such a persistent scratching in the back of your mind I'm granting myself repetitive licence.

This is where the reviewy bit begins.

Clause three, vapid apparitions

The Legend of Zelda (The Cupcake Pony) opens on a bloom drenched lake, allowing you the first sight of the head you're going to spend the best part of 35 hours starring at the back of. A head belonging to the mute, perpetually Botox-paralysed Link, it's also around this point the mud of disappointment start squishes happily between your toes and you note voice acting is once again non-existent. Someone please sit Shigsy down with a copy of the 2001 Squaresoft game Final Fantasy X as show the cantankerous git the extent to which great voice acting can humanise your characters. Final Fantasy X's dialogue scenes were an absolute joy to sit through and watch unfold at their own unhurried pace, where The Legend of Zelda (The Pink Pretty Puff Princess) leaves you stabbing angrily at the Wiimote as you watch the same 10-second stock animation of Link's stupid infantile face light up like a Christmas decoration with Down's syndrome for the seventymillionth time. The most shocking thing about this is every game reviewer I've read up until I have to proof-read this trainwreck seems to have mistaken this aching void of characterisation as "genuinely emotional", so it looks like Shigsy isn't the only industry member I'll have to leave in a flotsam of their own foaming saliva, mumbling about Sphere Grids and Dark Aeons.

Back on track, we rejoin Link unsurprisingly up his tree house in a tiny little farming village on the outskirts of Hyrule and guide him through a number of well-wishing "learn the ropes" quests ranging from ox wrangling to kitten entrapment (The fish... the fish!) before he is arbitrarily ordered to go and see Princess Zelda in Hyrule castle... and then it all goes a bit weird.

After a failed attempt on Link's life by an inky shadow that begs the question "Are Nintendo stealing ideas from Ico?" Link is captured and wakes up in a dungeon in a bloom-tastic shadow world (that confirms that Nintendo have indeed been breathing deeply from the fumes of Ico) apparently unharmed apart from the fact he is now a wolf. It's from here on in that things actually get interesting as wolfy Link is partnered with a Devil may care jade pixie named Midna it what I'm going to conservatively call a furry hentai artist's wet dream and they escape to seek counsel with Princess Zelda. After that, it's balls to the walls Zelda from there on in. Frolicking around Hyrule collecting the X broken parts of Y mystic artefacts over Z dungeons all the while collecting the usual parade of trinkets and toys you're never going to use again after the vanquishing of their respective Dungeon's bosses. Or course, the addition of the new shadow world is accompanied by a few rather interesting special effects: most noticeably the breaking up of Link from a 3-D character down into black 2-D squares as he teleports around Hyrule... which is indeed impressive for a while, but having to manually transform from Link to wolf then teleport and transport from wolf to Link every time you want to go anywhere quickly becomes grating.

I know I personally cannot level enough praise at the addition of Midna to the rapidly stagnating triangle of Link, Zelda and Ganon. Her character is highly enjoyable to watch develop and you actually feel the beginnings of emotion the first three-or so times Nintendo try to make you think she's dying, by the time you finish the game and Midna's regained her sleek humanoid form and passed back into the shadow world through the irreparable Twilight Mirror to rule her people as Queen (Spoiler warning) you are genuinely saddened to witness the passing of the cutest, cheekiest most terrifying personality that will ever grace the Zelda franchise with possible to that really sarcastic clerk from Wind Waker at the battle squids stall. In fact Midna often feels like an embodiment of the future, scooting around Link with an effortless grace and throwing the odd sarcastic comment his way as if to say "Look at you, you're stuck in the past! I'm what your franchise could be if you'd only evolve and stop playing off nostalgia."

The boss encounters are charming and intelligently designed yet insultingly easy, the puzzles are charming and intelligently designed yet insulting easy and the story's progression is charming and intelligently designed yet insultingly easy. Easy to follow that is, with every point thoroughly flogged and the important parts presented in a bilious green face, presumably so as not to alienate the Halo crowd and their "reading is punishment, when do I get the bombs?" chihuahua like attitude towards anything that doesn't play as if it was personally overseen by Michael Bay, the big hooting cock that he is.

Clause four, quod erat demonstrandum

The Legend of Zelda (Barbie Horse Adventure) isn't a bad game, no no. I am able to appreciate the technical achievement it represents, it is a great game. It is paced perfectly, the score is breathtaking and the visual style at times still has the power to take your breath away with its sheer fantasy beauty. It is well within normal behaviour to grab your horse and whittle hours away galloping around the land at sunset going uttering "wow" from behind slack jaws.

...but where I have nothing but respect for it as a piece of software, as a game The Legend of Zelda (The Mocking Girlie Tagline) is disappointingly lacking. At no point did I actually feel like I was actually having fun, and as soon as things began motioning towards the genuinely compelling you're thrown screaming and kicking into a thorny little side-quest that ruins the flow, or the motion controller grows bored and makes little inquests into the possibility of doing irrational things for the thrill of seeing you wound up.

It's a sports car; a sports car with unparalleled speed, that turns like a shark and looks like God had suddenly become gay, Italian and agonised over the design for a few millennia in a locked room. But it's a car that breaks down just often enough to make its operation and ownership frustrating to the point of resigning it to the showroom.

It is, at best, distracting.