(Crap, I actually drafted this yesterday afternoon after work, then forgot to publish it. So, I’m quick-posting it now while breakfast coffee brews and computer warms up)

Hey there. What’s been happening? I’ve had a madly relaxing four weeks of summer holiday even though I foolishly got up early this morning to do some writing, so at this particular moment I’m already feeling tired.

Back at work, munching away at my mountain of e-mails, and slowly getting back into it. Not a whole lot to report.

Holiday was great. Squandered it absolutely shamelessly playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Holy shit what an amazing game. Well worth the 10+ years of waiting since that time I borrowed my cousin-in-law’s Gamecube and got addicted to Zelda: The Windwaker and Zelda: The Ocarina of Time.

Yes, I played and played and played and then played some more. And then I took a break and tried in vain not to interfere too much while Wump played. She’s actually doing amazingly well with it!

I’m super impressed by the whole game, there just seems like no end of things to explore and do in there – like Wump says, it’s going to take us years and years to get it all done. Although … well, okay, I did actually already beat it the other day, but it was sort of an accident. Long story short, there’s four sub-quests you should complete before making a run at the Big Bad, and I’d done three of them. I was just tooling around, levelling up and collecting items, and Wump wanted me to go and check out the big scary castle in the middle. I went in there, and one thing led to another and then before I knew it I was in a fight with Ganon and the system wouldn’t let me teleport out, so I had to finish the fight or admit defeat and go back to an earlier save point. And no way was I doing that with my firstborn watching.

So yeah, now all that remains is finishing it properly, with all the gear and quests and stuff actually completed. The open-world quality of the game, though, as evidenced by the fact that I could muddle my way into the final Big Bad … it’s just brilliant. Very little railroading, and what railroading there is, is pretty subtle.

As I complained a little in my mini-review, I would still definitely change the tips screen so it doesn’t load the same frustrating pointless tip every time you die in a fight. But that’s a minor thing, and it’s not like the tip is wrong. You do get better if you leave a fight and go away and prepare your gear and tactics and food situation. And that’s really my only complaint. It’s basically a perfect game. And the Nintendo Switch (Nintendo Account issues notwithstanding) seems to be a really good console. Even the portable part is very usable.

Yeah, I had a few issues with the Nintendo Account before I was able to grab screencaps and share them. Apparently only one profile can be linked there – but all the caps are communal from the console so you can still share them. Anyway, here are a few highlights:

I was dubious about sneaking up on and then taming wild horses at the start, although it is basically all Wump wants to do in this game. Still, once I got the right stealth gear and decent stamina, it got more fun. Horse riding, like in Wind Waker, is still largely pointless to me … but one of the quests required me to tame and ride this “Giant Horse”. So I did. Wump, having seen me naming my horses things like “Mr. Ed” and “Meh”, told me to name this one in a non-silly way[1] – she suggested “Star”. I went with “Red Dwarf”, for the sheer number of levels.

[1] And keeping in mind, she named her first horse “Bollocks”.

The cooking and crafting in this game is also off the scale. My first few attempts resulted in dubious food, which you can live on (as the old quote goes), but tastes like shit.

“Give me a recipe for decent food, you enigmatic old fuck!”

Another of my horse-sneaking and -taming triumphs, the Lord of the Mountain is an ethereal steed who you cannot, unfortunately, register to a stable and then call upon whenever you please. Which is a shame because he’s bloody incredible.

This picture shows how the Switch allows you to meme-text your screencaps, as well as the fact that Link acquires a Mexican wrestler’s outfit halfway through the game (it has a glow in the dark skeleton printed on it, but you can only see it at night). And that you get to not only build a town and populate it with characters from all over Hyrule, you also get invited along when two of them get married (which is only fair, since you introduced them and also brought the priest in from halfway across the damned continent).

So that’s it for my Monday. I’m not sure if I’ll be making daily posts at this point or just focussing on other stuff … but let’s see what shakes loose.

– Written on my Huawei mobile phone while sitting in the office carpark after work.

– Posted from my Huawei mobile phone while getting coffee.