Amethyst's Shiny Pebbles

Today's been really very nice.  We've been home, for starters: while the mattress on the floor at my parents' house works okay for about a week, there's nothing quite like one's own mattress with nice fuzzy flannel sheets to give one a good night's sleep.  We were both so tired that we went to bed around 8-8:15 local time last night.  Woke up around 6, dozed and lolled till, oh, 7:30 or so.  So that was good.

We've done a good combination of "distinctly useful" and "just fun/pleasant" things today.  The combination of having company coming tomorrow and being in a somewhat messy environment for much of last week inspired us to do a fair amount of cleaning.  I tidied the dining room and coffee table (though the coffee table could stand more), cleaned much of the bathroom, and thoroughly vacuumed the  dining room and living room rugs.  The huz cleaned the stovetop and went through a pile of stuff on the kitchen table that's been collecting for quite some time.  We went ice skating for the first time in a bit over a week (last time was Saturday of last weekend), we both played our Wii games that we're working on (one star for the huz, and unbepuzzlement on various paths in Hyrule Castle for me), we've done computer stuff, read, and I even lay down for a while this afternoon after skating.  I beat Golem at card dueling in Chocobo Tales too.  Oh, and we've spent time with the kitties, which is both fun and useful.  Tazz is dozing on my lap even now.

The more I play FFF:CT, the more impressed I am by how generally kid-friendly it is.  Sure, the little chocobo hero is generally saving the world from a nasty demon book-thing, but how threatening is that when the method of saving is to play lots and lots of little games?  Especially when the worst that happens when you lose a challenge, either in a minigame or a duel is.. okay, fine, you lose, try again?  Even in a card duel, if you lose, you lose all your HP and the duel is over.  But the 'real world' chocobo avatar is just fine.  It doesn't die; there's no Game Over.  Golem (or whoever) just stands there and waits for you to challenge him again.  Eventually, you must beat him to advance the plot, but it's entirely likely that there are several mini- and micro-games for you to wander off and beat in the hopes of changing the local environment (usually to access a new area), rescuing one of your chocobo buddies, or gaining a new dueling card with which to improve your deck.  It's true that some of the games are kind of tough.  The microgames are set up in such a way that if you get some moderate number of points, you get an okay sort of dueling card; if you get a much higher number of points, you get a rather cooler card.  For most of the microgames, it's not hugely difficult to get that first level of card.. but of the many many microgames that I've come across, I've gotten the second level card all of twice, and there are two microgames where I haven't managed even the first level.  All these games are short, no more than a couple of minutes, and almost all of them give the sense that if one tries just one more time, one could beat battle level five or achieve the hardest trial run.  Just one more try, really!  Frighteningly addictive, but straightforward in terms of its structure to play for five or ten minutes and then shut it off again - a really excellent setup for a portable system.  Very very good investment, this.

Link was exceedingly dense while wandering around Snowpeak earlier.

Number of times he attempted to carry a cannonball past the rotating ice-dragon creatures in cages, or throw the ball up to a level spot, or similar, before realizing there were holes in the cages through which he could bash the creatures: More than I care to remember.

But once I noticed the holes, boyoboy, progress!  I've got the (erhm) key to the bedroom.. and while the map shows no boss, I cannot believe that There Is No Boss There.  There's also another chest which I haven't gotten to yet, which I'm assuming is the second heart piece (since all the other chests are gone now, and I have one but not two heart pieces from Snowpeak).  It's the one on the second floor of the main hallway, which I'm sort of assuming will involve the three chandeliers.  If only I could reliably make that dratted ice skeleton fall off the stairs and die, life would be considerably simpler with regards to solving this puzzle!

And, still in Zelda-land, the huz and I ran an experiment last night.  He did some Librivox recording stuff in the office with the door closed, and I played Zelda in the living room on the lowest audible volume setting (and kept my mutterings quiet).  No videogame noise on the recording!  Huzzah!  So now, while I will probably often choose to stick audiobooks on my Shuffle and do cross-stitch while the huz records, just 'cuz that's something I don't actually get to do very often, I know I have the option of game-playing!  Eeeee, excitement!

