Ntuple Indemnity

In coining the word différance (and establishing the vocabulary of deconstruction in its immediate, nonpresent orbit), Jacques Derrida presumes that it is phonetically indistinguishable from différence. It’s the keystone of… whatever it was he thought he was saying. As I am no expert on French morphology or phonology: does anyone know if this is actually universally true? Does there exist a French accent somewhere that demarcates a clear distinction between the pronunciations of the suffixes –ence and –ance? Or is it like the English –ible and –able, which are (to my knowledge) functionally equivalent in speech wherever you go, and solely a matter of orthography?

It’s fascinating to me, as someone with more than a passing interest in random, gratuitous acts of paronomasia, that it is entirely possible to construct puns that work in some dialects and accents, but not others. This may seem like a rather simple observation, but I think it has a certain latent power. It could also be disabling. For instance, if your philosophical rhetoric is founded on punning as a substitute for logic (not saying I mind), the puns had better work. Otherwise, you might be caught, and I’ll either see you in court (in Britain) or ignore you and lie on my cot (in America).

Speaking of which: I’ll see you in hell, Pachelbel.

I’m back from the World Universities Debating Championships in Vancouver. Maria and I finished on 13 points over nine rounds, the minimum of the range I expected (floor: 13; ceiling: 15), based on our performance on the third day and the knowledge that we had 10 points after the sixth round. Live coverage of the Grand Final can be found here and, over multiple posts dated 3 January, here. It appears I was not alone in thinking Oxford D (Closing Government) should have won, upon an initial assessment, though I discovered afterwards that I generally had a much higher opinion of the final round on the whole than most others did, thanks to the clarity of the argumentation, which could have very easily been mired in economic jargon. (The motion: “This house believes that economic growth is the solution to climate change.”) Unfortunately, those who actually have a clue about how economics work subsequently informed me that the participants in the round were evidently not of their tribe, and convinced me that nobody really knew what they were talking about. So let’s concede that I’m unqualified to offer a proper adjudication.

Scores by team here. Scores by speaker here. Scores by round MIA.

Since I’ve obviously been preoccupied this holiday, there hasn’t been much time to catch up on cinema. That said, let’s make another attempt at offering a few capsule impressions of what I’ve seen since the last film post, though I do want to engage in a more thorough discussion of Children of Men, which I saw tonight.

The Fountain: I’m usually reluctant to call something the best film of the year until I’ve seen it twice. So I reluctantly offer that The Fountain is the best film of 2006, noting that I still have a lot of catching up to do. This is Darren Aronofsky’s most digestible film, and probably his finest. Its tripartite structure delivers storytelling of the finest visual intricacy, and its mythic ambitions to be a tale of life and death undisplaced – a mortality play, if you will – elevate its soft, human underbelly to transcendent heights of splendour. While there isn’t anything quite as iconic as its predecessor, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the cosmic imagery (a microbial visual effect) is more emotionally grounded. After reading the online impressions of others, I have to say that I’m quite surprised at their fixation with what’s “real” and what’s not, as if that were central to understanding how the movie fit together. Personally, I don’t see how what the diegetic realities are or aren’t have any effect on the experience as a whole: besides, so much of The Fountain is about writing yourself into a fiction, and living it. I can’t wait to see it again.

The Queen: An admirable production, fuelled by a quintessentially British dignity. I feared it would take the easy way out and simply subvert the relevance of the royal family by humanizing them in the name of populist social critique. Instead, I find myself questioning the state of the Great British Public if their media-driven obsession with the former Princess of Wales empowered them to exert so much pressure on their fragile monarchy. Is this the result of a commanding manoeuvre to show that the Queen is only human for the subtle purpose of sympathizing with her threatened position of isolated privilege? Or is it evidence of an unintended failure to make a bold republican statement? It’s hard to tell. At any rate, historical dramas – good ones – have a way of making a news item, or an entry in a chronicle, a much bigger deal than you remember. To me, it is an interesting experience as a filmgoer to see events from my youth pass into historical subject matter, as they do in The Queen.

