Tag Archives: The Legend of Zelda

Tons of WoW and a bit of Zelda

Posted on by
Reply

Violet Spellwing

Seeing as I’m taking the time to deep clean my room this week I figured I would dust off the blog aswell.
I’ve had a rather busy month last month. A lot of IRL stuff has happened. I said goodbye to one of my coworkers who has gone on maternity leave and to our interim manager who unfortunately had to leave us due to not getting a permanent contract. I’ve also transitioned into a new position at work, one I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while, and found myself immensly tired after being trained for two weeks. This week however I have a week off and I’m hoping to spend it reading books, playing games and continuing to get rid of stuff on our attic. Hayfever has kicked in immensly and the tons of dust that seem to nestle itself everywhere in my room has made me sneeze more than I want to admit but it’s nice to have a truly clean room again, even though I know it will only last for a week or two.

Next to the IRL business I’ve also spent a lot of time playing games, or more specifically a game: World of Warcraft. I have set a goal for myself to obtain as much of the Artifact skins as I possibly can before BfA launches, with a special focus on the Mage Tower ones. I really want to get atleast all the Warrior, Monk, Paladin and Priest skins and will probably take a jab at Hunter aswell for atleast Beast Mastery and Marksmanship. I feel the Mage Tower challenges are not that hard to do but having to gear all my characters to be able to do them takes a lot of time and I rather focus on the classes I actually play over the ones I levelled up just to experience the stories.
Speaking of that, I only have the Rogue left to level. My latest toon, the DK, has gotten to 110 and I’ve finished her class campaign. I hated it (SPOILERS AHEAD). I feel like a Lich King slave all over again, especially when I was basically forced to annihilate the Silver Hand just to attempt to resurrect Tirion Fordring. I don’t feel comfortable at all making more Death Knights and I certainly don’t appreciate the telepathic link the Lich King seems to have permanently instated in my head again. Out of all the class campaigns I’ve done so far I’ve liked this one the least purely because of the story. I know it’s strong storywriting on Blizzard’s account otherwise I wouldn’t have these strong feelings about it. And even though I hated how the story played out I’m curious to see what ramifications my actions had and how things will go in the future for the Knights of the Ebon Blade and the Lich King himself.

Another goal I had on my list was to get the “Ahead of the Curve” achievement before BfA hits. I think the mount is super pretty and I would be sad to not have it. I have gotten every Ahead of the Curve achievement since it was instated in Warlords of Draenor except for the Kil’Jaeden one. So last Friday one of my best friends arranged for me and him to join an Antorus HC group. I was the lowest geared of everyone and didn’t have my Curve achiev but I think I did pretty well. I had minimum deaths and my DPS wasn’t super bad. All in all the run took about two hours after which I had my achievement, and my mount, and feel like I don’t have to do this raid anymore at all, which is a relief all on it’s own. My next big achievement is to get M+15 done. I’ve pushed up to +11 so far on my Monk and I’m confident I can get +15 done if I get a bit more gear.

Priest Class Mount

For now though I’m slowly ticking off goals of my list as BfA draws nearer. I’m slowly obtaining all my Class Hall mounts, working on the Field Medic achievement, gearing up to take on Mage Tower challenges and hunting Hidden Skins. It’s keeping me busy and I’m happy playing with my own goals set in mind. I’ve also almost decided what class I will be rolling as new main in BfA. Unfortunately since my Alliance guild is dead and I don’t really enjoy playing with the majority of people there I’ve decided to roll Horde so I can play with friends over there. I’m currently leaning heavily towards rolling a Protection Paladin but am still undecided because I just love my Windwalker Monk so much that I can’t make the final decision yet. It will mean that I am moving away from my Warrior at the start of BfA but I intend to level her up fast aswell so I can see the Alliance story.

