From Dust and Zelda: The Ocarina of Time 3D

When last I talked games, I missed a big one: Zelda: The Ocarina of Time 3D, for the Nintendo 3DS, somewhat obviously. This is one of my big gaming confessions: I've never played OoT all the way through. In fact, the only Zelda games I've completed are Twilight Princess (Wii) and Link's Awakening (Game Boy). So I was kind of excited to see OoT come to the 3DS in a somewhat changed manner. While it still largely looks like a Nintendo 64 game, side-by-side image comparisons show that it's pretty significantly improved. It's still far from modern-looking, but it looks a lot better, and really, I'm not playing games on a 3" screen for their graphics. What I'm playing it for is the actual game itself, and having played games that aren't 16 years old, it definitely feels like it is. Controls aren't quite as tight as more modern games, and it has some mechanics that seem really strange in light of more current games. Nothing game-breaking or even particularly difficult, but still somewhat annoying. On the plus side, it's not like the DS Zelda games where everything is controlled by the touchscreen. I can't really make a recommendation here, since anyone who's played the game knows what it is, and anyone who hasn't is probably still aware that it's consistently lauded as not just one of the best in its series (or the best, depending on who you ask - though its only major competitor is the SNES's Link to the Past), but possibly one of the best games of all time. I think 16 years of love says far more than I can on the matter, but just beware that it's a 16 year old game, and wears that on its shoulder.

On the newer side of things, I also downloaded From Dust on XBox Live Arcade, the second of Microsoft's Summer of Arcade selections. From Dust plays somewhat like the old PC game, Populous. You play as a god, I suppose, leading a group of villagers from map to map by creating pathways for them to move around the map. They can't cross water or lava, so the puzzles often involve transporting soil from one area to another to create a land bridge. You also gain more powers as the story goes on - things like the ability to move more stuff at a time or evaporate a large amount of water on the map for a short period of time. So far it's been okay, but I'm not sure I can say I really love it. It's not been terribly difficult and I appear to be more than halfway through the story (assuming the map it shows of the various lands is accurate) despite barely playing it. I'd check out the demo and go from there.