The Good Shepherd: I’m not at all surprised that Eric Roth’s screenplay drifted in the flotsam of development hell for over a decade before Robert De Niro picked it up, because this is safe, old-fashioned Hollywood filmmaking. I never say that as a pejorative, so don’t take it as one. The Good Shepherd is a film replete with gripping moments that stay with you long after the credits roll; De Niro is a capable visionary, and Matt Damon’s performance carries the day. It does, however, encounter some serious and perhaps crippling problems. The first is the shallowness of its supporting characters, which is not, by all indications, the fault of the cast. As for its complexity, there comes a saturation point when the plot’s capacity to baffle is no longer, I suspect, solely due to the audience’s interpretive inadequacies. Most problematic is the movie’s willingness to reduce history (the failure of the Bay of Pigs, for instance) to a coincidental series of individual happenstances that all conveniently lie within the main character’s personal orbit. It’s fiction, of course, and I’ll buy it if it’s done within reasonable bounds of plausibility. I bought it in Forrest Gump, where it was more of a joke.

Children of Men: I used to go on and on about how Terry Gilliam would be a great choice to direct one of the Harry Potter films. Then Alfonso Cuaron came along and made what is far and away the best of the Potter movies, The Prisoner of Azakaban. In Children of Men, Cuaron enters the realm of dystopia, which is very firmly Gilliam territory (please refer to Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, both of which I cherish). However, he does it quite differently. The film that Children of Men is closest to is, in many respects, Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds: there’s the same logistical marvel of extended tracking shots that immerse you in a gritty anarchistic spectacle, and the same backgrounding of man’s destruction, self-destruction and miraculous renewal to a secondary concern that occupies little to no exposition. This movie is sublime in virtually every aspect of filmmaking technique.

But like War of the Worlds, it’s not enough for this movie to be sublimely visceral when it has to present the argument that a few individuals’ struggle for survival is a microcosm for the salvation of all mankind. The former must happen before the end credits, and the latter almost certainly can’t (though we are meant to believe it eventually will). Does anyone remember Reign of Fire, where we were meant to believe a global infestation of fire-breathing dragons would just bugger off and leave us alone as soon as the main characters blew up a particularly important dragon? Children of Men comes dangerously close to doing just that.

Like most dystopic speculative fiction, the science of Children of Men – an unexplained eighteen-year cataclysm of global infertility, redressed by a miraculous and similarly unexplained birth – disappears into a corner and pleads for suspension of disbelief. We’re implicitly told that we are not to concern ourselves with scientific causes, but political effects. That’s okay by me, mostly because everybody else does it. And in many cases, perhaps no explanation is preferable to a bogus one. It’s a concern, yes, but a relatively minor one.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap that the Turkey City Lexicon calls “As You Know, Bob”: since there is no need for the characters to speak to each other at length about the state of the world, which they already know and take for granted, the story’s speculative history has to be presented by other means. Indirectly, we are given a state of affairs in 2027 where widescreen LCD panels are cheap and ubiquitous, but man has made no other discernible progress because everyone is too busy rioting in the streets and making life miserable for everybody else, given how the species is going kaput anyway.

Do we buy this? Can we accept the idea that a two-to-three-generation extinction warning is sufficient cause for the human species to go completely bonkers? Children of Men never attempts to establish a causal connection, but I think it does so implicitly: if there’s no model of cause and effect, there’s no reason to put the infertility problem, the oncoming global apocalypse and the nightmare of a fascist Britain in the same movie instead of three separate ones, one of which is entitled V for Vendetta.

