E3 2009: Hands on with The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

If you wanted to play the hottest games at E3, there was plenty of queuing to be done. On the Nintendo stand, the only line was for The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, and despite there being eight DSis running the demo, there was a line until the final hours of Thursday. I hate queuing so that was when I jumped on.

The demo featured three separate elements of the game. The first was the standard dungeon experience, which as with Phantom Hourglass had you controlling Link with your stylus - his movement and attacks following where you tapped on the screen. This time though he had a phantom buddy to help out.

These big, chunky, walking suits of armour armed with a mighty sword previously featured in Phantom Hourglass's multiplayer modes, but in Spirit Tracks you get to control your own phantom - useful both in terms of his battling skills, as well as dealing with traps and puzzles.

His control is simple and elegant. You tap at the phantom's feet to bring up a small red swirl, which you then drag to draw the path you want the phantom to walk. And off he wanders. He's fairly stupid but will attack anything he meets along the way, and being undead, can't be killed.

You can switch views between the phantom and Link if they aren't on the same screen, and there's a call button to recall the phantom to Link's position.

In the demo dungeon, the phantom was vital in triggering pressure pads to open locked doors as well as allowing Link to access areas protected by fire. In one example, you walk your phantom into a lava pit, which allows Link to jump on his head. You then move both to the other side. Another example had you moving the phantom in front of flaming jets of fire, blocking them off so Link could move through behind.

In this way, we expect the phantom to allow the developers to set up complex puzzles, as well as enemy encounters, that will provide more thoughtful gameplay than if you were only in control of Link.

It's also worth point out that the graphics of the dungeon demo were gorgeous: better than even Phantom Hourglass if that were possible.

The second demo was a dungeon boss battle. This featured only Link armed with a whirlwind power up. You used this by tapping the icon in the top right of the screen and then positioning Link facing whatever you wanted to blow. To trigger the attack, you had to blow into the DSi microphone.

Actually, the positioning of Link was a little tricky to get used to - even with help from a dotted line showing you exactly which way he was facing.

The first creatures to get the whirlwind treatment were some little blue, explosive caterpillars. More puzzle element than enemy, you tapped them with your sword to get them to roll up into a ball. If tapped again, they exploded. They also exploded after a couple of seconds if left alone. You had to use them to open a bridge over a gap in the dungeon floor - of course, by blowing one of them over the gap to explode and operate the bridge mechanism. Once complete, it was time for the boss battle with a large stag beetle.

Once again the whirlwind was required as you had to circle the beetle until you faced his rear - which was large, purple and giving off noxious gas. Using the whirlwind to blow this away, you then bashed his bum with your sword. After some rounds of such bum bashing, the beetle flew off and dropped some blue caterpillars and you repeated the sequence again, blowing the rolled up exploding forms to give the beetle's bum a real bang.

The final demo was the most significant in terms of offering new content that encompasses what Spirit Tracks will be about. This was a train level.

In this you control a train via a four-way gearbox with fast, slow, stop and reverse gears. You slide between these using your stylus. There's also a whistle which you pull down using a rope. This clears cattle off the track.

Obviously the train runs on the prelaid tracks, and you can pan the camera around by touching the edges of the screen. The final control is your cannon, which you fire by tapping on the screen where you want to fire. The further away you are from your target, the less accurate your shots will be.

The train is damaged when it collides with anything on the track, whether cattle - in this case some big pigs - as well as enemies who attacked the train.

As we travelled down the rails, we also came to some switch points, where you get a choice of which tracks to run down. You can see the options in the mini-map on the top screen, but in this case, both tracks went into a tunnel where we were attacked by spiders hanging down from the ceiling, resulting in plenty of cannon action.

Nintendo says such track choices will operate as real-time puzzle solving as you have to determine which track to take and how to best manipulate your speed.

Perhaps unsurprisingly though - as it was the newest element of Spirit Tracks - the train demo was the least convincing. Partly this was down to the 3D graphics, which weren't anything like as polished as the dungeons. Indeed, many objects, such as trees, suddenly popped up as the train approached them, which isn't something we'd expect to see in any Zelda game, even a demo.

In addition, the effects on 3D elements such as the smoke trails when you fired the cannon and the explosions were at odds with the lovely 2D graphics of the dungeon levels.

So it will be interesting to see how the train elements are built into the main framework of the game because, at the moment at least, they're certainly not as coherent as the similar ship-based levels of Phantom Hourglass. Of course, these were easier to handle graphically because the sea is simpler than a landscape covered in trees and rocks.

Still, with a release date scheduled for Christmas 2009, Nintendo has plenty to time to optimise the 3D graphics. And, in the meantime, we'll just focus on our anticipation of having a helpful phantom to command.