Looks kinda rough--fetch me the Three Sword
I've been unhappy with the performance of our laptop lately, so I've spent part of the evening re-installing OS X. It appears to be a bit more responsive, so I am guessing there is a Aqua half-life the way there's a Windows half-life.
One of the things I'm enjoying the most of lately is the GBA game The Legend of Zelda: the Minish Cap. (D'minish Cap! GET IT! It makes you smaller! HAHAHAH. Ahem.)
This was made by both Nintendo and Capcom, which is a little weird to me as I associate Capcom more with Resident Evil than anything else. Granted, they also made one of the best puzzle games ever—Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo—but for the most part they're all about the gore and the shooting and the beheadings and whatnot.
The Minish Cap isn't really like that. It follows the Zelda formula to some extent, which goes a little something like this.
- The Royal Family of Hyrule names their daughter Zelda.
- Something horribly bad happens to her.
- A shadowy figure is up to no good.
- It's up to a young lad named Link (or whatever) to find a bunch of tools and weapons in order to save the princess.
- Triangles are serious, triangles are important (usually).
- One of the most useful things in the entire world is a bottle, and there are only four of them in the known universe.
People are oohing and ah-ing over the new "serious" Link announced at E3, but I will take the super-cute Minish Cap Link over him any day of the week. My reasoning is simple: one of the tools you get in Minish Cap is the Mole Mitts.
I'll say that again. Mole Mitts. They let you dig through rocks and... um... rocks. But it advances the plot, and the caption in the manual showing a young, golden-locked Link digging maniacally through the ground makes me giggle with delight. Mole Mitts rock.
Other aspects of the game that are cute like Squee the kitten include the little Picori you have to befriend, the fact that you have to wake up your hat before putting it on, and the way the most fearsome beast in the game is a ravenous pack of baby chickens. The big game mechanic is that you can become quite tiny—Capcom does a fantastic job of making the mundane appear monstrous at a reduced size. Raindrops are lethal and tall grass is an impassable barrier.
If you've ever played Ocarina of Time, imagine how you felt when you had to fly using a Cucco, only stretched out over many hours and in portable GBA format. It's that much fun.
I was thinking the other day that Nintendo has wrung all the life out of most of their franchises. Pokemon, Mario, Donkey Kong. All of them have toys, games, cards, breakfast cereals, statues, plushies, etc. The Zelda games have escaped that, perhaps as fallout from the ill-fated CD-i titles, the less said about, the better.
On a more serious note, it appears the nuclear option in the Senate has been disarmed for the moment. I'm not thrilled by this compromise, but I am also glad that the rules are retained with nothing but a promise. In the winners and losers tonight, it appears that Bill Frist can probably kiss his presidential aspirations goodbye. This is all warm-up to the next Supreme Court justice, and we still retain that hole card. Reid and the Democrats walked away with the best of a bad hand. Frist and Bush, they blinked.
