Zelda Delayed

News came yesterday that Nintendo is delaying The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Gamecube to around March 2006. This comes as a big blow to Nintendo fans, and it leaves Nintendo without a major release this year to combat Sony's large PS2 lineup and the launch of Microsoft's Xbox 360.

The delay is unfortunate, and pretty unexpected, especially because rumors had been circulating for a few months that the game was basically done and Nintendo was sitting on it until the holidays. Obviously that's not true. I know, the usual applies-- the delay will give them time to make it even better, yadda yadda yadda-- the same thing all developers say when they delay their games.

It's pretty disappointing to me that the Gamecube has suffered the way it has-- I love the system, and it was my number two system as far as play time-- behind the Xbox and ahead of the PS2. However, due to the extreme lack of new Cube games (it's been months since I bought a new one), it has slipped to third, behind PS2. Nintendo really has an uphill battle to fight now. The only area which Nintendo isn't suffering is, predictably, the handhelds. The Nintendo DS continues to sell well (especially in Japan) and has a great lineup of games for the rest of this year. They're doing much better than Sony with the PSP, which everyone predicted was going to come in and crush Nintendo. That didn't happen-- the PSP launch was something of a disappointment, and the game lineup for the PSP looks pretty bleak.

Oh, and in completely unrelated news, I finally saw Kung Fu Hustle the other day. I was really looking forward to it, especially after enjoying Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer so much. I was a little let down. Sure, Kung Fu Hustle is pretty funny in spots, and has some good action sequences, but the storyline is completely incoherent. I'm in the minority here, but I greatly preferred Shaolin Soccer. Darn. Good thing is, I have Sin City arriving from Netflix today. Yay!

Oh well. I'm off to play my Xbox.