'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Well... most of the Links. From left-to-right: Skyward Sword, Smash Bros, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Link's Awakening, Twilight Princess (Wolf), Twilight Princess, Breath of the Wild (Rider), Breath of the Wild (Archer).

The latest few (Skyward Sword, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess) only turned up the other day - they've been on my wishlist of Amiibos for some time now but I could only find them at over-inflated prices from resellers (4x markup for a used one? Nope!). That was until Nintendo launched a preorder for another run of them and I managed to place an order before they sold out. I think the only Zelda ones I don't have now are the Toon Link/Zelda, 8-bit Link, and the Bokoblin.


In other news, the game of pick-a-wifi-router has continued - I've resorted to putting together a spreadsheet of all the different features. It's not helped that the datasheets (if you can call them that) are full of marketing lies and disagreements. It should not be this hard to determine which particular flavour of wifi standards a given router actually supports...

*ring ring*
Production: Hi, we've got a parcel for you, could you come and collect it?
boggyb: Sure!



boggyb: That's a bigger box than I was expecting.
Colleague: What did you order, a microSD card or something?



Nope, just slowly growing my Amiibo collection as and when they become available at not-insane prices.

This is actually my second attempt at buying the Champions Amiibo pack. I had actually managed to find them in-stock at Nintendo's own store and placed an order, only for them to sit on my order for a fortnight and then cancel my order as they went out-of-stock again. Nintendo did credit me 10% of the value (on top of the refund) which was a nice touch, though I'd be more impressed if their stock tracker was actually up-to-date and they had a notification system.

I spotted a Smash Bros Mario Amiibo for a non-insane price in the local second-hand games shop so I picked it up and got home only to discover that the 3DS refused to read it, claiming error code 037-0523 (which at time of posting didn't appear anywhere on Google). The WiiU gave a different error - 168-0409 - which according to Nintendo translates as "it's broken", and the Switch just stated that it wasn't an Amiibo.

So back to the shop with it for a refund, where they looked rather puzzled for a bit before remembering some email from head office - apparently there's a few fake Amiibos circulating and they think this is one of them. It did look a bit tatty with some scuff marks on the paint but I'd just assumed that was wear and tear.

The weird thing is that it did have a NFC tag in it, just not one with the necessary Amiibo coding. I mean, if someone's going to go to the trouble of making a fake Amiibo then why would they bother putting a non-Amiibo NFC tag in it? What's the point?

Managed it on the first attempt too, and with the Speed Clear Bonus to boot... but only a gold medal. I have a sneaking suspicion that the platinum medal will need a sub-1-minute clear to achieve, which is doable but tight.

elemnar is most envious that I get Nintendo shinyness delivered to my desk a day before the official launch date (thanks to preordering directly from Nintendo)...

In the Donkey Kong games, there's always been a mechanic where if you press A when bouncing off an enemy you jump higher. Most of the time this isn't particularly useful, but in some bonus levels it's required to avoid epic fail...


Youtube videos of platformers make them look ridiculously easy.

Anyway, I always thought that to get the extra height you had to press and release A exactly as you hit an enemy, and that there was a very narrow (almost frame-exact) timing window. Except that's almost completely wrong. In reality, you have to be merely holding A as you hit an enemy, the window for when you can start holding the button is frankly massive (up to maybe half a second in advance?), and it doesn't matter at all when you release A. That discovery made that bonus level quite a bit easier... well, it still took me about half an hour of extra attempts to finally reach the end, but at least I could now get past the fourth set of barrel cannons about 30 seconds in.

About a month ago I finally caved in and picked up a Wii U, along with Mario Kart 8 and Hyrule Warriors (as a "driving test passed" present to myself). It's not quite as wee a beastie as the original Wii - the console itself is a bit bigger, and the game pad is frankly enormous - but still just about fits in with everything else in the TV stack.

As an aside, GAME do seem to be amazingly bad at actually selling, well, games. I've tried two or three times over the past fortnight to buy the Wii U from the local store, and each time they've had no actual stock despite the shelves being full of game boxes. For added annoyance while they had a couple of nice bundles on offer, it's apparently impossible to place an order for them. Instead you have to order in the components in separately and then pay full price on the lot.

So instead I turned to game.co.uk, the online arm of the same company, wherein they not only had actual stock but had a better deal available and free courier delivery. The latter is less helpful than one might think as "courier" means "someone has to sign for it", but it's easy enough to get it delivered to work.

Anyway, the console. Setting it up was reasonably straightforward apart from the usual fun of getting it to talk to the router (the MAC address is surprisingly well-hidden), and it's quite nifty being able to wander off with the game pad and continue with the setup away from the TV. The only real downside is the ridiculously large system update needed that took a good hour or two to download (and my Internet connection's not that slow either). You'd have thought that since the console came out over a year ago it'd be loaded on at the factory, especially as I couldn't complete the Nintendo Network registration part of the setup without it. Still, eventually everything was updated and configured and I could finally play Hyrule Warriors on it, which is The Win.

Hyrule Warriors also has surprisingly competent AI-controlled allies. Normally AI-controlled players do no end of stupid things and generally fail at achieving the mission objectives, but here I was pleasantly surprised when part-way through one mission a Hyrule Captain (a very low-level allied leader) successfully captured a keep half-way across the map without any assistance. Later on in a different mission, I got given the objective "Protect Zelda from the ReDead Knights" followed almost immediately by the announcement "Zelda has defeated a ReDead Knight!". It's nice when your AI allies can be trusted to actually take care of themselves.

Thanks to someone dropping out of their pre-order, I have a Wii, with Twilight Princess. Sadly no Wii Play, the store had sold out of them.

Ach crivens, 'tis indeed a bonnie wee beastie, and is happily dozing on top of my computer as I type.

Oh, and Twilight Princess is Teh Win. Like Wind Waker, it's full of references to Zeldas past once you start looking for them, and that's part of what makes it so enjoyable to play.

Yet another meme. I should probably do a real post at some point. Oh, and photos for the photo meme will be posted soon, so get your suggestions in while you can!

( Video game quiz )

Nintendo Themes Acapella, complete with actions (discovered via tryss). You must watch this.