I said this over the weekend and I feel like I need to reiterate it this morning. For a little over a month my wife has been passively looking for a new vehicle. When she hit 120,000 miles on her Pontiac Torrent all sorts of little things started failing. The latest is a check engine light being caused by something in the engine emission filters… which in itself isn’t a huge deal apart from the fact that it disables remote start while the engine is in an error code. So for a month now I have been receiving links to vehicles from my wife, and we’ve made a few ventures out to car lots to see what we think of various models. There is an auto lot within a mile of the house that leaves all of the vehicles unlocked so that it is sort of a tradition to go there on Sunday when you to check out various vehicles unmolested by sales people. There are a lot of vehicles that got marked off of the list simply because my knees would not fit underneath the dash, and some others the first time my wife test drove them. We had narrowed things down to a half dozen different models, and one lot about an hour from where we live seemed to have all of them. The irony is that when we ultimately bought a vehicle… it wasn’t even one that was on the short list. The whole car buying experience thought feels foreign to me, and grossly outdated. During this whole sequence of events we found out that no car lot has anything even resembling updated inventory on their website. Its like this entire process is stuck somewhere back in the 1960s and never quite graduated to modernity.
My wife and I are both very data-centric people… and actively reject the “personal touch” that car salesmen try and put on the deal. Fortunately we maybe found the perfect sales person for us, who literally just handed us the keys to the vehicles we wanted to check out and left us completely alone to wander around the small town. Over the course of the day we drove I think five different vehicles, and spent a ton of time on our phones researching each of them while sitting in said vehicle. The problem is… a vehicle seems to permanent. We are not the type to trade them off frequently and instead tend to buy a vehicle and drive it until past the point it is paid off. Finally it came down to a dance of “funny math” which is frustrating as shit. Ultimately the dance involved the monthly payment rate, and a thin line in the sand that we were not willing to budge off of, which meant that in order to seal the deal given that we were not trading in a vehicle… that the dealership had to come down off the price a bit. There was a funny sequence of events where the dealer and my wife were both on their phones using the exact same financing calculator app trying to reach a consensus of numbers. Whatever the case we wound up buying, after an entire day of looking at this one lot… and made it home just in time for the AggroChat podcast.
The other big happening of the weekend is that I now have Zelda Breath of the Wild in my grubby little hands. No that does not mean I have a switch, but instead have been playing it on the Wii U. The screenshots I will be posting are not mine, but instead ones I have scavenged from the internet, because I do not have my Wii U set up so that it can go through a capture card… and I have never quite figured out how the hell to take a screenshot on the console itself. Even more so I have no clue how to POST a screenshot someplace I can actually snag it if I did take a screenshot. I have to say I have really mixed emotions about this game, and in truth I have barely just scratched the surface. I’ve cleared two of the early plateau shrines and have been trying to figure out how to get to a third one that is in a snowy region. Any time I get close to it, I start taking ticks of damage from the cold… and this is the point where I realized that there was a temperature gauge in the UI. The first hurdle that I have been trying to get past is the controls themselves. The default mapping of buttons is not that great to use… with jump being assigned to X at the top of the button layout… where I am much more used to it being B at the bottom of the button layout. This however apparently is something you can fix, but the other problem is I am so used to using triggers as weapon attacks in modern games and keep accidentally throwing whatever weapon I have equipped when I accidentally hit the right bumper.
The other big problem I have been having is that so far the game has the “Halo problem” for me. What I mean by that is that in Halo you have to constantly keep switching off weapons and wind up using some absolutely trash to try and progress through levels. The same thing is happening here… where a given weapon seems to last maybe one or two combat sequences before it breaks and I have to hurriedly swap to some other random piece of junk I picked up along the way. I’ve killed plenty of things by beating it down with a skeleton arm and I am not super proud of it. This is a Zelda game… I want to use a sword and a shield and until the game gives me some sort of permanent option for this I am not going to be terribly happy. It gave me a foresters axe early on… and I loved that weapon… right up until the point that it broke and now I feel like I am constantly robbed of the amount of fun I had using it. My fear is that I am going to bounce pretty soon if the game does not end up giving me some unlimited durability weapons that I can just use as often as I like. As far as the goods however… once I got used to the clunky controls it does in fact feel like an open world Zelda. I like that I can choose my own battles and that I see enemy camps usually well ahead of them actually attacking me. There was a cool sequence where there were a bunch of bow wielding characters up in a tower with no visible way to get up. However there was a draw bridge and I was able to sever the ropes holding it up with arrows causing it to fall down below and giving me access. This is a primary example of the sort of visual puzzle solving that seems to be going on in this game, and the early shrines I believe are teaching you a toolbox that can then be used later in the game to solve more complex puzzles. I do however absolutely want to stab the “Old Man” or at least push him off the tower, because I find him really annoying.
