Archive for December, 2006
The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess
I ordered this off a rather nice new website for ordering games at long last this week and got it yesterday. I’ve been waiting for it for several years and finally have started playing, and it’s brilliant. I wrote this e-mail to a friend about it and so I thought I’d use it as a blog entry as it’s quite nice.
So, I’m writing to you to get first impressions before we see each other at school and have a long conversation, probably in English. I’ve named Link Xyrael and Epona Athena – the goddess of war and wisdom is appropriate as it’s another classical allusion as Epona is, raising the status of the character 
It took me about forty minutes of scouring the net etc. to choose that one, as I knew I’d kick myself if I didn’t pick something nice. The cat is so cute!
Now, there are a few points so far that have frustrated me. Again, we have the usual annoying follower of Midna. I don’t like the servant idea at all. Also the fact that the enemy is that King of Shadows is cheesy and not Zelda. The series can get away with being a little cliched because it does it so well, but if he doesn’t turn out to be Ganon I’ll be dissapointed. I think it can be fairly said that the final battle on Wind Waker is the best Zelda boss battle ever, and I hope that this will live up to that.
There are many good points. I like the blending of Wind Waker style graphics with Ocarina realism – the curls and twists of Wind Waker work well but they are incorporated into the really nice colours. Now, it may just be that I’m using a pretty rubbish screen but right now, Wind Waker impressed me more by the beginning of the game for pure wow factor. Also, as per usual with me, I’m really pleased they’ve kept the old music but improved on it. For example, when I stepped inside Link’s house, it was great to hear the usual theme. The light spirits are a nice idea and the bit when you get dressed in the kokiri (SP?) tunic is very nice. /If only they’d mentioned the hero of time/, as the right theme was playing. I was very excited.
The whole shadow world idea is overall quite nice. I’m not keen on the ever visible blue earring, but the challenges that can be overcome as a wolf are fun. Here’s my prediction for the rest of the game: blast back twilight a bit further to reveal a dungeon, hack through as Link, switch back to wolf and blast twilight back a bit more etc. And the thing to collect, as in every RPG, will be the thing Midna is looking for (which I don’t really know about yet). And heh, I actually read the instruction manual before playing.
One thing that I’m extremely worried about is the lack thus far of a special item; e.g. Wind Waker, Ocarina, Harp of Ages etc. Something tells me it’s inside the first dungeon, that Dark Temple which I’ve just entered (I’m at grandparents now, don’t reveal beyond that point please!). I’m hoping that this will surface. So, what are your thoughts?
Gaming
We played DnD on the Friday before xmas, and it went very well. Unfortunately, we ended up with only myself, Matt, Ellie and Peter DMing, and it was a shame that others couldn’t make it in the end. The party of a celestial cleric, surly monk and loud bard started off in Amalaé’s Tower, waiting for the wizard and Kvetch the other bard to attempt to open a portal. I had a new feat called Common Sense, and the DM was charged with telling us when we were about to do something rather stupid. So, after stocking up on defensive magic, the portal opened and we got sucked in, as per usual. Waking up in the middle of a jungle, we used flight to take a look around. Finding a stone circle, we slowly uncovered a teleportation network around the plane we were on, and eventually came to the master stone circle. After pulling off some tricks to work out the passphrase for the exit portal to get past the golem guardians, we plopped into the astral plane.
After a bit of messing around we reached a portal, which appeared differently to each of us. The guarding statues spoke: “we are the guardians of the ninth gate, pay the toll to pass”. I gave up my shadow, as Peter had told me some months before, and now I glow permenantly – but I have several demi-celestial abilities. The monk gave up all the hair on her body except for her head, and got a load of penalties – and a minor bonus somewhere or other. The bard gave up her birthday and became immume to time. This was probably the coolest; the hair one got a rubbish exchange because it wasn’t very exciting.
So we entered a city made up of nine cubes through this portal, with each face of the cube having a door to a elemental plane and the cubes being influences by the faces they were nearest. We romped through to do some minor quests and escaped from the area back home. T’was fun.
Mediation Committee
Well, it’s official – I’ve joined the English Wikipedia’s Mediation Commitee, the official organisation for solving disputes in a peaceful manner. This means I will be putting a fair chunk of wikitime into trying to get people to work together to make the encyclopedia better. Mediations there usually involve incredibly verbose ramblings down talkpages, spiralling slowly into incivility. However, it’s my job to attempt to detangle said mess and improve things for everyone.
Wikipedia has a pretty solid dispute resolution system but the ‘official’ (in other words, last resort) routes are committee mediation and then if all else fails the sister arbitration committee, which has the power to start forcing solutions. Mediators are only there to suggest and nudge, which is great. We have a well developed system that generally works.
You will probably have noticed that the site has been redesigned again. I’m not going to explain it all as I have already done so on the about page. Go there, read, consume, understand. Gain knowledge of my unentertaining self.
I have a nix desktop again
I finally got round to doing away with the slow-loading, out-of-date, vaguely commercial Fedora Core last night and stayed up rather late getting ubuntu on. I must say, it really advertises itself well as it was insanely easy to install. Boot from the CD, and after a few minutes you have a fully working system. Obviously there are some limitations as its a live CD but it’s a nice philosophy – just run ‘Install’ from the desktop. There are a minimum number of options and it’s painless enough. I wiperised my old partitions and then with a little fiddling (that needed some thought due to an interface that wasn’t an obvious as I would have liked) I got it to create what it needed. Once installed and rebooted it updated itself, which was done very professionally. My task before going to bed was to get the bootloader to default to windows. I got some help with this (and with other things) from my ubuntu-savvy friend nalioth and got this sorted rather quickly. He tells me not to assume anything as the distro is so different – fex, apparently all I need to do to get my printer shared over the network for the benefit of the laptop using a simple applet somewhere. Unfortunately, I may not have time this evening but I hope to. Then I can use it almost exclusively.
I did want to use gentoo but I don’t think I’m really good enough to get it working graphically without frying anything. So, I’m sticking with my current little setup for now and maybe the no root philosophy will grow on me!