The logic, as far as I can discern it, is that as soon as people realized the human race was doomed, they did one of two things: a) without any long-term obligations to the prolongment of the species, they could act out of immediate self-interest alone, which does not entail happiness, but rather, the seizure and consolidation of power; or b) they turned to the eschatalogical reassurances of religion, which inherently devalues our material existence and therefore condones the collapse of earthly societal order. This is my own interpretation, but Children of Men comes off as a film that is intelligent enough to be conscious of it, if only just.

What about Britain’s sudden turn to fascist isolation and its refusal to accommodate the refugee crisis of the end times? If the Nazis proved anything, it’s that no government is incapable of abruptly becoming unimaginably horrifying. There are no limits to the political plausibility of what a reign of terror will do. However, we are also asked to buy the notion that the far right is so preoccupied with stuffing illegal immigrants into cages that the survival of the species is nothing to them, and a refugee baby is no baby at all. Then again, when the palace guards have traded in their bushy hats for the pointy hoods of the KKK, this isn’t so far-fetched. Autocracies are not known for making plans for long-term sustainability.

I haven’t read the P.D. James book on which the film is based, The Children of Men, but I’m quite interested in what it has to say on the subject. Obviously, Cuaron’s film is equally informed by what I would begrudgingly call post-9/11 politics, and overtly so; the novel, published in 1992, is not.

Since I only saw the film a few hours ago, I can’t guarantee that any opinion I harbour will still be true in the morning. Naturally, I recommend it quite highly; it remains to be seen how much. The scope of imagination in the visual narrative outstrips that of the actual content, and I think this is primarily responsible for my ambivalence. Children of Men dismisses considerable avenues of exposition in favour of confining itself to the perspective of Clive Owen’s character, Theo; I at least appreciate that this is done consistently. Like Theo, we can very easily get too caught up in the frantic action – which is terrific, by the way – to concern ourselves with the details of how and why.

Does it all make sense? And if the movie does just enough to open up a universe of causal possibilities, but too little to explicitly commit to anything, does it matter?

You’ll recall that upstairs in my capsule gushing over The Fountain, I said it didn’t. With respect to Children of Men, I haven’t decided yet.

Happy Christmas, everyone.

In the lingo of collegiate debating, which is apparently going to be relevant to me later this week, “burning the turf” is (to tilt a paraphrase in order to make a point) what you call it when someone on your side of the house, who precedes you in the speaking order, opens and closes the book on the subject and leaves those after him with nothing substantial to say. It’s a localized formulation of the paralysing encumbrance that weighs upon the shoulders of any sufficiently literate (aspiring) artist: if every frontier you wish to explore has already been traversed, where do you go?

You’ll notice how by this logic, it follows that most artists who shed the “aspiring” label are not sufficiently literate. I’ve always thought this obvious, myself: art in any medium – music, film, words, or what have you – could only be so plentifully derivative if the little worker bees exploited by the media factory showed a considerable lack of self-restraint, propelled by the favourable trade winds of market forces or the groundless praise of layman peers who never read a stanza of real poetry in their lives.

I spend a considerable proportion of my uptime Not Writing a Novel. Industrious as I am, I sometimes commit to a sitting of several hours where all I do is not write. I am a practised notwriter. And from experience, the best way to go about developing a fruitful career in the arts of not writing is to read voraciously, and read well.

If you ever wondered what a Nicholas Tam novel might look like, given n discrete units of time-talent-practice and m monkeys on typewriters greater than sufficiently large N and M, I suggest you read Richard Powers.

I’ve only read two of his novels (The Time of Our Singing and, as of last night, Galatea 2.2), but I think I can already posit with confidence that Richard Powers burned my turf.

I discovered, from observing my classmates in my first semester as a full-time student of English literature, that for a lot of readers, the primary rubric by which a story is measured is, in the first instance, a personal one. Did it elicit your sympathy? Could you identify with the characters? Did you care what happened next, or in the nonlinear case, what was left to be revealed? These are not sophisticated questions by any means, but immediate, and fiercely emotional.