Even though WoW is consuming a lot of my time I’ve still found some time to tackle other things. I’ve started reading the Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb and am halfway through The Assassin’s Apprentice. I’m also finishing off The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. Reading is a nice diversion from staring at a screen all day and seeing as I have about five books on my shelf that are still untouched I will be reading for a while to come.
I’ve also finally started my first serious playthrough of Ocarina of Time on my 3DS. I never had proper Nintendo consoles when I grew up, only handhelds, so I didn’t really experience any of the Zelda games. I bought Ocarina of Time when it became a select and now finally bit the bullet and started playing it. My first impressions are that it’s a rather confusing game which doesn’t give that many clues and the clues you do get are rather cryptic. I know there is a ton of side content to do in the various villages and I have been peeking into a walkthrough every now and then when I was really stuck but otherwise I’ve been trying to make it through on my own. OoT really is a game that wants you to explore and test and do a lot of things on your own so I’ve been wrecking every jar and box I’ve come across, headbutted every tree and talked to every dude in every village. I’ve made it to Dodongo Cave right now but I’m shivering when I think about what’s to come. I heard the Water Temple is legendary and notorious at the same time so I’m quite curious as to what it entails.
I’m also slowly advancing through Dragon Quest 8, for when I’m stuck and frustrated in Zelda, and completed my party by adding Angelo. I’m really enjoying the story, although the monsters are still very bizarre. I think I’m about 8 hours into the game where I know it’s about 80 hours or so long so I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface but still. It’s a nice game to fire up every now and then and play for an hour or two before putting it away again.

There’s more games I would like to focus on after I finish Zelda and/or Dragon Quest 8. I still have Persona 5 and Horizon Zero Dawn that I want to finish on my PS4 and Kirby: Star Allies on my Switch. For the time being though I only have one week off and not enough time in the world to do everything I would want. So I’ll see how far I come with my books and my games, aslong as I get to relax and be happy.

I’m in Love

Posted on by
Reply

So. Seeing as how it was my birthday yesterday I finally got my hands on Breath of the Wild.
I actually wasn’t planning to buy this game at all. I was going to wait untill I got a Switch later in the year and then buy it, but plans change. My dad needed a gift for my birthday and seeing as Nintendo has this habit of not really letting prices drop on their games well… I opted to ask for Breath of the Wild. And I’m extremely glad I did.

So far I’ve been really enjoying the game. I’m now (only) 6 hours in and already made my way to Kakariko village. I have had some distractions along the way. I’ve seen the Game Over screen more than enough already thanks to trying to swim in tar, icewater, getting killed by guardians and accidentally blowing myself up with bombs. Yet I love every minute of it. I love the weapon diversity, I love the bow and arrow gameplay. I like the fights and I already tamed my first horse! Yay for me!
All the little side things like taming horses, cooking, blowing up ore, picking herbs, catching bugs… Hell I even apparently activated a fairy thing. It’s all very well made and it will probably keep me busy for quite  some time. The map of Hyrule is seriously big and I’ve only touched upon a tiny fragment of it so far… I can’t wait to see what’s around the next corner!

P.S.
I also found out how to take screenshots on my WiiU. It’s a bit of a hassle but the result shows at the top of my post I guess. And yes my game is in Dutch.

It’s… March?

Posted on by
Reply

Wow. I’ve been bad with gaming this February.
I’ve put so many goals on my list and I’ve only managed to knock off three, in a game I actually wanted to play less. Go figure. It doesn’t really help that I was effectively knocked out with the flu the last week of February so that took a lot of time away from gaming aswell. Trying to get anything done with a fever is almost impossible. I’ve not raided in WoW since I’ve gotten ill either. I just feel terrible when I try to focus on a screen for longer than 45 mins at a time. Still I’ve dusted off the blog a bit to talk about what I did do last month and what my plans are for March.

