Zoo Review is a monthly feature at Murderblog 3D in which our esteemed review panel pores over the hottest new game and breaks it down into a score that you can understand.

Nintendo’s WiiWare distribution service launched this week, completing the trifecta of digital distribution on home consoles. The lineup includes A Square Enix game that’s not an RPG (although it is Final Fantasy branded), a quiz game, virtual blackjack, some sort of bubble wrap simulator aptly titled Pop, a spruced up flash game, and a rather odd platformer known as LostWinds. Forgive me for telling you this, dear reader, as you’ve probably heard it several times before if you’ve been following the WiiWare launch, but: you simply must download LostWinds.

LostWinds was crafted by Frontier Developments (who also developed, uh, Frontier, the sequel to the old PC game Elite) and follows the story of some midget thing and a lost wind spirit or something. I don’t know. None of that matters. It’s a ten dollar game with an amazing control scheme, inspired music and fantastic gameplay.

I try to stay away from mashup equations when describing games, but LostWinds is probably best understood when considered to be the Wii’s version of Kirby Canvas Curse with a touch of Zelda. Canvas Curse was the first game that really showed the potential of the DS’s stylus being used in a side scroller. While Mario Galaxy made fantastic use of the Wii’s remote, you could play through the entire thing without using any of the wiimote functionality (aside from the spin attack, but that could have easily been mapped to a button press so I wouldn’t exactly say it’s taking advantage of the technology). LostWinds, while presented in a similar manner, absolutely requires the remote to play. The nunchuk analog stick moves the on screen character while the remote pointer moves a little cursor representing the wind god. Holding down the A button on the remote slows time to a halt and allows you to trace paths across the screen. Release the A button and a gust of wind follows the path. I can’t possibly put into words how satisfying this is. An upward gust makes the character jump. Do it again in midair and he’ll fly even higher. NPCs and background object subtly react to the wind, and later on it’s used to route water and fire in some interesting puzzles. The whole thing is wrapped in this non-linear world. There’s a lot of backtracking, but the good kind of backtracking (think Super Metroid rather than Metroid Prime).

If you need any more convincing, just take a look at what the big boys have to say about it…

Fucking douchebags.

See, when I first played through the introductory puzzles I was overwhelmed with the sense of “Hey! This is just like all those indie PC games I play! But on a console!” You know, like Cave Story or Knytt or You Have To Burn The Rope… games that are inspired with a unique feeling or risk and experimentation. This is what Xbox Live Arcade was supposed to be. Instead Microsoft choked developers with their ridiculous approval process and restricted hobbyists to the XNA Creator’s Club (which doesn’t allow games to be sold for profit). It seems like Nintendo is actually going to make this work… from what I understand their only approval process is making sure the submitted game actually runs (and they probably check to make sure there’s not, like, virtual orgasmic rape hidden in the code). And the developer gets to set the price and see some return. Awesome.

Granted, XBLA has a few indie titles once in a while such as Eets, but it’s mostly overrun with old game rehashes (fuck Frogger) and stuff from the big publishers (oh, Capcom gets excluded from the file size restrictions? How nice of you, Microsoft). Maybe WiiWare will end up like that too. We’ll see. Either way, buy LostWinds. And play it. It’s tight.