This is not how I evaluate literature; at least, not consciously, and not primarily. Its natural consequence is the constriction of one’s reading habits to a whittled selection of authors, genres, styles and socio-historial milieux, and I find that to be intellectually limiting. I ask instead: Is this a story well told? Is it thematically coherent? Is the language eloquent and conducive to the delivery of ideas? Do the ideas themselves matter?

And there, we complete the circuit and return to the domain of personal taste: do the ideas themselves matter to me?

It should go without saying that I am almost predisposed to adore a book like Galatea 2.2, which demonstrates not only exemplary craftsmanship in covering the gamut from heartbreak to laughter, but tackles big questions with admirable finesse. Problems like the limits of artificial intelligence. The line we draw between the merely operational and the truly conscious. How to read and why we read. The consequent anxieties of the complete overhaul of English literary education in recent decades, which the University of Alberta undertook in force just before my arrival in the relevant department. The instrumental futility of poetry. The inadequacy of language as an independent cloud of signifiers unbound from material reality. The conceded irrelevance of literature in a practical world in practical crisis. Love. Loss. Shakespeare.

That’s thematic material, of course, specific to one novel alone and not necessarily endemic to the author. But consider this: what is the most significant barrier to reading? It’s language. In literature, it’s figurative language. You can’t understand a metaphor if you don’t speak the language of that metaphor and are unable to trace its analogues and connectives.

Richard Powers, more than any other author I’ve ever had the pleasure to read, speaks my language. He manipulates the symbol set of science, mathematics, music and literature in order to grapple with concerns that are relevant to everyone. What it means to be human, and all that jazz.

More to the point, he does it extremely well, with a lucidity that explains why I found Galatea 2.2 immensely more pleasurable than a similar book, Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, which got mired in its symbols. To find an author whose wavelength is in such fine coherence with what I want in literature is downright intimidating.

I finished The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess almost two weeks ago. I logged a solid 57 hours without reference to any external source of information. Since then, I have added almost another 10 hours roaming Hyrule and discovering new things I’d completely bypassed, even though I’d thought myself quite thorough. I am now two pieces short of all twenty hearts, and not even close to finishing the two major collection quests.

I finished Zelda, but I did not complete it. I’ve only ever “completed” The Wind Waker – and by that, I mean not only the standard four bottles and twenty hearts, but every bonus chart, underwater treasure chest (including the bogus one from the auction that only yields one rupee), observation platform, secret cave, submarine and Nintendo Gallery figurine. The Gallery quest requires you to play through the game twice. I got the Hero’s Mask on my second run, prior to which I didn’t know it existed. So, yes: I completed it. (Okay, so I didn’t get the Tingle Statues, but I did plug in the GBA long enough to get a snapshot of Knuckle on Tingle Island. Surely that counts for something.)

I’ve been meaning to write a review, though it took me awhile to balance the desire to not spoil anything for the general readership, which I’d wholeheartedly recommend grab a Wii (once possible) and play the game, against the compulsion to give the game the thorough assessment it deserves. The latter would be directed towards audiences that have not only completed Twilight Princess, but have an extensive familiarity with the Zelda series as it currently stands.

Let’s make a stab at some postgame impressions, then, and see where they go.

To be honest, finishing the game was a deflating experience. For two weeks, it had a monopoly over everything that could be considered “free time” in my schedule, which obviously excludes watching televised coverage of party leadership races. I’d taken my time and kept a relatively steady pace for someone swallowing the game in eight-hour chunks – a bit of time in the fishing hole every now and then, perhaps. And then I rushed straight through the last three dungeons and the thrill of the superb, superb final battle.

That was it?

See, upon finishing a game of this scale after familiarizing yourself with every known nook and cranny (with a plethora of unknowns remaining), it’s easy to look back and say, well, wasn’t that a lot smaller and shorter than I expected. What a letdown. And then you notice the omissions. No Magic Meter? Octoroks? Moblins? Great Fairies? Gallery-esque monster of a side quest? Post-completion save file with hidden bonuses in the second playthrough? I was wrong about one of these, but what a letdown nonetheless.

