the rambling fanatic

I was really looking forward to playing more The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword Saturday night, but when I finally had all my immediate obligations taken care of and could settle onto the couch with my Pro Controller and some fizzy water that evening, I ran into another apparent glitch with the port. This one, I could not troubleshoot my own way out of, not with the help of the entire internet. I tried all the settings and configurations that I know. Pro Controller v. Joy Cons. Motion controls v. button controls. Docked v. handheld. I did that section of the story over and over. (I can't go back to a save file before the section, because SkSw only has one manual save file and one auto-save file, unlike more recent games.)

( Read more... )

Update: Yep, the problem was me, not the software or the hardware! :-D

On Friday evening, at the grocery store, I found the vestigial books-and-magazines section gone. Not relocated: vanished. Some of the remaining magazines seem to have been squeezed into the impulse racks near each register, but that looks temporary.

On Sunday afternoon, at the department store, I did not find any of the three items I went there for, and decided to swing by their books section before coming home. I was overwhelmed with the new-to-me "vocabulary" of contemporary book covers. This has been coming on slowly for quite a while, but it bowled me over in that moment. I could not tell the genres at a glance. No cover has traditional paintings or photographs. Everything is bright (or shiny/glittery on dark) shapes and single objects, or, if it's people, they are "cut outs," like that certain kind of clip art often used on business trainings. The edges of the pages are all gilded or otherwise painted, which used to be a sign of a very fancy special edition, like Franklin Mint or better, but seems now the norm. I couldn't even tell which were for adults versus young adults at a glance at their exteriors. (And few were not thick. I saw very, very few that physically signaled "quick read" to me.)

On Monday evening, at the drug store, I was relived to find their vestigial books-and-magazines section intact. It's not much, and the magazines are a lower tier than many the grocery store had sold, but it's there. Interestingly, other than a few -- leftovers? -- in the traditional mass-market form factor, most of its books were what I guess must be the new mass-market form factor: they are as tall as trade paperbacks, but not as deep. On your shelf, spine out or pages out (which I gather is a thing now: weird), they will look like trade paperbacks. They use a little more paper, I suspect, than a traditional mass-market book, but perhaps not a lot. However, they definitely won't fit in even a generous pocket.

I wonder whether Super 7 will ever put out more of their Dungeons & Dragons (cartoon, 1983-85) action figures. Take a look.

On the one hand, it would seem to be a good sign that they are and have been sold out of all their D&DC merch (except the $300 16"x20"x20" Tiamat). On the other hand, there hasn't been a peep out of them about a second wave of figures going on two years after the first wave (plus the bonus invisible [transparent] Sheila), even though they email me ads for all kinds of other figures. And early last year they communicated that they unfortunately had to cancel numerous projects and lay off numerous people due to the tariffs situation, though they didn't specify which projects. (I don't think they would have been affected by the perceived "failure" of the D&D movie at the box office, but that's a possibility, too; TPTB could have yanked the license.)

Last night, I bumped into another imperfection -- and solution -- in playing the The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (HD) without motion controls on Switch 2 with a Pro Controller. The internet at large was not tremendously helpful, because of course most chatter is from when the game first came out, on different hardware and presumably before patches. The internet's advice was to quit without saving, sacrifice progress, reboot, and redo getting to this point, thus reloading the room ... which didn't work for me. The solution is simpler!

TLDR, no spoilers: Playing without motion controls, I've found that the "Move object" action is always and only to push. But when I toggled settings to motion for the controls only -- not the camera, not switching to joy cons -- pull became available in the place where it was needed. :-D You're welcome.

(Going forward, I'll try this on everything that looks like a port glitch.)