Phantom Hourglass
I made it back east. I swear to god, United Airlines’ planes are falling apart on the runway. Everytime I fly with them their planes are always requiring extra maintenance. One day one of those planes will fall apart in the sky and I don’t want to be riding that, not unlike Albino riding Kasumi like a horse. Sorry ladies, but I don’t own that fine statue of Kasumi bent over fixing her stockings with her ginormous rack billowing in the breeze, that belongs to my brother. I do own the big headed rabbit riding her like a horse and he’ll tell you one thing and only one thing: “never bend over around an Albino! High five!”
I picked up Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on my way back. I was stuck in O’Hare for a couple of hours. Thanks to United’s delayed flight out of SFO I missed my flight out of Chicago by mere minutes. My consolation prize was to go on a pirate-y adventure with Link (who I named Albino) and his pirate chums. So far Zelda’s not a bad game. The ability to annotate maps is the next best thing in RPGs since Aeris getting stuffed through the back with a 10 foot long sword. Just like never bending over in the presence of an Albino you apparently don’t just randomly get on your knees and start praying either. Let that be a lesson learned.
I actually do like using the stylus for all of the controls. It’s easy to pick up and it keeps the action where it’s supposed to be: all over the screen. I have to admit though that I end up covering parts of the screen with my big ass hand as I play, but I can get over that. The ability to tap on monsters to attack them or to draw a circle to do a spin attack works really well since you’re already on the screen moving Link (Albino) about. I hear there are some repetitive and annoying parts, which makes me wonder if I’ll continue to enjoy the game, but I’ll find out as I get to them. The game puts all of the DS’s features to nice use. You can use the microphone to blow out candles, or start up windmills, or even call out to someone in one instant — which I didn’t because I would have looked like a big(ger) idiot at the airport for yelling at my DS, but thankfully it’s not really about yelling as much as it is about blowing into the microphone really hard until the event trigger is activated. The 3D is rich and beautiful for a portable game. Sure it’s not a PSP game, but damn it looks nice on the DS. It’s amazing what you can do with the DS hardware. From my homebrew studies I know the DS can support toon shading, fog, and up to 2048 triangles on screen at once, and they’re put to really good use here. You can annotate just about every map — your sea charts, town maps, and dungeon maps. One aspect of the map I enjoy are the geometric line-intersection puzzles that have you physically marking locations on the map and then extrapolating lines to find a hidden treasure. I haven’t done that in a game and it’s a neat little not-coded-within-the-game feature that is a side effect of drawing freely on the map.