First off:

  • Get my Arms artifact to 35
  • Work through the Illidan quesline
  • Work through the Artifact questline

I’ve been busy in World of Warcraft. All the goals I’ve set for this game have been met and then some. I finally got the “Balance of Power” achievement meaning I have now unlocked 3 out of 5 possible skins for my Fury Artifact weapon (I have 4 out of 5 for Arms thanks to the hidden appearance). The only ones I can still get are the PvP appearance and the hidden appearance. Seeing as I’m not a big fan of PvP I don’t see that one coming anytime soon and the hidden appearance requires me to grind Halls of Valor in hopes of a drop from God King Skovald.. Something I’ve not yet been able to motivate myself to do.
I’ve also leveled my druid to level 110 and am currently working on finishing the class campaign so I can unlock my 3rd relic slot on her. I’m happy to have a max level healer again and I do plan on playing her for Mythic+ content, but for now I’m slowly tackling content. I’ve yet to finish all quests in Highmountain and I’ve not even looked at Suramar yet so enough to do there! I have reached ilvl 815 so far so I hope to be slowly able to build that up to a level where I can start running some LFR and higher Mythic+ content. I guess we’ll see.

As for the rest of my February goals… They’ve all failed. I have not been spending much time on FFXIV at all, only really leveling my Dark Knight a bit (she’s level 35 as we speak!) and picking up the rewards from the fanfest stream that I bought. I’m not that enchanted with the High Summoner attire, but that can also be due to low resolution on my PC. I used my Au’Ra to model since I just happened to log in on her to pick up the pieces to begin with.

Looking Ahead

Looking ahead to March I’m unsure how much gaming time I can actually get in. I’m still feeling rather unwell and there are a lot of things happening this month. My free days aren’t actually that “free” so most of my gaming will happen during the limited free time I do have and during the evenings after work.
That being said I’m shoving aside FFXIV and any other game but WoW for raids after March 17th since that is my birthday and I’ll be getting The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as a gift (the WiiU version). I’m really excited about this since it looks to be a very awesome game. Especially since it’s a gift from my dad and I’ve not gotten a game from him since childhood I really want to make this special and enjoy it to it’s fullest. I do realize it’s a huge open world game and it will take me a lot of hours to actually complete it. Nonetheless I want to play it as much as possible.

Other than that I don’t really want to make goals for this month mostly due to being too busy to actually get major stuff done. I might put some effort into leveling some more alts in FFXIV and probably gearing my Druid in WoW but that’s it really.
I do hope to write a bit more on the blog, especially when I receive Zelda, but I can’t promise anything.

Sun on Sundays

Posted on by
Reply

Spring has finally arrived in the Netherlands and seeing as we don’t have that much sun in our country, I felt like I needed to take the opportunity to enjoy the warmth and sun. So after spending yesterday walking around in the shopping area, getting my eyebrows done, shopping for new clothes and a new phone cover and picking up sunscreen for this year, I felt today was perfect to pick up my 3DS and sit in the backyard and play while trying to get some tan on my legs.
So I did just that and played about 2 hours of Pokémon Blue, defeating Misty in the second gym and talking to Bill to get my S.S. Anne ticket. The average level of my Pokémon is now 18, which isn’t too bad after gym number two. My team currently exists of Wartortle, Bellsprout, Pidgey, Nidorina, Geodude and Jigglypuff. I’m hoping to replace the Jigglypuff and Nidorina with a Fire and Electricity or Psychic type Pokémon, but for the third gym Geodude will be amazing, so I’m definately keeping him on my team.
Playing through the first Pokémon game I realize how easy the later generation games have become. Training Pokémon and beating trainers on Blue is significantly harder than it is on Pokémon X and Alpha Sapphire, the two latest installments I have from the series. It’s really nice seeing this oldtimer again though and I’m having as much fun playing through it now as when I had when I was 10 years old.
My coworker has picked up Pokémon Red and we’re kind of navigating through the game together, picking opposite things so we can trade Pokémon to eachother later on for completion of the Pokédex. Ofcourse there is no way to get them all without atleast a third person with a third game around, but we do our best.

Another game I’ve been poking around on my 3DS in is The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. I bought this game heavily discounted thanks to My Nintendo and I have to say it’s a lovely game to play. Having only seen Majora’s Mask and The Windwaker so far this feels like a more real Zelda game than the other two. I’ve only just started so for now I’ve only seen the top-down gameplay, but it’s cute and simple and something I can see myself putting time into and even finishing within the considerable future. Together with Pokémon Blue though this takes up most of my “handheld” game time, leaving little room for other games to be played.

