Big Releases for the Week of December 11th: Zelda Hits Cube, Elebits Gets Charged, and Metal Slug Goes to War

The holiday season is heating up with a fury this week with some truly great games hitting all those shiny next-gen systems and a final title honors Nintendo's last-gen wonderkind. Even though it debuted on Wii just under a month ago, the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess finally hits the Gamecube, the system it was originally designed for and was intended to be released on almost one year ago. Twilight Princess on the 'Cube is nearly identical to its Wii counterpart, the major difference being that the players perspective in the game world is actually reversed due to Link being left-handed in this edition and the game is missing all of those fancy motion controls. It's still probably the best adventure on any console this year so Gamecube owners shouldn't miss it.

Speaking of the unstoppable Nintendo Wii, Sega's Elebits is released this week. A quirky first-person game, Elebits takes place in a world where all electronic devices are powered by strange critters named Elebits who hide throughout the world and even in a person's house. Players use the Wii remote to manipulate objects in the game world and capture the little beasts. Early word is that this is an exemplary title for the new system, showing off just how versatile the freehand style control can be and featuring a simple yet compelling series of challenges. Those Wii owners looking for originality would do well to check it out.

Metal Slug Anthology, which collects six entries from the fan-favorite Neo Geo shooter series of the same name, drops on both Wii and PSP this week. Metal Slug is known for its finally polished Contra style shooting, minutely detailed sprite art, and hilarious sense of humor. The PSP version is said to be feature perfect ports of Metal Slugs 1 through 5 and X and the Wii version features numerous control methods that take advantage of the controller's motion sensitive control. Anyone with an itchy trigger finger and a love for the classics can't go wrong with this package.