Four Swords Anniversary Edition (again)

Slightly interesting news: If you want to play The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition on DSi/3DS and your handheld is a different region from your partner's, you're out of luck. Multiplayer simply refuses to work on my and my husband's DSis. It doesn't make much sense to me, considering the only way to play co-op is locally, but oh well...

That said, I did get through the basic single-player campaign today. Having never played the game before, I was pleasantly surprised. The puzzles were nothing too special, but they were still quite fun, although there were some points where having another person play with you would make things work much more smoothly than switching back and forth. Having played the single-player mode of Four Swords Adventures on the GameCube, this did surprise me a little, but left me with no real trouble. I just wish I could play the game with Paul.

Where the game truly shines, though, is the "Realm of Memories": this new section riffs on The Legend of Zelda, Link's Awakening, and A Link to the Past in a fun and great way. The puzzles are also more challenging here (still nothing too brain-breaking; this is a Zelda game, after all), and personally, more fun. I'm nowhere near being finished with the game--I do want to find all the treasures in all the areas, and unlock as many techniques as I can!--but I can see myself coming back to it even after I complete it.

FLIM

There's around eleven trillion films I want Emily to watch, and around the same amount she wants me to watch, so we've decided to get 10 a month or something. HMV is going to love me and my money soon.

• Amélie - one of my favourite films
• Being John Malkovich - this film is very weird
• Bicentennial Man - robotic Robin Williams
• Die Hard Quadrillogy - technically four films, though you could pretend it is one very long, terrible day
• Drunken Master - a very drunk Jackie Chan
• Fight Club - still great
• Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children - she wanted it
• Gladiator - kills tigers and doesn't afraid of anything
• Liar Liar - pretty sure this is funny
• Willow - zelda

Going to be fun.

Four Swords Anniversary Edition

I can't believe this happened, but Paul wants to play a Zelda game.

We just got The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition for free on the DSi, and he is the one begging me to play it! I suppose I have had more influence on him than I've realised. Also, this means that one day I may get him to play Wind Waker. Muahahaha.

Now that I'm back in England, I can finish another playthrough of Wind Waker myself! However, I might wait until I play some of my new games first.

Back Home

Emily and I are now very tired but back at my place. IT BEGINS

Acquisitions Special

Uh, okay, before I leave, Good Old Games currently has two games for free that you might be interested in.

• Ultima IV: Quest for the Avatar - hehe, oops. It's free! Well, now I have the DOS and NES versions, I guess?
• Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars - Director's Cut - I haven't played the first in the series though I have finished the second game. I'd expect a fun if not particularly amazing adventure game.

You like games? They free. Get.

Returning to England

I've been here in New York for nearly 2 weeks now, and a lot has happened. Now I'm taking my new wife back to England in anticipation of lots of cooked breakfasts and co-op speedrunning.

I leave for Philadelphia in about 8 hours, and then on to Manchester some time after that. See you all later.

Populous (DS)

I was pleasantly surprised to find Populous had been ported to the DS while randomly browsing my local game store one day. It's a reasonably faithful port; you drag the land up and down to change it, and while the interface can only be worse than the original DOS game, it works. The stylus is necessary, but the d-pad and L button are also very useful and using all three at once for longer than about 30 minutes gets painful. Obviously the DS is designed with short bursts of play in mind though.

So, the game. It looks nice; the GUI is very similar to ye olde dos gamme, and the spells are refreshingly familiar, though the 'choose which deity you are' thing looks half-lifted from Populous 2, which is not a bad decision at all. It seems kinda short; there's 4 sets of levels named 'Tutorial', 'Level 1', 'Level 2', and 'Bonus' and single levels within these sets have a time limit, so it has a pretty well-defined upper time investment. Unless you lose the levels, of course.

This port also has FMVs for some deity spells; while I'm not a fan of this kind of japanese stuff, they look okay and they are quite brief. Also a break from the dragging up/down action is welcome; despite the usually slow pace of Populous, on the DS with its slightly different mechanics games tend to be more frantic. Losing when Armageddon is declared at the time limit is possible, it happened to me today!

So far I've done all of Level 1 and Tutorial.