The Clan of the Cave Bague

Ooohhhh it’s just lovely. So, I’ve rescued yet another light spirit and have changed from shadowy dog thingy back to Link once again. Next up is a trip to the Goron village to find out what they’re in such a bad mood about.

Bashing loads of baddies on the way, naturally. Hopefully I won’t bump into that runny-abouty postman type person. He gives me the heebie jeebies.

Well, I haven’t completed Dawn of Sorrow yet, but I’m temporarily stuck at a nasty big zombie dinosaur boss, so I’ve temporarily diverted my attention to the above. And it’s a work of genius. Simpler than later CV games, for sure, but still lovely. It has the same wonderful elements, including but not limited to the insane obsessive-compulsive desire to colour in every single room of the map, even if you know there’s nothing in it.

Anyhoo – it’s the same old story – Dracula is potentially on the rampage, and it’s up to a pale goth with a bullwhip to save the day

No, really! It’s not that interesting really, but never mind. Anyhoo – I have a wee database going of games what I have and it exports to HTML, so I’ve stuck it up here, just for a laugh. You can get to it from the “Links” section on the right hand side – or here if you’re lazy.

Of course, there’s hardly anything in there at the moment cos most of our games are sitting in crates in Sydney harbour awaiting shipment, but it’ll get filled in in the fullness of time.

Easily one of the best franchises out there – this is my second run through Dawn of Sorrow (although I never completed it the last time, I’m ashamed to say). I have the valueriffic Castlevania double-pack all lined up and ready to go[0] and thought I’d better finish this one first.

[0] We’re going flying on Monday. A nice shiny 28 hour flight, all the way to rainy Edinburgh.

Woohoo! Forest Temple complet0rated! That’s the first dungeon done, although at seven and a half hours in, it’s taken a fair time to get to it. I’ve just wandered out of the newbie area into Hyrule Field and, well, it’s big! There’s no sign of Epona and all the kids have been nicked from the village, so there’s a good bit of rescuing to be done.

I have to say, that Diababa – the dungeon boss in the Forest Temple – is one of the most entertaining and funny Zelda bosses I’ve come across (and that’s saying something because some of the Wind Waker bosses were priceless). I’m also getting the hang of the Wii interface too – the boomerang works particularly well (except when I try to put it away too early and end up rolling off a platform) and the swordplay is as fun as ever. Sure, it doesn’t map your exact movements to sword movements, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a real blast playing as if it does

You should now be reading this post from nelefa.org’s new shiny host. Mail and web services have been moved over to Donhost, where the DNS record is, just to keep everything together in one place. Any intermittent issues you may come across in the next 12 hours or so are probably down to me tinkering and should be ignored. In other words, do not adjust your set.

Woohoo! Well, we have a bit of spare time on our hands so we thought “what better way to spend it than getting Mario64 from the Wii online shop channel and seeing how quickly we can finish it as a group.”

So that’s what we’re doing. Ace, eh?

Well, who’d have thought I’d actually play a game? Had a wee go of Zelda today – it really is a work of art – it’s a true return to form, feeling very much like Ocarina of Time.

I’m still in the first dungeon, despite having a cumulative play time of 5 and a half hours (over about 15 sessions I think). It’s just lovely – the new control scheme, while not mapping sword swings directly to the remote, still feels dynamic and fresh, and the graphics are very pretty.