Meanwhile, we sold Super Monkey Balls back to the local Gamestop for a surprisingly reasonable amount, and put the credit from that towards a used copy of Super Paper Mario.  The huz played all of chapter 1-1, and has gotten his second Pixl in the town in chapter 1-2.  It's huge fun to watch.  Pretty graphics, if stylized, and the flipping from one dimension to the other is a real hoot.  (Giant Mario is - not to pun - an even bigger hoot.)  The dialogue so far is really very clever, and the play is pretty straightforward.  One minor blow to Nintendo, though: there's NOTHING in the manual (and I think, similarly, NOTHING from Tippy, your hint-Pixl that you start out with) about how to enter a pipe.  The huz would have gotten really frustrated had I not had a moment of insight there in the middle of chapter 1-2.

Finally, as I mentioned in my last post, we downloaded Wave Race 64 the other day, based on my vague but month-long desire for a racing game just to have something different that was a good pick-up-and-play-a-few-minutes game, and on the IGN review of it.  It's fun!  I'm not even vaguely competent yet at doing any of the tricks (barrel rolls and flips off the ramps, doing a handstand or facing backwards or standing up while riding), but I have mostly gotten over the initial difficulty I had with oversteering.  Just playing around in the practice area is a lot of fun.  We both think that IGN went a bit overboard in claiming that the water physics are still the best around, though.  They're fine.  They're quite nice.  Amazing, I'm afraid they just aren't.  But at $10, I'm not going to complain.  :)

When I came home from work this evening, the huz was sitting at the Wii.  "Wanna see something?" he said.

He turned on the screen and woke up the console... and I watched with pride as the Ganodorf from Zelda: Ocarina of Time threw curses down on all and sundry.

In a matter of mere months (he bought and started the game the day it came out on the Virtual Console), the huz has beat Ocarina of Time!  (Took three tries on the final battle sequence, but I bet most people take multiple tries.)  Congratulations, oh huz!!!!!

Zelda: Almost done with the Lakebed Temple.  I found both pieces of heart (8 heart containers!  Yeah baby!), and have only to unlock the boss door and find out what that's all about.  I expect an interesting cinematic once I've got the third and final Fused Shadow given what the last district spirit showed me.  Point of pride: No looking at walkthroughs on this one!  (Yet.)

Rayman: Completed another day, this one with a warthog race as the final task.  Maybe it was because I'd done a decent amount of practicing on the course over the last month or two (the huz completed that day some time ago, and thus opened up the day's tasks in Score mode), but I'm still rather proud of the fact that I managed to win the race on only my third try - and didn't have to get the huz to win it for me this time.  :)

Wii sports: Well, er.. this is kind of a dis-accomplishment.  I did a fitness test the other morning for the first time in ages.  And because I wanted to have a bit of a workout, I used the nunchuk, which allows the boxing minigames to be used in the test.  I did not expect all three tests to be boxing games!  Because the controls on the boxing games are kind of iffy, "Oh no!  You've added 46 years to your score!"  At least it should be pretty easy to lower it from the current 73 years or whatever the dreadful score was.

Super Monkey Balls: The huz played the regular game for a while, and realized during the irritating boss stage of World 2 why it was so frustrating: the camera angle changes to focus on the boss rather than staying fixed behind the player.  As a result, it's MUCH more difficult to control the angle of the stage than it should be.  Rrrr.  We also played a few of the minigames... and ya know?  They really aren't as well done as Rayman, for the most part.  Some are pretty decent (the driving game, darts, frisbee golf, the birds).  But many more are thwarted by poor instructions (we never did quite figure out how to control the adjunct ball in Monkey Target; the spearfishing one, the bowling one), are really really really dumb (fruitbasket and Rock Paper Scissors), really poorly implemented (fencing), or just plain bad (trombone).  And while the colors are bright and the mood hyper, the overall execution feels unpolished and/or flawed.  We're guessing that this one got pretty good reviews due to the fact that it was one of the better offerings for the system at release time.

