The Twilight Sun

Alright… first off, I know I haven’t been posting like I just said I would be(!), but it’s been a little busy around here, being the week before Christmas and all. And The Orange Box took up a lot of my time too… you can see just how much at my SteamID page, if you really wanted – it’s right here. But this means I’ll probably have a Portal review coming up, and Team Fortress 2 after that. TF2 was definitely a nice surprise when I first played it… never thought it would be quite so fun!

I’m sure you’re wondering what I got for Christmas, hm? The ones that stand out most in my mind – not that the others were less great! – are The Orange Box (which you know of already), two new Wii games, and a brand new, beatiful, and sleek LAPTOP. I’m using said laptop to post right now, actually. Woot!

Now, with the post out of the way, I’m off to enjoy my presents.

~Jonathan

I’m sure everyone’s had a time when they’ve promised something, then realized they couldn’t keep up the pace or some such thing, right? Well, I’m having a hard time posting every other day. Scary as this is, I’m finding it hard to find things to post about!

So I’m going to change my posting frequency to something like once every three days. I’m sure you all would like a quality post every so often, rather than a mediocre post very frequently. Right?

Well, having just recently finished LoZ:TP on the Wii, and once before on the GameCube, I figure this is probably a good time for a game review.

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was pretty hyped up before its release. However, like movie trailers and the actual movies, the former can set some high expectations of the latter. Who wants to show off an unlikable part of the movie? That is what I think happened with Twilight Princess. The game truly is a great addition to the Zelda collection, but what I think fans were expecting was a masterpiece on par with, or even exceeding, the glory of Ocarina of Time.

.:Graphics:.
I can honestly say the graphics of the game were stunning. As for realism, there was a good balance between life-like and Ocarina of Time-like – not that OoT’s graphics were bad! In a similar vein, I was quite surprised to see the level of detail in Princess Zelda’s facial expressions, as well as Midna’s all-around expressiveness.

.:Gameplay:.
I found the overall gameplay to be quite enjoyable, although there were at least two or three spots I found annoying. The first is the Ordon Village introduction, from the start to the first entry to the Twilight Realm. It was just boring to the point of doing something other than playing. However, the amount of above-average gameplay in other areas, such as the “bow practice” at Old Kakariko, more than make up for it.

My only other gripe is that that cannot easily move the camera around on the Wii. (And on the GameCube, you can backflip off of Epona with a certain button combination…)

.:Storyline:.
Now this is what I love about Twilight Princess. The storyline, from the moment you meet Midna, draws you in. And the further along in the game you are, the more you discover, and things keep falling into place. From the curtain of twilight that’s settled on the land, to the Fused Shadows the Mida seeks, to the kidnapped children, the storyline keeps you hooked almost the whole way through. You might have noticed that I said ‘almost’… I feel that some of the dungeons were added more or less just to extend the gameplay. This brings me to my next point…

.:Dungeons:.
These dungeons are pure visual gold, in my opinion. Visual and gameplay. Every dungeon has its own unique “trick”, such as the magnetic flooring of the Goron Mines, or the spinning bridges of the Forest Temple. The three dungeons that I mentioned felt added in to extend the game, are still just as immersive. It could have been done a little better, in terms of how and why they were added, however.

.:Sidequests:.
This is the one big thing that I didn’t feel compelled to do. Agitha’s bugs felt pointless, Malo’s fundraisers didn’t do much for me, and while I attempted to slay every Poe I found, I never really had the urge to bring the Poe souls back to the gold guy. Even the heart pieces felt unneeded, as I finished the game with not too much trouble with only eleven hearts. They’re good sidequests… there’s just not enough incentive.

The one minigame I loved to do was the sled racing with the yeti couple, probably because it was fun the first time around too, during the actual storyline.

.:Overall:.
Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is a stunning game. While it not better than Ocarina of Time, it’s almost as good. The one thing that prevents it from getting a perfect score is the sidequests, which I felt were mostly lacking in incentive. I highly recommend this game to any Zelda fan. I know some Wii owners out there will hate me for saying this, but I suggest getting the GameCube version instead of the Wii version. It’s really just nitpicking – they’re both very enjoyable – but the fact that you can’t move the camera properly on the Wii can be slightly hindersome.

~Jonathan

Just a short post today on posting frequency. I’ll try my best to post either once a day or once every other day, and hopefully never longer than that. If I have to take longer, I’ll be sure to post about the delay along with the previous post.

That said, I’ve got some studying to do the next day or two, as on Wednesday is my last Algebra test, and the Wednesday after that is the final. So far my grades have all been above 90%, and I want to keep it that way…

To keep your interest in the meantime, here’s a video I found while "stumbling" with StumbleUpon: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4913196365903075662 – "The Boy with the Incredible Brain", just under 50 minutes long.