What I’m saying is that it’s very easy to underrate this game. After exploring some more and finding out just how much I missed along my beeline to the final boss, and watching someone else play through the first half of the game (which really does feel like a lifetime ago), I have renewed an appreciation for Twilight Princess that almost – just almost – slid into disillusionment.

This is an incredible game. Compelling. Magnetic. I’m a very thorough player, and it’s telling that I rushed to the end, just dying to see the big finish.

Is it better than Ocarina of Time? Yes.

Is it the best of the Zelda series? In some respects, perhaps. (Notice how this was a separate question.)

Is it flawless? No.

For the sake of elaboration, we here enter the realm of Nintendo geekery. That means specifics, and moreover, spoilers. I’m not going to discuss the story – in my opinion, the hallmark of the Zelda series is that the way the player progresses through the game is the story – but I will name specific locales, elements and items. I wouldn’t have wanted to read this before I played the game: ergo, spoilers.

So, what matters in a Zelda game? Off the top of my head: dungeons, overworld exploration, items, optional quests, minigames, bosses, enemy design, the general environment of the game (people, places and things, if you will), and my personal speciality, the music.

Dungeons: What impressed me most about the dungeons was how functional they seemed. There was a certain logic to their design, in that most of the obstacles displayed an implicit reason for existing beyond just waiting to be solved by a swordsman in a green tunic. The Lakebed Temple’s slides, mills and gears are a suitable exemplar, as are the magnets in the Goron Mines and the entirety of the Snowpeak Ruins. This isn’t saying that I dislike abstract environments, but on the whole, I’m very satisfied that the dungeons are architecturally coherent, in addition to their typical property of being thematically coherent.

There aren’t any puzzles that I would call outright hard, but I don’t think I’ve ever been outright stumped by a Zelda game. I think the tasks that confront the player in a typical Zelda dungeon fall into four classes: problems of mechanics (speed, timing, aim), problems of observation (which items you should use, where you can use them, what you can interact with, and where you can go), problems of logic (blocks and switches), and problems of combat.

To be honest… none of them were really a challenge. Observation, maybe – I’m thinking of the City in the Sky ceiling switch – and it might actually be because of the lack of a free third-person camera in the Wii version, something I worried about going into the game. The absence of a free camera doesn’t outright impede anything, but it might be responsible. Combat was a piece of cake, but fun. I did wish that Hyrule Castle had more in the way of actual puzzles, and wasn’t so exclusively combat-heavy, but to each his own. As for logic, I can see how some people might have trouble with the ice block puzzles and the statues guarding the Master Sword, though I didn’t. They’re not overly hard, nor are they easy in a way that makes them less than fun. Like the Water Temple in Ocarina, they’re not difficult, just lengthy without being repetitive.

Complaints? Hyrule Castle was too combat-heavy. The Twilight Palace thinned out after retrieving the two Sols in the palace wings; it deserved at least a miniboss and a unique item, not two mini-minibosses and a temporary upgrade. City in the Sky was so spacious and dependent on Clawshot mechanics that at times, it felt devoid of enemies. The late dungeons are the weakest, but the boss battles were appropriate compensation.

Regardless of their ease, I think the Twilight Princess dungeons are almost all among the best of the 3D Zeldas. It’s their scope and their variety. There are a lot of moments that hearken back to other games’ dungeons and improve upon them – Poe-hunting in the Arbiter’s Grounds, controlling statues in the Temple of Time – but little repetition within this game itself, from one dungeon to the next.

Best dungeon? I’m going to have to go with the Snowpeak Ruins, which really captured the spirit of the entire game.

Overworld exploration: It’s the biggest one yet, though it feels small once you get to know it well, and big again once you realize you didn’t know it well at all. Because you are constrained to certain boundaries and tracts of land, there isn’t the same illusion of total exploratory freedom as that of The Wind Waker. That has been replaced by an illusion of density, that there’s something worth checking out at every turn: it’s a trade-off, but it works. At the same time, however, there’s ample space for so much more.

