I was going to play a bit more of Paper Mario today, but instead I got distracted by something I’d been curious about for a while now: Lost Winds, one of the launch WiiWare titles.

It turned out to be, as expected, a rather short little game that only took a little over three hours to finish. I think that’s a fair length for it though, as any longer and the more annoying aspects of the controls would have become far more frustrating. You move the protagonist with the nunchuk, but use gestures with the remote for any other actions, including jumping, lighting torches, blowing objects around, attacking enemies, and so on. It works pretty well most of the time, though sometimes it’s a bit hard to push that rock just where you really want it.

It’s fairly easy, since it’s generous with the revives and most of the enemies aren’t much of a threat to begin with, and I didn’t even get hit once during the final boss battle. The only real challenge was figuring out where to go next, since you have to backtrack to some areas and it’s not immediately obvious were the new part you can go is. It’s definitely not the game you want if you’re looking for a challenge, but it was decent enough for a relaxing weekend time-killer.