Zel-kun’s Words

Well, I spent several hours playing the new Zelda last night.  And I think I can say its my favorite of the series.  Its very good because it addresses small things that kinda irritated me about the other games in the series.

1. You get to look cool.

You see, in many of Zelda’s cutscenes, the only thing you do is look and observe, maybe occasionally gasp or look surprised.  On a rare occasion you may even draw your sword to get promptly knocked on your ass.  Storyline-wise, Link has always been a bit of an incompetent moron.  Not in this.  While still mute (pretty much a series trait at this point), Link now has an array of smiles, nods, scowls, and various other looks that show he is actually a thinking living being while a scene is going on.  For the first time ever, it seems that Link is actually interacting with other people.

Add this to the fact that you do some pretty heroic-looking things.  Last night I wrangled a horse, chased down a villain on horse back while fighting his calvary unit, then proceeded to have something of a jousting showdown on an ancient stone bridge, upon my victory, Link rode to the top of a hill against the sunset, raised his sword to the air as the horse reared.

Okay, so that last one is cliched, but it still looked cool as hell.

2.  Shopkeepers actually want to make money.

That bomb salesman that says, “Oh, you don’t have a bomb bag, you can’t buy my bombs,” is gone, replaced by a saleman, “You’d like some bombs?  But you don’t have a bag, I have a special starter kit, a bag and thirty bombs!”  So now I don’t have to go through a long dungeon to get disappointed that the treasure there is the mundane nessessity, bombs.  (only in Zelda could you call bombs mundane)

3. New and interesting twists to the classic arsenal.

Since the beginning, the bow, bomb, and boomerang have been a mainstay of the Zelda series.  While nifty, they’ve remained pretty much unchanged since their inception.  You shoot the bow, plant the bomb, and throw to boomerang.  The control of which have been nearly identical since the game went 3d.

Not this one.  The boomerang is completely different.  First of all, you don’t throw it at enemies to hurt them.  The boomerang embodies wind and a little tornado follows its path, bringing things in its wake back to you.  Whether those things be good (rupies) or bad (annoying bats).  So you can control wind, get distant object, and bring small enemies closer to you for the kill.  Nice.

The bow and arrow?  The same, buuuuuut…

The bomb?  Almost the same (also there are apparently three varieties of bomb, don’t know what they are yet), but you can combine the bomb and the bow.   That’s right… Exploding-freaking-arrows.  How cool is that?  I submit that it is very cool.

4.  You have full mounted combat capabilities.

That’s right, most of your weapons at this point can be used on horse back.  You can trample a poor goblin, turn around, and finish him off with your sword.  After being limited to only the bow and arrow for so long, this was a nice change.

5. You can run and slash at the same time.

That’s right, you can run around slashing your sword blindly.  This isn’t the most effective form of combat, but it really helps with those large patches of grass or a long line of breakable pots.

6. The spin slash is once again non-magical.

That’s right, the spin I knew and loved from Link to the Past is back.  I don’t have to worry about a magic bar to do a simple spinning move.

So there you have it, maybe I’ll make a third post on this game… seems halfway likely at this point.

Zel-kun out.

For Christmas, I received ‘The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess,’ which has truly been long awaited.  As I just finished Okami, this was a well-timed present, as my fingers were still itching for another adventure title.  On the various message boards I read, it seems that there’s something of a feud going on between the players of Okami and Zelda.  The fanboyism from the the Zelda side and the elitism from the Okami side is palpable, with the rest just copping out saying you can’t compare the two.  While the games are very different, they’re are some striking similarities.

1. You play a wolf in both games.  Sure, in Okami you’re a wolf the whole game, and in Zelda you periodically become a wolf.  I’m not sure if that means anything, but there it is.  After playing Okami, the control of Zelda’s wolf seems clunky and inept, its skill in fighting far less that of his Hylian counterpart.  Okami’s wolf is more fluid and exciting, with more moves than ‘hit the attack button to lunge, then do it again.’  But then, Amaterasu was always a wolf, and Link had just been transformed into a wolf, so maybe that’s to be expected.