Looking forward to: probably Super Paper Mario at some point, possibly Super Mario Galaxy, definitely Rayman 2.  Possibly Wii Fit, because the balance board looks like it's going to be a super peripheral in the future.  I see a snowboarding game, and I *definitely* see a full-blown Dance Dance Revolution game with simultaneous balance board and remote-nunchuck action. 

Things not done:
hedge trimming (due mostly to still-healing sprained finger)
lawn mowing (ditto)
general cleaning (laziness)

Things done:
OSH shopping trip (doorknob, paint, assorted gutter bend and extension pieces)
listening to more music
helping install new doorknob
generally kicking back and relaxing

My goal for the holiday weekend in Zelda was to find and defeat the mid-boss of the Goron Mines dungeon.  (Having found the mid-boss for the Forest Temple kinda difficult, and having required three tries to deal with him, a weekend seemed like a reasonable guesstimate for the next one.) 

Somewhat to my surprise, I completed this goal Friday evening.

I found - and defeated - the boss of the dungeon earlier today.  Whoa.

Now I need to go back in and open all the money-chests and such that I didn't bother with earlier 'cuz my wallet was totally full.  (Link was able to go on a shopping spree after completing the dungeon and is now feeling poor.)  Plus there's a heart piece that I missed!  Hope Midna doesn't mind that she's going to see the inside of the dungeon again.

That was, I think, the most surreal item-quest I've ever been on.

Evil spirits not like bridge.  Evil spirits stole the bridge and put it somewhere else.

Midna sez: Find The Bridge.  Oh yeah, and this is how warp points work.

After some totally clueless wandering around, found the bridge (set on its end, looking a little like a ladder).  Midna then bamfed me and it off to where the bridge was originally built.  I was appropriately impressed - Midna's strong!

But... a bridge.  A bridge?  Totally weird and surreal.

IGN 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.   
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.  ;)

1. On Monday, I had my first voice lesson in a couple of weeks.  My teacher was able to lead me into keeping my throat open and relaxed while singing, even the high stuff.  It felt like a new door had been opened.  Then on Tuesday, when I was practicing, I found a Really Useful image to think of when I breathe in: Not only am I thinking down (with my diaphragm), but I'm thinking back (to stretch and relax the larynx - this part has the lovely side effect of elevating the ribs in my back too!) and also up through the back of my head (to help generate the lift and space I need to get the resonance that I want).  When it works, it feels like it really works!  Everything's open, free, relaxed, not forced... Hopefully I'm doing things right, and not screwing things up.

2. Last night I got to have my first rehearsal with our new choir director Matthew.  Working with him really is wonderful!  He's challenging us: last night consisted largely of: read through a piece with piano accompaniment once, or twice in one case, and then he'd have us try it a capella.  Great fun, as far as I'm concerned.  :)  And of course he's a marvelous musician, and huge fun to work with.  It was a lovely evening, ending with drinks and dessert after rehearsal.  (And we're doing a piece this Sunday that I actually felt the need to take home and learn (at least for one transition spot).  Novel, what?

In other news: I am now the proud holder of the first Gold Medal in the household for a Wii Sports training exercise!  (in the Golf: Hitting to the Green exercise, if anyone cares)  Yeah, boring life I know.  ;)

So now that we've had the box for a few days, what do we think?  Stil totally awesome.  (Anyone who happens to be in the area *must* come visit and play.)

Plan A (going to Fry's and claiming someone had given us the games we didn't want) failed, because a senior manager recognized the games as having been sold as part of a bundle, and therefore required the receipt and whole system to return.  "Gosh, my friend didn't tell me that..."  But Plan B (going to Target sans receipt) worked!  I picked up copies of Zelda (which I knew we wanted) and Rayman (which I vaguely remembered as not having abysmal reviews), and we've looked at both.

And before I get to actual content, go watch this.  It's a Mac-vs-Windows-like mock advertisement comparing the Wii and the PS3.  WARNING: Do be careful of your environment when you watch; there is much rubbing and jiggling of (clothed) female body parts.