No Nunchuck, No Okami... (#115)

So, the Japanese style game I was talking about yesterday is a game called Okami that originally came out for the Playstation 2 and was adapted for the Wii later. I'd heard quite a lot of praise for the game, and decided to check it out. I bought the game and it arrived yesterday. I don't know anything about it, except that the game features a wolf called the Amaterasu as its main character, and has a little green bug thing called Nippon (correction: he's called Issun, I got it confused with Nippon which is the name of a place in the game) that serves as comic relief. To be honest the only reason I even know that is because that stuff is established within the first twenty or so minutes or the game.

I really, really want to play this right
now.

So, you may be wondering, how come I only know that much if I got the game yesterday? Well, it's my nunchuck's fault (the thing that comes with the Wii, not an actual nunchuck, lol). As soon as the gameplay began, it felt like something was wrong, and turns out that the joystick on my nunchuck is kind of loose. It's not loose in a way that seems like it might fall out or anything. But the joystick doesn't stay in the middle, and it seems to move around by itself too easily. I might have talked about this a mite before (am I Australian now?), but in March I had to buy a new nunchuck, because my old one (which I still have by the way) wasn't working any more. The stick stayed in the middle properly and it wasn't loose or anything, but in all the games that I used it for the thing I was controlling just wouldn't move and it kept saying that the nunchuck had been disconnected.

So I got a new one and until now that one has worked fine. But recently (I can't remember if it was like this before but I doubt it), like I said the joystick seems loose on this second nunchuck. Well, technically it's probably my third or fourth since I've lost a couple of these things before. But basically, in Okami (or at least in the tiny bit I got to play), the more you tilt the stick the faster you move. So, tilt a little, you walk, tilt a lot, you run. But since the joystick's 'neutral position' (I don't know much about this so I'm probably speaking nonsense) isn't right in the middle and it just falls in the direction you hold the nunchuck (hopefully you understand what I'm saying), it's really awkward. No matter how much I tilt it up, the Amaterasu (the wolf I'm controlling) won't move up at all. If I push REALLY hard, I can just get him to walk, but it's unbearable to play a game where you can only walk slowly, especially since it's a lot like Zelda. I've also started to notice this fault in other games like Pikmin 1, 2 and 3, where it's getting really stressful when I need to go up but can't because no matter how much I push the stick it just refuses. I wouldn't mind as much in Pikmin if there wasn't a time limit, but it just wastes a lot of time.

Never thought I'd be so desperate for
one of these.

Anyway, I have ordered a new nunchuck, and luckily I got one on eBay for like £3 with nothing to pay for delivery. I definitely would not use Amazon in this situation since they charge like £21 for a nunchuck plus delivery price. Yes, seriously. I do prefer them over eBay but they seem to overprice controllers. Like when I got my Gamecube controllers last September to play Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door for the first time, I got two for £10 on eBay compared to one for twenty pounds on Amazon. No joke.

Anyway, the nunchuck is expected to come tomorrow, so hopefully nothing will go wrong and I'll be able to play Okami.

...I shouldn't have said that. Now something is sure to go very, very wrong.

Thomas