Progression in FFXIV
I gave my Miqo a new haircut. Normally I’m not fond of short hair, but this particular cut is super sassy and I love it on her. Pixie cuts are cute and if you have the right face for it they can look amazing, something FFXIV shows. I also am a huge fan of bubblegum pink hair so naturally I had to dye it that colour. Although the gear looks horrid (level 35 leather gear just doesn’t do it for me) I love the way she looks right now and I don’t think I will change it for a while.

So about that progress…
Yesterday I dinged level 40 on my Machinist. It’s kind of funny that the more skills I unlock, the more I seem to enjoy the class. It’s kind of what Bard was in the last expansion, only with more gadgets and more cooldowns to keep your eyes on. Playing Machinist is quite intricate, but if you play it well and use your cooldowns wisely you can pump out much more damage than meets the eye.
At level 40 you also get your first turret, the Rook variety. It has two forms, an attack form where it performs single target attacks on the same target you’re using weaponskills on. If you upgrade it, it turns into a TP restoring turret, which is really nice if you run with melee. I immediatly got to take the turret for a testdrive versus Svara in the Coerthas Central Highlands. Yes. That Svara. I’m not really sure why Square Enix raised her from the dead just for a Machinist quest, but I’ll take it.

We took her down as a bunch of Machinists and all was well.
Having my Machinist on level 40 means I can focus on the Monk a bit again and bring that to the same level. Although Monk as a class isn’t new to me, I’m still happy to play through the jobquests again and unlock the skills that turned Monk into the best Melee DPS in the 2.0 expansion.
All in all I had a really nice, relaxed weekend. I got to play through a bunch of Pokémon Blue and The Legend of Zelda and got some nice personal time in, which is about as important. I noticed that I can still lose myself in a game, I just need to actually sit down and play. And with that knowledge I hope to be able to push through a lot more stuff over the coming weeks.

Flooding

Posted on by
Reply

Literally getting my feet wet
When I came home on Wednesday evening I was in for a nasty surprise. Getting upstairs and into my bedroom after dinner I discovered quite an amount of water on my bedroom floor, courtesy of a leak. A combination of a partially clogged gutter near my skywindow and a ridiculous amount of marble sized hail proved to be a fatal combination to handle for the outside works thus “flooding” my room with water.
Luckily for me the area with my bed, desk and clothes closet was spared, thus leaving me breathing a sigh of relief as I saw all my electronics being intact and not having to deal with a wet bed. The only real victim of this whole ordeal has been the rug I used for under my deskchair, which is now sitting in the outside garbage bin because it was completely soaked. It didn’t give up without a fight though, seeing as it left behind quite a big chunk of rubber remains that I have for the most part scrubbed off the floor yesterday.
All in all not the best two days for me personally.  I have been quite sore all over today due to having to scrub the damn rubber off the floor and assisting my dad with maintenance work on my roof. Having to hold a tilted skywindow over your head for about 20 minutes is a real test to your arms, can tell you that much.

Picross Madness
I posted earlier this week about My Nintendo, Miitomo and the rewards program and mentioned that I had gotten The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess: Picross game.
I really love Picross. It’s one of those games that has you think about your moves and keeps your brain healthy. Combine it with a game series I’m really starting to get into and you have a gem of a game. I’m currently over 2/3rd of the way completed when it comes to the game. There are three modes of play: Picross, Mega Picross and Miicross.
Picross is the original game with the numbers and squares. You can opt into hints or not and after the inital tutorial there are 45 puzzles to complete ranging from 10×10 squares to 20×15 squares.
Mega Picross is the same puzzle buildup only with a twist in the puzzles themselves. Instead of having rows and colums seperately with numbers they have replaced some of them with numbers that span two rows or colums at the same time, making the puzzle a bit more challenging to complete (See picture below, it’s from Pokémon Picross but the same idea).

The last play mode option, Miicross, is a very large picture broken up into about sixty 10×10 puzzle grids. Solve them all and you unlock the picture.