The secret caves are the best yet in variety and scope – easily equivalent to the Bottom of the Well in Ocarina or the Ghost Ship in Wind Waker – though too many of the rewards are monetary and therefore unnecessary, because there aren’t any extortionary fairy-man cartographers squeezing you for thousands in cash. Remarkably, I didn’t discover the Cave of Ordeals until after I finished the game, in spite of the fact that I repaired the Eldin Bridge, leaving the cave in plain sight. It’s an improvement over its predecessor, the Savage Labyrinth, though some of the rooms were made considerably easier by the fact that you could snipe away from the ledge before diving into the heat of battle.

Items: These are probably a clue as to the relative weakness of the last two or three dungeons. The Double Clawshots probably would have been more fun if I hadn’t expected to see them the entire game. The Spinner, Ball and Chain and Dominion Rod are interesting in that they made their respective dungeons worthwhile, but seem to be of little relevance afterwards. While this is true of the Dominion Rod, which could have benefited from there simply being more statues in the overworld left unmarked, it speaks to the thoroughness of the game’s design that while you’re rarely required to use the Spinner or the Ball and Chain, their effects were often taken into consideration. For instance, using the Spinner protects you from fall damage and lets you coast right over the collapsing blocks in the City in the Sky.

Bomb Arrows and Water Bombs were marvelous: I only wish there were more arrow combos aside from Bombs and the Hawkeye. Speaking of which, I think the Hawkeye didn’t quite make it through the GameCube-to-Wii transition. Maybe it’s for stability’s sake, but it doesn’t make much sense to pan with the stick and aim with the remote, only to put on the Hawkeye and suddenly aim entirely with the stick.

On another note about the interface, the Fishing Rod desperately needed an in-game explanation at the beginning of the game, where it is required. The item selection screen tells you how bobber fishing works, but the manual only concerns lure fishing, which could be misleading. There’s no other mention of how to fish with the bobber anywhere else.

On yet another note about the interface, the item selection wheel was an excellent idea, though the concealment of the number of usable items remain would have worked even better if there were more (or, indeed, any) secret items to be found.

Optional quests: This is one area where the game seemed lacking. Aside from secret areas like the Cave of Ordeals, there just wasn’t much to do. Magic Armor was a nice reward for the game’s big money quest, which there’s a certain impulse to perform because the reward is in plain sight, though it’s not obvious how much you have to spend. The Golden Bug and Poe collection quests are a challenge, but also probably the biggest impediment to truly completing the game. I’m not sure what I prefer: being required to find all 60 Poes in the game world, which means you’re not allowed to skip any, or something along the lines of Joy Pendants in Wind Waker, which enemies drop from time to time (albeit too abundantly when it came to, say, King’s Crests). The absence of a trading quest similar to how you obtain the Biggoron Sword in Ocarina was felt. What else is there? Hot Springwater delivery? Is that it?

At the same time, I think many of these deficiencies are made up for by the variety in the main quest itself, whether it be collecting Tears of Light or my personal favourite, the thrilling carriage escort sequence. It isn’t the activities themselves that disappoint, but the game’s overall linearity.

Oh, and call me spoiled on Wind Waker, The Minish Cap and to a lesser extent, Navi’s presence in Ocarina, but I really wanted to see every enemy in the game named and shamed. If there’s a better way to do it than as a figurine gallery, fine, but do it.

Minigames: Absolutely fantastic. Fishing, flying up Zora’s River and sailing back down, snowboarding, the rupee sink that is Rollgoal – there’s so much to play, and it’s all worth playing. Occasionally frustrating, sure, but only because I kept going back for high scores. If Twilight Princess is the best of the series in any one aspect, this is it. That said, I was stunned at the absence of a sumo-wrestling game where you work your way up successively tougher opponents. It seemed like an obvious choice to me, but sumo wrestling completely disappears after the Goron Mines.

