My fiancée has a Wii, and she's been enjoying it immensely. We've both been progressing in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, until about last week she hit a snag at an obstacle in the game that was virtually impossible to get through. Yesterday I gave it a shot myself, since I got to that same point. I had considerable trouble with it, but managed to finally make it through. Then she tried again, but being already past the point of frustration, she quickly lost patience with it. Eventually I tried to get her character through as well, and had more trouble than I did the first time. And ironically, all the online or printed guides say that this is an easy thing to get through. They're full of crap. And I don't think I'm any better at this than she is, just insanely lucky.

[Edit: The following is not a spoiler. It tells you nothing significant about the plot, happens well before you're even halfway through the game, and does not tell you how to really get past any of the obstacles involved.]

Here's the challenge: On horseback, your task is to guard a wagon on its way to a village across dangerous lands. First you have to have a joust on a bridge against a troll-type dude on a warthog who blocks the wagon. If you get past that and die later, you start after this part, so it's not too bad. But the next part is the killer. You have to replenish your arrows, then lead the wagon on a three-stage journey to safety. In stage 1, you and the wagon are fired at by a few archers from cliffs, and the wagon will catch fire. Once you get to a gate, out of harm's way, you put out the fire by using a boomerang that has the power of wind, then unlock the gate. No problem. Stages 2 and 3 are the big and little fields, respectively. In the big field, three warthogs with two riders each will follow the wagon and try to set it on fire with their arrows, while bird-things will harry it and drop fire pots in front of the wagon to try to divert it along several points. At the crucial point, they can divert it from moving into the little field and it will go around on the same big merry-go-round again. In the little field, you may have one of the warthogs follow you in, and another bird will try to keep the wagon from reaching the last gate.

So, that sounds challenging enough, right? Well it gets worse. First, you can't kill anyone. You can knock guys off the warthogs but eventually they'll get back on. At one point I managed to knock it down from three to two, without having any idea how, but eventually I had three warthogs back again, so nothing gained. Some of the birds appear to be killable with arrows, but the last one at each stage has to be killed when it appears or else it'll come back. (I think so anyway; let me know if I'm wrong.) So you have to guard the wagon up to a point, put out fires or at least reduce them with the boomerang, and then you have to get to a point where you shoot the bird-thing with an arrow so the wagon can move on.

The Wii controls for the game make this a smidge difficult. In your left hand you hold the nunchuck, which controls the horse's movement and Z-targeting. Z-targeting improves your accuracy tremendously with ranged weapons, but you pretty much can't do it on horseback. In your right hand is the main Wii remote, and here are the killer controls: The A button on the face is used to put weapons away, which you need for your ranged weapons to switch to a sword, and it's also used to spur on your horse, which you need to get ahead of or catch up to the wagon. The B button, which works like a gun trigger, is used to pull out and fire a ranged weapon (the boomerang or the bow) while you point the remote at the screen to aim. The remote must be shaken to use your sword in a standard attack, and you can shake the nunchuck for a spin attack that's normally very very helpful. Finally, you need the cross-shaped pad to switch between the boomerang and the bow, because you'll need both.

If all that sounds complicated, it gets worse. If you knock guys off their warthogs, the warthog can still be in your way and is difficult to shake without using a spur. If you run directly into a tree, a warthog, the wagon, or what have you, the horse will stop outright and is hard to get moving again quickly. The spin attack doesn't work for crap on horseback; it has a delay of several seconds here, so by the time you use it you don't have as many enemies in range for it to hit. The B button to pull out a ranged weapon changes the camera view, so you can't aim before using it, but it will also auto-fire if it's pointing at the screen when you use it, so the boomerang will leave your hand before you can properly target it on the wagon, and you can forget about using the bow and arrow at speed. Also while you're targeting with a ranged weapon, you can't control your horse. The only way to proceed past stages 2 or 3 is to wait till you're most of the way through the field and be sure the wagon is mostly not in danger, get ahead of it, and then bring your horse to a dead stop (or close to it) at a spot where you have a good vantage of where the bird will drop the fire pot, then pull out the bow and hope you get off a lucky shot.

There are two ways to fail at any of the above. The most common is for the wagon to get to the point where it burns up completely, which can happen if you're not really close to it since targeting with the boomerang is beyond difficult while on horseback. (You have to sort of shoot ahead of the wagon, which is usually easiest if you're directly behind it. Killing the bird usually requires being a little way ahead of the wagon.) Another way is that occasionally the baddies will get in hits on you, and eventually this will take its toll. If this happens, you start back at the beginning of stage 1--after the joust, but before any of the wagon chase. If you leave and come back, the closest save point is before the joust.

When I first did the challenge I actually got through stage 2 without a hitch but had trouble on stage 3. My fiancée was amazed I even got that far. When I eventually had to try again, I saw why that was. I had pulled off a very lucky shot on the bird-thing the first time around, and when I finally made it through it took two such shots. Pure luck and just being in the right place at the right time. Doing it again was even harder, because skill has little to do with it.

I like a good challenge, but this was stinking ridiculous. The complexity of this one task was enormous. I can only conclude the people writing the guides which suggest this was easy were all tweaked on crystal meth at the time, and also possess a superhuman ability to point the remote at just the right point on the screen and fire at the right time. The testers of this obstacle must have been freaks of a similar caliber, and its designers were pure sadists. And seriously, someone should die for the can't-control-the-horse thing.

In conclusion: Wii good, Zelda good, crazy challenge 10× more impossibly difficult than anything previously encountered: bad. Seriously, never ever do this to your players. They will not forgive. Trust me.