The Clan of the Cave Bague

So, there’s not been much postage done lately (nothing to do with the postal strike, but more to do with not much playage being done). I have had a couple of wee goes of Twilight Princess, though. Despite being not as pretty as Wind Waker, I think it’s a pretty good contestant for Best Zelda EVAR – it’s huge, never becomes a chore, and has enough variety to keep me amused for hours. As a result, I generally only play it for half an hour at a time because it’s the kind of game you could plough through really quickly and miss out on a lot of the nuances.

Anyhoo, I’m currently on my way back down from the top of the Temple of Time. At the top, I met the obligatory dungeon miniboss, in the shape of an armoured knight, from whom I wrested The Thing for that dungeon. And, naturally, I’m using The Thing to complete the dungeon and kill the boss. Cos that’s how Zelda works. Once out of this one, I reckon I’m off into the clouds! Hooray!

I’m on the last hurdle of campaign mode, but it looks like it’s going to be a tough fight. Essentially, I’m surviving wave after wave of enemy attacks while trying to conquer the enemy base. His rate of production is quote extreme, due to the high number of barracks he has and, unlike in endless play mode, he doesn’t seem to require an economy of his own, so doing away infrastructure appears to have no effect. Still, I’m pretty sure that putting most of my resources into a full on assault is the best way to proceed, because otherwise he’ll be able to whittle away my cash reserves in a long campaign.

Once the campaign is done, of course, I can get on with  the REAL game, which is endless mode

I’ve clearly been lapse with updates cos I haven’t actually posted anything about this game. I’m currently at the start of Chapter 3 and really had to stop playing because I couldn’t read any more of the incredibly stupid dialogue without swallowing my own head with mirth. SPM is different from other Paper Mario titles inasmuch as it’s not a straight RPG but more of an adventure with RPG elements and a whole pile of jumping on things.

Basically, it’s a 2D mario platformer but with the ability to flip into 3D to solve puzzles and avoid bad guys. Like all Paper Mario titles, though, it’s utterly bonkers and makes very little sense…… like Bleck!

And the characters are all mad.

ZOMG! I’ve hit a sweet spot! I’m on chapter 11 and have to find three parts of a treasure map. I need to trade with some Indians to get one part and they want Ostrich feathers. Only bloke with Ostrich farms is an enemy so I need to conquer his island. Which means I have to spend upwards of 18K gold on Academy upgrades. Fortunately, though, my civilisation has been engineered to a sweet spot so that the net profit I’m making is sitting pretty stably at 168 gold. So, barring any natural disasters, I should be able to just leave it sitting there for a couple of hours. So – it’s sitting in front of my dual monitors at work, and I save it every fifteen minutes or so. It occurs to me, though, that in the time it took me to build a stable economy I could probably have conquered the bad guy four times over. But that wouldn’t be as interesting.

I quite like this – it’s the usual quest-based RPG fare, but the addition of CPU henchmen means you don’t have to spend and time whatsoever with dribbling noobs. Especially handy as each of the AI henchmen seems to know how to play their class, which is more than can be said for the common classes of wetware who inhabit other MMOs. ACE (ish).

Desert dungeon complete! And what a beautiful piece of design it was too – not too long and quite episodic. The first section revolved around tracking down a series of Poes so much changing to and fro between Wolf and Human form (which I can do at will now, incidentally) was required. This led me to a hugely entertaining mini-boss bottle after which the dungeon’s obligatory boss-killing gadget was found – an awesome spinny spinning top bladed skateboard of doom! Not only can it skim across the surface of quick sand, but it can also do a spot of vertical rail-grinding along channels cut in the walls and do a spinny attack thing. A few of the platformed areas felt not unlike Jet Set Radio on the Dreamcast (may it rest in peace).

Anyhoo, with new gadget in hand, it was on to the boss battle – one of the most entertaining Zelda bosses I’ve encountered. It was one of those set pieces where I didn’t want it to end. It came in multiple stages and I’m not going to say anything about it cos I don’t want to spoil it for others.

So, new heart get, and I now have to track down three mirror segments, indicating another three dungeons possibly? Either way, I’m thirty hours in.

Gaaaah! They weren’t joking when they said it was hard, were they? All five of us have had a go and Tristan, our in-house SMB expert has managed to get the furthest by almost getting out of world 1-2.

Umm. This is going to require some practice.

Well, fuelled by the knowledge that there’s a new paper mario game out that I’m not buying until I’ve completed some of the $hlmun of games I’ve yet to play, I had another go. So, I finally ganked the Invincible Tubba Blubba and made my way back to toad town. After a particularly silly and funny cutscene, it’s Onward To Chapter 4! So, Toad Town is infested with shy guys and I know where they are. So, into the Shy Guy Toy Box I go, travel east a bit and do all the easy stuff there, then travel west and foolishly pick a fight with an antishy guy. So I’m dead. ACE.

I had a fairly extensive Angband addiction for more years than I care to remember and I’ve inadvertently stumbled onto it again. And it’s just as evil and unforgiving as it ever was, but also just as ACE. It never ceases to amaze me how much depth and complexity can lie beneath the surface of a character-based interface, but I swear to God those “r” signs were laughing at me as they chased me back up the stairs after I’d stupidly wandered down to level 3 when my character was only level 3.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, Zangband is a modification of Angband which is a roguelike game. It’s available on most platforms, so if you’re prepared to spend a wee bit of time reading the text files and learning the buttons, it’s well worthwhile giving it a look. Provided your games don’t need to have pixel shaders and directX 9c support, that is.

Postscript: See that little “r” at the very top of the map? Well, that’s a giant white mouse. What you can’t see, though, are the other 8723646 giant white mouse that were just outwith my line of sight. I was dead within three minutes of that screenshot being taken. Life is harsh in Zangband.

Welcome to my shiny little site, all of my own! Anyway, only had a very brief go of Zelda last night – had a little wander around the haunted desert prisony place and killed a big ghostie thing but lost track of where the other three went and don’t know what to do next. Ho Hum.