2. You purify the world, one section at a time.  Okami has ‘Cursed Zones’ and Zelda with ‘Twilight Realms,’ (essentially the same thing) and as you delve into these areas, revive a purifying source (spirits or trees), and make the region safe again.  This is not nessessarily a bad thing, as both have unique and interesting ways of ridding the lands of the darkness that engulfs them.

3. With the exception of Okami’s so very long intro, the two have about the same story:action ratio.  Also, the action is similar (fight, gain new powers and/or weapons and items), but with very different feels.  So both are fairly comparable, if you like one game, you’re bound to like the other to some extent.

The differences?  Okami is definitely more lighthearted, while Zelda seems to have delved a bit deeper into darkness.  Okami isn’t very challenging, with a focus on running around and doing any number of countless godly sidequests, while Zelda (in traditional Zelda style) is moderately challenging with a focus on puzzles.

So bottom line, Okami or Zelda?  I say both, although in the long-run, Zelda will likely have the higher replayablity, as all of its predessessors.  Zelda is already sporting some of the coolest graphics (as much as I liked the cel-shading, I’m glad they went back to more traditional 3D) and gameplay out of the series (the boomerang it sweetness embodied), and Okami pioneered a style that while lacking in the challenge department, truly manages to be extremely fun and visually stunning.

Zel-kun out.

Its that time again, come and gone.  I remember sitting in front of the Christmas tree as a child, scouring the stacks of presents, looking for mine.  I lifted them, shook them, and scrutinized them for what might be inside.  Then when the moment finally came to open them, it was like a moment of pure jubilation, the culmination of a season of waiting.

These days, the Christmas season is decidedly more blase.  The days of wondering, “What am I going to get?” are behind me.  This is not to say Christmas is not without its charm.  Seeing the streets lit up with lights, and getting together with the family still hold their own special places.  And spending this year with Zai made it all the better, though I could have done without the 4+ hours of driving to pick her up and drop her off each day.

Once again, Zai trumps me with her Christmas gift (I’m sensing a pattern) with an elegant silver pocket watch, with a little window to see all the gears, and the wind has been running since Sunday (I want to see how long a full wind will last).  I’ve always had a fascination with clockwork, its a technology so elegant and archaic all at the same time.  I think of the first man, I believe two hundred some-odd years ago, to say to himself, “The big clock with the pendulum is pretty cool, I wonder if I can make a tiny one with hundreds of tiny gears that doesn’t require a pendulum.”  That man must have been a gnome, only gnomes can be so crazy.

The weekend was far too short, far removed from the two weeks I used to get as a child.  Ah well, back to work.

Zel-kun out.

As of this writing, I am now twenty-five years old.  I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that, but that doesn’t change fact.  Every year, I tend to look back at where I was last year and ask myself the question, “Am I better off?”

The answer this year is yes.

This year has been turbulent, make no mistake.  I began the year in a boring go-nowhere job at Nalco (but it wasn’t hard and I got a lot of time to myself), and then got thrown through the rollercoaster of what I’m now calling the ‘Xsport Fiasco.’  I quit my job, took on the arduous (albeit high-paying) task of trying to please the jocks of a gym.  I drove an average of 600 miles a week, working 10 hour days (without lunch, usually) and even while on the road, frantically taking care of calls, wondering when I can next plug in to the internet to solve them (after seeing the technology in place here at Verizon, I think of how much easier this could have been with the aid of an aircard).  I’m not going to turn this into a violin-worthy story, just stating that I worked my ass off, I put forth more effort for this job than I ever have.

After three months, I was canned.

I didn’t realize this at the time (and I may be repeating myself, but this IS a recap), but this did quite the number on my confidence.  I bounced around for three months, doing various short-term work for TekSystems.  Sometimes these jobs lasted as long as two weeks, sometimes no more than a few hours.  While not exactly steady, it paid the bills.  I interviewed for a couple long-term jobs during this time, and unlike every other interview I’ve been on, I had no hope of actually landing the jobs.

