Exploran

Last weekend was good for gaming. I spent most of Saturday finishing up Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on the DS. It's a lot simpler than I recall Ocarina of Time being, but it's still amazingly fun to explore each new town and dungeon, to get each new tool and figure out what you can do with them. Zelda is a game filled to the brim with "Wow!" and "Ah-ha!" moments, and I really have to love it for that.



Note to self: I should set up an emulator for N64 and play some OOT.

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On Sunday, I went ahead and bought World of Warcraft. Pat and I had previously played trial accounts; WoW is superior to any other MMO that we've tried, and we decided it would be worth paying the full price.

I got the WoW Battle Chest, which had an installer for the base game, another for the Burning Crusade expansion, and neat glossy illustrated guides for each. Plus smaller B&W manuals for each. Bought it at Data Blitz; it was significantly pricier than the MSRP would have led me to expect. But for some reason there aren't many stores that sell original software! Huh.



Mmm, time for some GRINDAN.

Serious Magics!

Lorwyn released last month, and I've been playing a lot of Tournament Sealed (which is to say, every other weekend). I've been getting solid results so far: 3-1 in the prerelease, 4-3 in a GPT and 5-2 in a PTQ. However, sealed deck (where you play with fresh, unopened packs) is expensive if you weren't actively looking to buy packs to start with.

Of course, I was trying to gather packs; I also put together a Casual Limited set, meaning four of each common and two of each uncommon, shuffled up and repacked into 40 boosters. Now that I'm done collecting, I might just go play Constructed instead.




I mentioned a while ago that I was playing FF: Chocobo Tales. Now, the nice thing about playing a Final Fantasy game is that they can reuse the good, nostalgic music from their previous games... and Chocobo Tales reuses old music shamelessly. This is a positive thing overall; this is good music.

The net effect being that as I finished the game, I had the nagging urge to play some the good parts for myself. On the piano! A bit of digging around revealed some sheet music here. Initially was leaning towards the boss music, but I eventually settled on the slower 600AD song from Chrono Trigger, with much better results.

Kurikinton Fox, The Decisive Battle (FF6)