Various and sundry
Mar. 28th, 2007 04:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amethyst73IGN has a pretty amusing Top list this week: they chose to determine the 25 Worst instances of game box art. There are several apparent categories: too much flesh (male - e.g. Rambo), too much flesh (male+female - mostly consisting of heroes'n'heroines dressed in their Brassieres Of Protecting), plain old Bad Art (e.g. Wonder Boy, Mega Man, several others), inclusion of odd elements that have - presumably - minimal amounts to do with the actual gameplay (like the Appalachianesque banjo player on the cover of the space war game Phalanx, the bizarro baby face on the cover of Super Bust-A-Move)...
.. and finally, the "What were they thinking when they came up with the game concept?" cover: Ninja Golf. A clear winner.
As a side note, I'd never seen the box art for the home console release of the original Pac-Man (heck, I'd never seen the art for, much less heard of, most of the games listed, and I'm sure that's for all the right reasons), but I thought it had a certain charm to it.
I've now logged over 5 hours (yeah, woo!) of gameplay on Zelda: Twilight Princess and so I feel like I can make some early comments on the game.
Spoiler indicator: I've just acquired a shield.
Graphics: Wow, this looks niiiiiice. Have pity on me: keep in mind that the last vaguely console-like thing we owned was/is Connectix Virtual PlayStation. In terms of 3D run-around action, I'm used to seeing the near-ubiquitous sepia tones (and entirely fine - but very PlayStation era - texture maps) of Vagrant Story. The other basis for comparison is Ocarina of Time, which the huz plays regularly, and which Twilight Princess clearly borrows a lot from visually.
Textures are nice, certain individual objects are very nice; I particularly like the rocks scattered about. And there's one design aspect that I really like: the black patch that appears in the sky of what I'll call Daylight World when creatures of the Dark World zap themselves in. Yeah, sure, the outline is very blocky. But the swirly, almost circuit board-like designs within are very cool. They remind me of TRON, as I suspect they're meant to. It's a nice additional reminder of how different and alien the Dark World is.
Writing and characters: I'm quite impressed so far. Midna is particularly well done, as should be the case for a character clearly as major as she is. Her physical design is nicely ambiguous: roughly equal parts of her body are light- and dark-colored, and I noticed in one full-body shot that her white leg ends in a stump - no foot. (I didn't think to try to get a look at her dark leg, but I'll watch out for it.) And her writing is just great. She's an imperious, powerful, know-it-all little b!tch, and she clearly relishes her position of power over Link. She's helpful, sure, but only when it suits her. As a player, I trust her very little so far. After all, I saw Pan's Labyrinth way too recently to entirely trust anyone who says I have to to exactly as they say! And the bit where she transformed her physical appearance to that of the kids who'd been captured, yet still continued to talk in her echoey, alien babble was appropriately weird and creepy.
I was also pleased to see that the villagers change over time. Early in the game, when Link had knocked down a hornet's nest using hawk grass, the villager he'd helped said that he was going to practice his own hawk grass skills. When that same villager spots Link in his wolf form later, the villager puts his practice to use by summoning a hawk to repeatedly attack the poor little wolfie.
Even the chickens have personalities, though they seem (reasonably enough) to be none too deep. Was anyone besides me kind of freaked out by the chicken who thinks the wolf is beautiful? One presumes that if this chicken ever wandered out of town, or if a true wolf wandered in, that particular chicken would not be long for this world. *shiver* MF'in' weird chicken.
Gameplay: I like the mix of talking to people, solving puzzles, doing combat, and hitting the occasional platform-like section. I was very grateful that, in the sequence at Dark Hyrule Castle when Link is walking along the wall, the game simply plonks you back at the beginning of the wall sequence after you've fallen off to your (presumably) death WITHOUT making you go through the Game Over screen - poor little wolfie fell down several times. Having seen the two boss battles that the huz has met in Ocarina so far, I'm a little nervous about Link's eventual descent into a dungeon, but, well, that's what saves are for.
The one gameplay aspect that I find a little irritating so far is the 'Wander around until you hit the Midna HotSpot' part. Midna can help Link jump great distances... but Link has to muddle around and find the spot at which Midna will deign to indicate a jump path. This was a little annoying when I was trying to sneak up on the guy with the hawk, and the first Midna HotSpot I found was the sequence up to the middle of the waterwheel to the roof of the house where the shield is. Since I hadn't yet scared the guy with the hawk, the hawk was flown at me, and poor little wolfie had to run home and dig up some hearts before he felt better. Similarly in the castle wall sequence, I went to an Obvious Gap that looked like it miiiiight be jumpable to the next ledge, found that Midna didn't appear, and attempted to jump. And fell, of course. I suppose this aspect may be intentional: it certainly re-inforces both the player's sense that Midna is the one in charge here, and the player's irritation at the fact.
