Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass: rolling out of the way

I found an actual hard bit of the game last night. So far it's been quite easy, though some of the puzzles in the temples have been quite clever, especially in the way they reuse rooms with different switches. One nice touch was the dual control of Link and a Goron, where you had to move them separately to trigger switches and assist the other. It reminded me of Mario and Luigi on the Game Boy Advance.

At the end of the Goron's temple was a monster, a big dinosaur thing, which was on the other side of a quicksand pit to Link. However, the Goron appeared on the same side as the dinosaur. To kill him, I had to roll around the pit as the Goron, avoiding the dinosaur's fire, until he charged me. I had to roll out of the way and then hit his side several times until he fell over. Then I had to switch to Link and send a bombchu across to hit the dinosaur in his mouth. Three times. It would have been easier if there weren't snakes attacking Link and the Goron all the time so you had to keep an eye on them too.

I'm actually very impressed with the thought that's gone into this. The general set of Zelda items has been nicely adapted, with things like the boomerang and bombchu using the touchscreen excellently to trace out their path. I've now got the grappling hook which'll let me access some other areas that I was barred from on previous islands, and I'm torn between completing the ice temple or just going exploring.

Oh, but before I went into the ice temple I had to solve a lovely little puzzle. It was a twist on the standard "find the liar" conundrum, with six people, two of which gave details of two others and the remaining four talking about one other each. I had to scrawl details down onto the map in order to solve it. Being able to make notes is very useful indeed.

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