I’ve been doing lots of stuff this week. Sure, a good chunk of it involved being contorted in various agonising shapes to find the one that hurt the least (thanks, back pain). By the time this article goes live, however, I will need to be up and about – there’s a BT engineer coming to my house to soup up my internet connection. My town finally got FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet), meaning delicious 76Mbps broadband is almost at hand. Apparently, this is known to the masses as “super-fast” broadband. The next tier up is ultra-fast. I wonder what happens when they run out of descriptors? I hope it’s this:

If you don’t get that reference, do yourself a favour and go watch Spaceballs. Like, right now. Don’t even finish reading this sentence; you have more important things to do. On the off chance that you’re still reading, you can come back later. I’ll wait.

…

Right. So the point is that I’ve not done anything BIG this week – just lots of little things. Most of them involve games at some level, so let’s run with it.

I’ll start with something very gaming-related: two Zelda games. Hot off the heels of my completion of The Wind Waker, I decided to play through The Phantom Hourglass. This DS game is a direct sequel to The Wind Waker, which I thought made the most sense. I didn’t like that it more or less abandoned the plot of the previous game – apart from a few appearances by some secondary characters – but even as a standalone game, it was pretty good.

There were some unique interactions with the game that made me smile. At one point, I was presented with two pictures on my dual screens. On the bottom screen was my sea chart – the map of the area I was in. At the top was a wall chart which looked very similar to my sea chart, except for two things: it was upside down and it had a special mark on it. The game told me that I needed to somehow press the mark to my sea chart. Now, in most games, this would just be a button press or a quick-time event or some shite… but in The Phantom Hourglass, things were different.

It took me a second or two, but then I wondered “What if?…” and I closed my DS. This normally just puts the console into sleep mode, but lo and behold, when I opened it again the mark had “touched” my sea chart and I was able to progress. See, that sort of thing is cool.

What was less cool was that I had to control almost the entire game using the stylus. Even more annoying was that the “main” screen was the bottom one. I understand why this was the case, but it didn’t piss me off any less because of it. Just about the only time I pushed a single button was to hold down the L trigger to equip whichever item I had selected – using said item still required input on the touchscreen, though.

It was a background annoyance that persisted for pretty much the entire game, but I was able to ignore it and enjoy the rest. I completed the game fairly quickly by my standards and swiftly moved on to yet another sequel: A Link Between Worlds. Being the follow-up to a previous title isn’t the only thing these two had in common: ALBW also has the unfortunate trait of being limited in its use of the controls, but in the other direction.

I’m probably about two-thirds of the way through the game and, so far, I’ve used the touchscreen for basically nothing except quick travel and the occasional bout of inventory management. Controlling Link using the analog stick and the face buttons is a welcome return to normality, but to ignore the touchscreen almost entirely seems like a mistake. The game even seems to encourage you to use your fingers instead of the stylus, making my refusal to do so all the more cumbersome. There’s no way I’m getting fingerprints all over my screen, but holding the stylus all of the time when I’m not using it feels awkward.

I honestly don’t think I’m enjoying A Link Between Worlds as much as I did The Phantom Hourglass. They are two different Links, of course, but “Toon Link” was much more light-hearted and expressive. The characters were more colourful and less stereotypical. ALBW is certainly a faithful sequel to A Link to the Past, but it feels like more of an iteration than an innovation. Compared to my experiences in TPH, my time in ALBW has felt almost devoid of danger or achievement.

Take for example the fact that nearly every item in ALBW is bought from a man in a purple bunny suit that takes over your house. You can rent any item almost straight away, meaning that you’re walking around Hyrule with a full arsenal before you’ve done even the first dungeon. The caveat is that, should you die, all of your rented items will be returned to the store. The trouble is, I’ve not “died” once, since I’ve always had a faerie at hand to revive me. Remove this risk and it’s hardly worth farming the rupees to buy the items permanently (which costs something in the region of twenty to forty times more than renting).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still enjoying myself on the whole. I loved A Link to the Past and the geek in me got unreasonably excited about there being a name for the Dark Kingdom now. Lorule and Princess Hilda? Oh yes. YES.

What else? Oh, I totally made a green-haired, dual-pistol-wielding Aurin in WildStar called Bucky O’Hare. It was too perfect. I couldn’t resist. Again, if you don’t know what I’m talking about here, go watch .

There was also the release of Patch 2.3 for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn – you know I had to squeeze something FF-related in here somehow – which should prove occupying for the next few months. Assuming I can stop playing Zelda games, of course.

But the main focus, I suppose, has to be the Fibre Broadband upgrade. With the new speeds, not only will I be downloading everything much faster, I should be now able to stream games from my PS4 on Twitch. Because no matter which quality setting you choose, streaming from a 1Mbps upload connection is going to result in a stream made of ass. If things go smoothly and I get PS4 access to the Destiny beta, you can be sure that I’ll let you guys know so you can all watch me be terrible at games.

And that’s just about it. Quiet week. Keep an eye out here at Zero1Gaming for what will hopefully be more substantive content from me in the future!

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