Luckily, it turned out I was wrong, and I can’t say I’ve ever been happier to be wrong.  Because I sit at one of those jobs now, making decent money, and doing work I like.  Through holding this job down and getting a very positive 60-day review, I think I finally have my confidence back, which is good, I was beginning to miss it.

As a tangent, I’d like to take a moment to make a mention of TekSystems, who have pulled me through the tougher times with much needed jobs here and there.  The people there have been nothing but friendly (even treating me to lunch on several occasions), and have found me work even way back when I had nothing to show on my resume for experience (six months at a tiny company that folded isn’t exactly what people are looking for).  And with them, doing jobs for small and large companies alike, have given me the experience and knowledge to get better and higher-paying jobs.  So if you find yourself in a dead-end, low-paying job, maybe you’re tired of waiting tables or working at the local store, and you know anything at all about computers (and I mean as simple as knowing how to hook one up), maybe you should look them up (www.teksystems.com).

Zai continues to be my constant companion.  Offering a smile and encouraging words whenever they’re needed.  The saturdays I spend with her have kept me going even when life wasn’t exactly pleasant.  Admittedly, I wish she’d get her license so I don’t have to drive around so darn much, but maybe that can be my birthday present next year.

I have more to say, but I also have work to do.  Maybe later.

Zel-kun out.

1Rough couple of days there, but Zelkun is back on the air and ready to take your calls, operators are standing by!

Oddly enough, even though Zelkun was unreachable for two days, the spam-bots still managed to find me.

In other news, Zai has purchased me the most elaborate birthday present yet, a set of 36 vampire sourcebooks!  (only $85 on eBay!) I’m not sure, but I THINK she is hinting at me to run a game.  Methinks I have a lot of reading ahead of me.

I’ve already begun reading the main masquerade sourcebook, the world is listed as ‘gothic-punk.’  This strikes me as the type of setting poseur teenage goths in suburbia would like, so of course I’m going to have to tweak the world to be non-suck.  Reading the description of ‘gothic-punk’ in the book describes the society of humans to be like one giant rave.  So, uh… yeah, lot’s of changes to make it non-suck.  But I have high hopes, with these books, I can start a game in the Dark Ages and progress to the modern over the course of the story.  I think it may also be cool to incorporate a bit more magic than the Vampire world usually allows for.  But I’ll have to research a bit more to see if that would truly be a smart thing to do.

Zel-kun out.

It always seemed ironic to me.  I spend all day fixing other people’s computers, and I come home to a perpetually broken one.  I’m not sure I could call it a computer anymore, more like a crash simulator that occasionally computes in its free time.  From bad memory sectors, a fried power supply, corrupt video drivers, completely unexplained reboots, fried video card, corrupt Windows installations, the win32 worm, corrupt firmware in the MONITOR, fried PCI port, fried memory slot, broken network card, two broken cable modems, and a broken router, I’ve seen nearly everything.

 These problems, of course, have been over the course of six years and two computers, but its still pretty damn frustrating when you’re writing something, and the computer inexplicably reboots on you, without an error message in the event logs or anything.  Hopefully that will change with the order I just placed for a brand new motherboard and processor, and with the PCI-E card I’m getting from my good friend Pete, who has always been willing to let me get his hand-me-downs at a discount, heheh.  With those and the new RAM and Hard drives I plan on buying in the not-too-distant future, all of these problems will be a thing of the past.

In other news, its getting harder and harder to keep the spammers at bay on this site.  Although they’re annoying, their tendency to try to imitate ACTUAL comments can be quite amusing.  Here’s a couple exmaples:

”

wheelchairs…

Didn’t notice it before . . . quite clever…. ”

and

“if the human brain were simple and easy to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it”

and the ever-present

“Mmm… Good post Will watch your blog ”

Its strange to think of people actually wasting their time programming spam-bots to do this stuff.  I can’t imagine this kind of ‘marketing’ brings ANY business to the sites they promote.  All they create is irritation, in my opinion.

