The Clan of the Cave Bague

This movie demands to have the same rights as a sponge! The right to contain only one single Larry!

It was a foregone conclusion that the only thing to break my post-Zelda ennui would be another Zelda game. And this one is pure Zelda but in your pocket. By that, I mean it’s a modern, 3D Zelda, rather than a top down Zelda. Not that that’s hugely important, but – well – it’s pretty and shiny and that’s just ACE. Basically, Phantom Hourglass has been built specifically to take advantage of the DS and it does it well. It’s completely stylus controlled, and as such is eminently straightforward to control. Some nice additional touches. Rather than using a gale boomerang (or something) to blow out candles, you just – well – blow them out – via the microphone.

Also – a note on the controls. The developers of Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance should take note -  this is how controls on the DS should work. So, if you could be a nice bunch of chaps and go off an develop it, that’d be great. ‘k thnx bye.

0

Nil

Zilch

Nada

It’s a ZERO LARRY MOVIE. Absolutely unprecedented. Mined ewe, it’s entirely possible that Larrys hadn’t been invented in medieval times.

“Delhi’s deputy mayor SS Bajwa died yesterday as a result of “serious head injuries” after falling from his first-floor terrace while attempting to fight off a pack of wild monkeys, the BBC reports.”

Whu? The sounds like the kind of thing the British Government would come up with.

Delhi’s deputy mayor killed by monkeys | The Register

There. It needed to be said.

1! One single Larry! I’m shocked, to say the least. This film stands up much better than I expected it to, and for some reason is a lot more entertaining than I remembered.

Larry count is 3. Which stands to reason. It’s very much a 3-Larry-Movie.

Many Garry’s, Harry’s and even a Barry though. But they’re semi-Larry’s at best.

Whenever anyone mentions RPGs (Japanese style, rather than, say, Neverwinter Knights) conversation rapidly moves to Final Fantasy. As a result there’s little or no talk about the other awesome RPG franchises on the SNES. Foremost of these is the Breath of Fire series. This goes for me as well – I hadn’t played a Breath of Fire game (for some reason I missed it on the GBA) before it appeared on virtual console and my first reaction (at a little over three hours in) is WOW.

From the title screen onwards, the game oozes 8-bit high production values. The music is beautiful, alternating between mournful, epic, sweeping and joyous as the situation demands. The story is involved, passionate, and a good deal more adult than many similar titles.

Underneath is a solid RPG engine with random encounters, turn based combat and all the usual trappings. The animations, however, are where it stands out – it animates more like Fire Emblem than Final Fantasy, with colourful, detailed sprites leaping about and making sword slashes.

Anyhoo – I’ve barely scratched the surface at the moment. I’m sure more coherent commentary will be made once I’m a little further in.

OK, so some of you will remember this article where I was babbling on at great length about setting up a media center using mp3, jinzora, and so on. Well, I hit a small snag a bit down the line and thought I’d share the adventure with you lot. Basically, the problem is this: mpd on Ubuntu doesn’t support the AAC audio format (the format iTunes uses by default to encode, and the format the iTunes music store uses for its DRM free downloads)  out of the box. There’s a very good reason for this – mpd is a universe component – it’s open source and community maintained. The AAC file format, though, is multiverse because it can’t legally be distributed in some countries.

The only way around this is to  build mpd from source, and that involves getting a pile of prerequisite packages installed. So here’s what we do.

First of all, we want to get rid of the packaged version. One caveat here, the uninstall process likes to nuke directories in /var/lib/mpd, so move /var/lib/mpd/music somewhere safe (unless it’s a symlink to somewhere else, of course). Likewise, you’ll want to make sure you have a copy of /var/lib/mpd/playlists.

Once it’s all safe, do:

apt-get remove mpd

And it’s gone.

Next, we want to download a copy of the mpd sources.

wget http://musicpd.org/uploads/files/mpd-0.13.0.tar.gz

That will get you the current release. Next bit is down to personal choice – I tend to have a /usr/src directory that I stick sources in so I can keep them hanging around in case I want to rebuild or (more usually) do a make uninstall when the package with the options I want finally becomes available.

So – let’s get the sources untarred. Assuming you’ve saved the download in your home directory;

tar zxfv ~/mpd-0.13.0.tar.gz
cd mpd-0.13.0

There we go – we have the sources unpacked and it’s time to install some pre-requisites. Firstly, a C compiler will be handy. Fortunately, Ubuntu has a useful meta-package to install everything you need to compile and link.

sudo apt-get install build-essential

This will download and install a whole pile of software. Once that’s there, we need to install a substantial list of prerequisites. Although your system is already capable of playing media formats, you don’t yet have the dev packages installed and these are required for mpd to be linked against. So here we go;

sudo apt-get install  libmikmod-dev libid3tag0-dev libmpcdec-dev libmpcdec3 libfaad2-dev libmp4v2-dev libvorbis-dev libflac-dev liboggflac-dev libaudiofile-dev liblame-dev libmad0-dev libsamplerate-dev libao-dev libalsa-dev libasound2-dev libao2 libao-dev

Phew! That’ll chunter away for a wee while installing. When it does, we just need to do a;

./configure –prefix=/usr

make

sudo  make install

At this point, have a look in /var/lib/mpd and, if necessary, create a playlists directory or move your saved playlists directory back, similarly for your music directory / symlink.
sudo /etc/init.d/mpd start

And that should be you! Your media player now supports AAC files. Of course, the trouble here is that you won’t get nice handy automatic updates for mpd any more. Hopefully, someone will produce a new package which is build in this way. You could always make one yourself and run a repository for it.

It is complete – at a little over 50 hours, and I reckon there’s 2-3 hours of optional stuff and at least 10 hours of fishing quests still in there. The ending was as epic as games get, really, with lovely protracted titles showing events in the world after the end of the story.

Spoiler Alert – skip this bit if you don’t want a bit of a final-boss giveaway.

Still reading?

Well, the climatic boss fight with Ganondorf was completey ace – his final (fourth!) form was the longest and toughest section (although still not HUGELY tough) – it was a gimmick-free straight up walled swordfight. No tools, no hookshot or bow required – just the shield and the Master Sword against the Big Bad. And it was fab!

So, chalk up another completed Zelda to Mr Gubbins – not only that, but I think it’s the first game I’ve completed since my Castlevania binge at the beginning of the year. Time to get on with Paper Mario methinks.