Bosses: In general, far too easy, but fun to play and fun to watch. Never mind that Stallord barely hurts you at all: coasting around on the Spinner is great. And they kept getting better: Argorok and Zant weren’t difficult, but they were dynamic, and in a very rewarding way. What also struck me was the outstanding quality of the minibosses guarding each dungeon’s special item. Maybe it was because these battles – like the Ball and Chain Soldier and the Darknut in the Temple of Time – were often more combat-oriented, and didn’t practically end as soon as you figure out the (often obvious) strategy. It’s probably also the variety of what you get to face, which is evident right from the beginning, when you fight the boomerang-throwing monkey in the Forest Temple.

That said, the bosses could have been more aggressive. Some of them, like Morpheel and to a lesser extent, Stallord, sit back and wait patiently for you to make a move. The battles do escalate as you get a few hits in, but often not in a way that deals more damage. Like the other 3D games, the hint system (here, Midna) is all too eager to hold your hand and show you what to do after very little time (which really isn’t necessary), and I do wish there was a way to turn it off. But I suppose there are kids playing this too.

As for the final battle (by which I mean each of its separate phases put together), I have never seen better in a Zelda game. A novel combination of the 3D battles that have come before it and exciting new material that plays to the strengths of what makes Twilight Princess unique, its greatest moments were every time you saw what you got to do next. I really don’t know how they’re going to top this.

Enemy design: (Here, I mean both function and aesthetics.) Hit and miss, I’d say. Hits: Gorons, Beamos, axe-wielding Armos, variously-armoured Lizalfos, the Snowpeak ice knights, Freezards, two-phase Darknuts. (Notice how so many of these are mechanical, metallic or otherwise solid.) I was impressed by how many elements from the 2D games finally made it: aside from the close-quarters miniboss battle with the Ball and Chain Soldier, we finally have enemy archers, and the desert is full of sandworms leaping all over the place (which we’d previously only seen in the Molgera battle in Wind Waker). Also, the Twilight Palace provides the most inventive use of Wallmaster-like disembodied hands I’ve seen to date: they serve a purpose and pose a threat.

Misses: I primarily miss the life and expressiveness that Wind Waker‘s cartoon stylings brought to the classic Zelda enemies. Stalfos are back to being generic skeleton warriors. The ChuChus, if that’s what those slugs full of Chu Jelly were supposed to be, were inert little blobs, quite unlike the ones that sprung to life in the previous game. I don’t think it’s a graphical problem, just an stylistic one: the Bokoblins, for instance, are no less dynamic than the ones in Wind Waker as far as interesting foot soldiers go. But I do get the impression that there’s very little way to make creatures like the last game’s pop-up ChuChus and drooling Moblins work in a grittier, more “realistic” aesthetic like what Twilight Princess offers. Because of that, I hope the Zelda series moves towards a stylistic compromise similar to what you see with the Twilight Beasts, which are reminiscent of the cel-shading technique (mostly because their textural uniformity reacts the same way to the lighting model). Or, for that matter, the battle with Zant.

Obvious omissions include Octoroks, Moblins and Wizzrobes. I miss them slightly less if only because Lizalfos and Zant Heads are functional replacements, if not as lively.

I suppose this is my way of saying that Wind Waker is the better-looking game, but that’s not to discredit Twilight Princess for a vast rogues’ gallery that keeps the combat fresh. If anything, the Cave of Ordeals is a reminder of these strengths.

Environment: I appreciate how the NPCs preserve a lot of the genuine quirkiness of the Zelda series, and that the more “realistic” look of Twilight Princess does not preclude a few indulgences in caricature. As with the enemies, this works for some characters (Midna, Rusl, Barnes) more than others (Telma, Agitha, the Lake Hylia cannon guy). The landscaping and architecture are exquisite throughout, though as a world in decay, Hyrule Field naturally feels a bit dull and dry. Since you spend most of your time there, it’s tempting to say that the game lacks colour, though Snowpeak, the Faron Woods, and the Twilight Realm prove otherwise.