Graphics: Wow, this looks niiiiiice. Have pity on me: keep in mind that the last vaguely console-like thing we owned was/is Connectix Virtual PlayStation. In terms of 3D run-around action, I'm used to seeing the near-ubiquitous sepia tones (and entirely fine - but very PlayStation era - texture maps) of Vagrant Story. The other basis for comparison is Ocarina of Time, which the huz plays regularly, and which Twilight Princess clearly borrows a lot from visually.
Textures are nice, certain individual objects are very nice; I particularly like the rocks scattered about. And there's one design aspect that I really like: the black patch that appears in the sky of what I'll call Daylight World when creatures of the Dark World zap themselves in. Yeah, sure, the outline is very blocky. But the swirly, almost circuit board-like designs within are very cool. They remind me of TRON, as I suspect they're meant to. It's a nice additional reminder of how different and alien the Dark World is.
Writing and characters: I'm quite impressed so far. Midna is particularly well done, as should be the case for a character clearly as major as she is. Her physical design is nicely ambiguous: roughly equal parts of her body are light- and dark-colored, and I noticed in one full-body shot that her white leg ends in a stump - no foot. (I didn't think to try to get a look at her dark leg, but I'll watch out for it.) And her writing is just great. She's an imperious, powerful, know-it-all little b!tch, and she clearly relishes her position of power over Link. She's helpful, sure, but only when it suits her. As a player, I trust her very little so far. After all, I saw Pan's Labyrinth way too recently to entirely trust anyone who says I have to to exactly as they say! And the bit where she transformed her physical appearance to that of the kids who'd been captured, yet still continued to talk in her echoey, alien babble was appropriately weird and creepy.
I was also pleased to see that the villagers change over time. Early in the game, when Link had knocked down a hornet's nest using hawk grass, the villager he'd helped said that he was going to practice his own hawk grass skills. When that same villager spots Link in his wolf form later, the villager puts his practice to use by summoning a hawk to repeatedly attack the poor little wolfie.
Even the chickens have personalities, though they seem (reasonably enough) to be none too deep. Was anyone besides me kind of freaked out by the chicken who thinks the wolf is beautiful? One presumes that if this chicken ever wandered out of town, or if a true wolf wandered in, that particular chicken would not be long for this world. *shiver* MF'in' weird chicken.
Gameplay: I like the mix of talking to people, solving puzzles, doing combat, and hitting the occasional platform-like section. I was very grateful that, in the sequence at Dark Hyrule Castle when Link is walking along the wall, the game simply plonks you back at the beginning of the wall sequence after you've fallen off to your (presumably) death WITHOUT making you go through the Game Over screen - poor little wolfie fell down several times. Having seen the two boss battles that the huz has met in Ocarina so far, I'm a little nervous about Link's eventual descent into a dungeon, but, well, that's what saves are for.
The one gameplay aspect that I find a little irritating so far is the 'Wander around until you hit the Midna HotSpot' part. Midna can help Link jump great distances... but Link has to muddle around and find the spot at which Midna will deign to indicate a jump path. This was a little annoying when I was trying to sneak up on the guy with the hawk, and the first Midna HotSpot I found was the sequence up to the middle of the waterwheel to the roof of the house where the shield is. Since I hadn't yet scared the guy with the hawk, the hawk was flown at me, and poor little wolfie had to run home and dig up some hearts before he felt better. Similarly in the castle wall sequence, I went to an Obvious Gap that looked like it miiiiight be jumpable to the next ledge, found that Midna didn't appear, and attempted to jump. And fell, of course. I suppose this aspect may be intentional: it certainly re-inforces both the player's sense that Midna is the one in charge here, and the player's irritation at the fact.
In non-gaming stuff:
- The boxes that arrived at work had everything! And there was even a packing slip enclosed!
- The little lilac bush in our back yard, which has never had more than one spray of flowers on it (and more often had none at all) has FOUR SPRAYS of buds!!! *happy joy dance*
- I bought myself new ice skates! I'd been using my mom's old skates for a while. Said skates were probably 20+ years old, and had no support in the boot above about the height of a pair of dress shoes. Not useful when you're trying to do 3-turns and mohawks and stuff. I'll probably spend the rest of the current session of skating classes just getting used to them, but it'll be a good thing overall.
- We had a lovely time hanging out with friends this past weekend, and listened to several chapters of At The Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald driving to the meeting point and back. Delightful story. But do move along, sir. There's no religious symbolism to be seen here. ;)