So far I’ve completely solved the normal Picross mode and the Miicross and am now steadily working my way through the 10×10 grids in Mega Picross mode.
I find it a really nice puzzle game to play. I play it at home to relax after work or when I just don’t feel like starting up any of my machines. It’s also a nice way to spend the 15-20 mins on the train every day, making me be at my destination before I even notice.
The music is nice and not too annoying when played constantly and the graphics, as far as they matter, look good. The only downside so far has been that with the bigger puzzles the squares you need to tap to fill in get smaller and especially around the bottom edge of my screen it sometimes doesn’t really tap the right square, causing me to make an error and thus giving me a time penalty.
Time is  a thing is this game in so far that if you go over 30 mins in solving a puzzle you will not unlock the coloured picture. Going over 30 mins has proven to be almost impossible though, unless you keep on making mistakes so they have been really easy with that.

All in all I’ve really been enjoying this game and I feel like it’s a very good way to spend my first 1000 platinum points of the My Nintendo system. I’m currently saving up to get WarioWare Touched aswell, because free games are always awesome! And it will leave the programme at July 1st. With harking in around 200 coins every week though I should have that game on my 3DS in no time at all and have room to get both the Mario and Donkey Kong themes for my 3DS aswell.

My Nintendo and Miitomo

Posted on by
Reply

About two or three weeks ago Nintendo launched their long awaited new rewards program: My Nintendo. Meant to replace Club Nintendo, they did a complete overhaul. Where in Club Nintendo you would get codes with purchases of games and consoles, that you could turn in for points and ultimately goodies the brain behind Nintendo decided to go a new route for their rewards program, calling it “My Nintendo”.
Going about it a little differently now Nintendo has installed two seperate currencies for their rewards program: Platinum and Gold coins. Platinum coins are mostly earned with attaching your social media accounts to My Nintendo, logging in the Nintendo E-shop and Miiverse every week and using the newly released Miitomo app (more on that one later).
Gold coins are earned when buying games in the Nintendo E-shop. I don’t think you can get gold coins when buying physical copies of their games, which is kind of a shame. I guess this is Nintendo’s way of pushing people to buy their stuff digitally.


Now what do those coins actually buy?
Platinum and gold coins can be exchanged for various things. For the gold coins it’s mostly discounts on games on the Nintendo E-shop for the WiiU and the 3DS.
Platinum coins are a little bit more diverse. So far you can get discounts on games, just like with the golden coins, but you can also get 3DS themes, ingame stuff for Miitomo and an entire free game: The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess: Picross. This game is exclusive to My Nintendo and costs 1000 platinum points, which you should be able to get in about a day. I opted to buy the game, and one of the 3DS themes, and it cost me 1200 platinum coins in total. I’m more or less totally addicted to this picross game and am well on my way to finishing it completely. But for the 1000 points I decided to spend on the game I could have gotten Mario Kart 7 and ToL: A Link to the Past with 20% discount on the Nintendo E-shop, lowering the prices of those games to respectively €36 and €16. Not a bad deal at all and something I am saving up for right now. Plus if I buy those games I will get gold coins… Which will give me discount on other games again. It’s a nice little circle that Nintendo has created and a better rewards program for someone who likes games rather than silly accessories (feel free to disagree with me). The only thing I dislike is that there is no rewards for buying physical games, and I personally rather have a physical copy than a digital copy so that’s kind of sucky.

og_image

An App to tie it all together
Right after My Nintendo launched Nintendo’s first app ever launched aswell: Miitomo. It’s an interesting app and best described as Nintendo’s take on social media. It boils down to creating a Mii to resemble you, adding friends and then getting to know eachother better by answering questions and reading other people’s answers. Together with a secondary game of being able to put your Mii in the most interesting outfits, and being rewarded for changing clothes constantly, it’s an app to keep you quite busy. For me it’s been very nice to get to know my Twitter friends better and I have tried to get some of my IRL friends to use the app aswell, just for the entertainment value.
Add up that you can earn atleast 15 platinum coins per day by just using Miitomo right it’s also making me use the app a lot so I can earn rewards for my gaming systems.

A very smart marketing move by Nintendo and a very addicting app for people with a lot of friends I’m really happy to see them making progress and branching out with their company.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a Picross game to finish.