The most beautiful part of the game is the Sacred Grove, which I think demonstrates what I mean by an ideal stylistic compromise for the Zelda series: the trees and crumbling structures are intricate, the lighting makes the whole place downright painterly, but cartoonish enemies (Skull Kid and his puppets) don’t feel out of place at all. It’s full of life and colour without being overly abstract, and it’s built to last.

Music: Ha! That’s a whole other post.

Verdict: We now return to the question of whether this is the best Zelda to date. My answer would be, not at the exclusion of the other ones. It doesn’t make any game obsolete, though it goes a long way towards doing almost everything Ocarina of Time did, but better. Not the whole way, but a long way. I still think the 3D Zeldas have yet to live up to A Link to the Past in terms of puzzles, secret items and other elements, but Twilight Princess is a step forward. The dungeons don’t supercede everything that has already been done; Wind Waker still has its cooperative dungeons to recommend it, even if Twilight Princess incorporated most of its innovations, like controlling statues and working against the wind. I can’t say how it compares to Majora’s Mask, which I haven’t played, and I’m not going to bother drawing comparisons to the other 2D Zeldas.

This was a really long post. I suspect it was time better spent fishing and playing Rollgoal. And telling people to see The Fountain, which I’m tempted to call the best film of 2006, though I’m reluctant to jump the gun on such a judgment until I see it again, a careful reluctance that also applies to the more publicly acclaimed Babel.

Well, this is interesting. Today I discovered that someone has, on two separate occasions, attempted to create a Wikipedia entry under “Nicholas Tam”, which is an esteemed name that I would prefer remained unsullied. Both times, it was deleted. The second time, it was protected; now nobody can write a Wikipedia entry under that name without first obtaining administrative approval. Naturally, I would never do this myself: I’m keenly observant of Wikipedian etiquette, and well aware that autobiographical masturbation is best conducted in the privacy of a user page.

At first I thought the culprit was my kid brother, who occasionally spams my referrer logs with frivolous queries like “Nick the ugly canadien who goes to café”. In fact, the date of the entry’s first attempted creation coincided with my brother’s birthday, which is, if anything, circumstantial. Alas, it was but an alignment of the stars. Upon an examination of the entry’s edit history, it seems that there was indeed an individual who assumed my fine and noble name and wrote about himself, no doubt miffed that it is I, not he, who represents at least the first twenty Nicholas Tams in the World According to Google.

The deleted entry reads:

Nicholas Tam is a distinguished student, sportsman and debater in Victoria, Australia.

Wrong! Nicholas Tam is a distinguished student, sportsman and debater in Alberta, Canada (pick a city – there are only two that count, and I’m not sure about the northern one). For the sake of argument, we’ll consider Scrabble a sport.

But that’s not all, no sirree. Not only does he create a vanity article, when it is (properly) tagged with a notice for speedy deletion, he removes the notice. When a passing volunteer leaves him a message on his talk page expressing the nature of the problem, he removes the message. We have here a genuine troll, it seems – and thanks to him, there’s one more hoop to jump through if you are to write a well-earned article about me once I’ve achieved something sufficiently prominent, which is bound to happen sooner or later. Vandal! Charlatan! Fie upon him!

You’re on, Nicholas George Park Wing So-Called Tam from Victoria, Australia – if that’s your real name. The gloves are coming off. I will find you. I will get you.

But soft! What’s this I see on my talk page?

Looks like I’m not the only Nicholas Tam on the planet. So, is my Canadian counterpart also Eurasian? Tamazoid 10:40, 1 December 2006 (UTC)Nicholas Tam (of Australia)

Ha! You don’t know the half of it, kid. I have always been at war with Eurasia.