Zel-kun out.

Well, I finally did it, I finished Vampire: Bloodlines.  With the fan-made patch, it wasn’t too bad.  Does it maintain its place of dishonor in the Hall of Shame?  The answer is yes.

As I went into the endgame, the plot began to have more and more holes in it.  Anyone who plans to play this game may want to look away, as I’m sure there are spoilers ahead.

There were plotholes from the very beginning, most of them minor.  I wonder WHY I was chosen to be a vampire, what my original purpose was.  They never explain WHO you are, or why, if your mortal self was from LA, why they’d keep you in LA with the risk of being recognized by people you knew in life.  But, I suppose these are plot holes that can be ignored for the sake of just getting you into the game.

Then you meet this vampire, who APPARENTLY is the leader of the bad guys, who for SOME reason, releases a video where a bunch of monsters he created murder a young girl.  THEN he sends the monsters out to kill any that have seen it.  Its never explained why he did it, because even among his little group, they like to keep themselves secret.

Then near the end your ghoul (servant) is kidnapped and murdered by the bad guys.  One would think this was to draw you out, except they didn’t leave a note or message or anything.  So as you’re raiding their hideout, you just stumble in on them killing her.

Also, for some reason, there are people with gouged-out eyes standing around this hideout.  They just stand there… not doing anything.  So I punched one, and he runs around fearfully for a little while, then walks calmly back to his post.  No sense… whatsoever.

So you choose your path and basically go on a killing spree in one or more of the game’s main faction’s headquarters (admittedly, this was pretty fun).  And I start fighting vampires with the same character model as me.  Not a plot hole… just bad, bad programming.

So, the game is over, and you are standing there with the key to the Ankaren Sarcophagus, this relic you’ve been chasing after pretty much the whole game.  You can choose to open it, or leave and let this other guy (the leader of the Vampires who’s been bossing you around the whole game) open it, this thing that supposedly contains a being that will bring about the end of all things.

When its opened, there’s a stockpile of C4 and a note written by Jack (who’s been something of your mentor throughout the game) that says ‘BOOM!’  I got a good laugh out of this (even if I DID choose to open it and blew myself up), and even more so when it cuts to Jack sitting in the hills watching the explosion laughing at the whole thing.  Sitting next to the mummy of a Mesopotamian King, which was all the skeptics said was in the sarcophagus.

It was funny, until I got to thinking.  The sarcophagus had only been opened once before, on the cargo ship carrying it to LA.  And mysteriously, the entire crew vanished, leaving only the bloodstained walls and floors of the ship behind.  The player assumes that the casket was opened from the inside (as indicated by the markings), and the demon inside slaughtered everyone.

But now… Jack went aboard the ship and killed everyone?  I understand his desire to blow up the Vampire leader, but why would Jack, a fairly good-hearted (if crude) vampire slaughter a ship full of people to do it?

All in all, the plot was decent, but it could have been much better with some character development and some patches on those plot holes.

Well, I’m done ranting for now.

Zel-kun out.

During my employment here at Verizon, I have just learned a critical piece of info. 

LOCK YOUR COMPUTER.

Even if I’m only going to be gone for a moment, lock it.  Because if I don’t, I run the very real risk of a co-worker sending out love notes from my email address to the rest of the IT group, including my boss.

So, yeah, be more careful.

Zel-kun out.

Its not winter yet, but that doesn’t stop the chill winds and blizzards from finally finding their way into Chicago.  Last night brought the gentle tapping of sleet on my window to lull me to sleep, and a blinding world of white greeted me as I woke up.

A semi ran off the freeway today, blocking up two lanes and backing up traffic for ten miles.  Took me nearly two hours to get into work.  I was late, not that anyone cared, everyone was late today.

On the plus side, boss is letting us out early, so I should arrive home with plenty of time to play some Vampire.  Just as well, there’s nothing here to do, all the users decided to stay home too.

Zel-kun out.