~Jonathan

Pretty much everyone knows that the cel-shaded graphical style of Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker wasn’t well recieved, right? I’ll admit that maybe making the whole game cel-shaded wasn’t such a good idea – mainly because of the reactions it got – but I found many cel-shaded parts of the game to be very visually pleasant. To name a few: the lava and water effects, pretty much all of the underwater Hyrule, and the stained glass in the Master Sword chamber.

Cel-shading in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, however, is hardly noticed when seen beside Wind Waker. But it’s there, in a more background role… and like it a lot better like that. In the Arbiter’s Grounds, for example, the mini-boss wields a large black sword with glowing runes. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the runes appear to be nicely cel-shaded. It also reminds me of Shadow Ganon’s sword, from the Wind Waker.

In summary: when cel-shading is over-used, it can cause “cartoon-y” or “kiddy” looks, but in moderation it can add more realism.

~Jonathan

The majority of this post will probably be going in the "About Me" page, but since it’s probably a given that the journal part of a blog is the most visited, I’ll put it here too.

My name is Jonathan Castello. I’m 15 years old, which might surprise a few people further along in this.. My interests are mostly in the technical realm, such as social chatting (mostly on IRC), helping with various Wiki’s (mostly the RuneScape Wiki), and programming (in general, C++, but I’m expanding into C# and a few others). I like tennis too, but unfortunately, liking it can be very different from being good at it.

I first got really into computers when I was around four or five years old, every day when I was left at a daycare. I was, ahem, so much more advanced than the class I was in, that most of the time I sat at the computer and played the learning games on that. To me, that was more stimulating than the teachers who didn’t know what to do with me.

When I was nine years old – and being homeschooled – I was enrolled into an online class on HTML, at a website called the Virtual School for the Gifted. I’d like to say it went rather well, and I came away from it with a good but basic knowledge of how to make a website with nothing but HTML. The year after that, I enrolled in a class on the C programming language. I’m sorry to say I didn’t really focus enough on the material, but I did enjoy myself a lot.

Around 11 and 12 years of age, I had found a book on ANSI C (the ‘99 standard, it seems). I think it was a little too much for my young(er) mind to comprehend, but it was a fair amount more successful than my VSG class on the subject.

Fast forward to age 12. I happened to get bored – something which happens far too often lately – and decided to Google for C tutorials. I found cprogramming.com, and got into the tutorials there really well. I definitely got into it a lot more than the previous times. Within a month or so of learning the basics, I attempted a sort of RPG game in C++, but without classes – I hadn’t learned about those yet. It’s a sad, sad thing… well, to me at least… but I’m told by a  lot of people that it’s one of my better projects.

Around then, I was editing Wikipedia a bit, and wondered if there was a RuneScape wiki somewhere. Well, there was and is, and it was just getting off of the ground, with just the founder and two sysops regularly editing. I joined in, and since it was a very new wiki, there was a lot of work to be done – something hard for me to find on Wikipedia. Within a month or so, I started an RfA (Request for Adminship), which passed successfully. Then the wiki founder left pretty much permanently, leaving us without a ‘bureaucrat’, which isn’t really a good thing. A bureaucrat can make other users sysops and b’crats, so without one, we couldn’t have any new admins.

I e-mailed the founder, explaining the dilemma and asking for b’crat powers myself, and I was granted said powers. I’d like to say I kept the RSWiki afloat, because after a time the other two admins also left the wiki, leaving me one of the only sysops, along with someone I had sysop’ified before the others left. Regardless, the RSWiki is now a thriving place, and it feels good to have had some hand in that.

Lastly, both the RuneScape Wiki, and a game developement website I used to frequent, www.gamedev.net, have IRC channels (the Wiki one having been created by yours truly), and that’s where I get my social chatting from. IRC is just plain easy to use with the right client – and other clients give you more power over your IRC experience.

Oh, and the tennis came from my wasting away in front of a computer.

~Jonathan

Well, hello. This is my first post on this brand-new blog! I’m pretty happy with it, SquareSpace has a great setup here. I’ll be posting here on various game-, internet-, and general computer-stuff, as well as any programming projects I’m doing (although I’m notoriously bad at actually finishing them). I’ll add some details about me tomorrow, so watch this space!

~Jonathan

P.S. Oh yeah… Twisol rhymes with "Lysol", not "drizzle". It means – to me at least – Twilight Sun, as ’sol’ is Latin for ’sun’. I just wanted to get that out of the way… everyone gets it wrong the first time around, and it bugs me to death.