Batting her firefly eyes through lashes powdered in lilac, the slim, tall Germanic girl took me by the hand. Her name was Ina. Een-ya. Although more athletic than voluptuous, the parabola of her perfect spine pushed her stomach and pelvis forward, as though they were sensually crying out to be crushed against my own. On my part? I throbbed with longing. I'd waited long for this. As she pulled open a curtain and led me forward into the darkest rooms, drawing me in behind her, I knew that all my heart's desires were about to be fulfilled.

I was about to play the Wii for the first time.

Tossing our pretentious opening paragraphs aside with cool contempt, I was being led by Ina the Nintendo Booth Babe into a showroom, having been given a chance to play the recently announced Battalion Wars 2.

This was not a game I really cared to play. Even as a thousand journalists at the Nintendo Press Conference emptied their bladders in unison and sent a rolling tsunami of urine down upon the stage in reaction to the announcement, I yawned. Battalion Wars? Didn't the first one blow?

But when I got an opportunity to play Battalion Wars 2 on the Wii, I still jumped at the opportunity. Despite the fact that Nintendo wants me to hold a small phallic object in my hand and refer to it by a small child's euphemism for his own genitalia, I still hold the Wii with a sort of awe. But it's a hands-off admiration. I've never played with one before.

Ina placed the Wiimote in my hands gently."You hold this part in this hand, like this, okay? And the other part in the other hand, like that. Okay?"

"Yes, that seems intuitive," I agreed. Ina nodded emphatically. Holding things in your hands was intuitive. Ina turned on Battalion Wars 2.

My first impression was just how astonishingly ugly the game was. I was some hunched over, pixelated lump of polygons, running around in a 3D world that only scarcely seemed to be of a higher graphical standard than early Playstation 2 games. Everyone knows that Nintendo's not trying to compete with the graphical capabilities of the PS3 and the 360. But Jesus, surely the Wii can not compete harder than this.

Ina continued explaining the controls, "OK. So... you move like this." Ina exerted pressure on my wrist to roll it around, and my little army man on screen aimed his rifle in various directions. "And to jump your man, you must make this hand go up, like this." She grabbed my left hand and jerked it upwards, which did indeed cause my man to jump. "OK?"

"OK," I agreed. I was getting this stuff so far.

"OK," Ina went on. She liked this word. "So now, to roll your little man? You must do this." Then she grabbed my right wrist and attempted to snap the bone and drive the sharp, pointy edge through my flesh.

"Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! OW!" I called. She stopped a few degrees before the bone would have snapped, sending an explosion of sharp, jagged bone splinters exploding out of my flesh.

"You must loosen your wrist!" Ina rebuked. She demonstrated the movement that I was expected to make in order to roll my little man. It seemed to involve a wrist that could actually spin 360 degrees freely in its socket.

"OK, Ina, I totally don't get that," I said to her. "Is it likely I'll have to roll?"

Ina tugged her lower lip thoughtfully, "Hmm. Maybe yes? To dodge enemies?"

"So I can die in this demo?"

"Oh! Oh, no."

"Yeah, I don't think I'll worry about it then. Strafing seems irrelevant when you're nigh-invulnerable." I thought this was a particularly keen observation.

"OK!" Ina chipperly continued. "So you move, yes? With the thumb stick. Then you lock on with this button here, and shoot with the trigger. OK?"

"OK!" I emphatically nodded. And then I tried it out.

The first thing I noticed was just how loose the controls felt. Turning my character around, in particular, seemed extremely difficult. I would have to whip my hand back and forth several times to complete the circle. Aiming was easy, since you could lock on to targets with a trigger button, but surprisingly unsatisfying. Yet I was still just thrilled to be waving around that cool Wiimote.

As I ran around, I realized I had no idea who the bad guys were and who the good guys were. But it didn't seem to matter much, since I was nigh-invulnerable. I just sort of ran on, waving my hand around, chasing these hovering stars that would occasionally pop up on the horizon, signaling my next objective. I was already bored. I noticed absolutely nothing about what sort of enemies I was shooting at, or what the level was even like, although I vaguely remembered some purple canyon walls and occasional barrages of guys that I'd just sort of run past. It didn't really seem to matter what I did.

Almost as if she was reading my thoughts: "I don't like this game," Ina complained to me. (Man, these German Booth Babes have proven to be a sexy and subversive lot.)

"It totally sucks," I agreed. "But why don't you like it?"

Ina squinched one eye shut, sneered, then began nervously shuffling her long pink fingernails through her hair inan obsessive-compulsive display of distaste. Then Ina casually delivered the clearest summary of the violent geopolitical spectrum I'd ever heard in pidgin English:

"This game? It's war. War is for boys."

I nodded grimly.

Ina continued: "I like the game where you flip bunnies."

"I'm not familiar with that game."

I considered chasing her up on the facts of this bunny flipping game — was it, perhaps, an unannounced Wii game? Could this be my first GC06 "scoop"? — but, by this point, I'd noticed a quite painful throb in the muscles of the arm I was using to hold up the Wiimote. This distracted my thoughts. Aching spasms seized my rhomboids and deltoids. I realized that holding even a light-weight object in the air and pointing it ahead of me for five minutes was not really a skill evolution had embedded into me. In another five minues, I expected my arm to physically tear off my body and dangle from my spurting shoulder by a single string of torn, bleeding tendon.

"Jesus, this is pretty hard on the arm, isn't it?" I remarked to Ina. She nodded gravely.

"Yes, it is! But you can hold it in a different way to make it more com-for-ta-ble."

And then, Ina the Nintendo Wii Booth Babe did an amazing thing. She pantomimed holding a Wiimote in her right hand, lifting it to shoulder height, pointing the end at the Wii. This roughly simulated the way I was currently holding it. Then, she slowly lowered the Wiimote to directly in front of her crotch and began to pantomime jerking the imaginary Wiimote back and forth.

"See?" she remarked, "It's much more relaxing!"

And no doubt it was. But if there's one thing I learned in junior high school, it's the peril of openly jerking around your Wiimote in the presence of strange, beautiful women. Florian Eckhardt

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