neurological dryer lint

alright so we have our band for the wedding - crosstown jazz, we saw them last night at henke winery. howard, the sax player, is a friend of renee's family and my mom knows the drummer's wife... blah blah blah.... they rocked. i'm hyped.

also started playing through the minish cap, the new GBA zelda. this and four-swords, the bonus multiplayer game that came with the GBA port of zelda III, were developed by capcom along with nintendo and i think they do a great job of capturing the traditions of the series. minish follows it well, except it's a totally new story and map... in the last year they've just been porting stuff, so it's nice to have some new levels to fight through and puzzles to solve.

it's sweet how capcom mixed it up - they incorporated music from both zelda III and the wind waker, sound effects from ocarina and link's awakening (the first original GB zelda release), along with link's awakening's control scheme - instead of one button always being your sword, shield, etc. you assign any items you want to the A + B buttons. in this one, the gimmick is, you have a magical, sassy talking hat that shrinks you when you stand on a tree stump. you can't say they're not creative. capcom went extra bizarre in this one. it's like after wind waker, nintendo had this license to go as psycho and strange as they wanted with the zelda series, and they just handed it over to capcom and said 'do whatever, we're going out for a sandwich'. and capcom delivers - they clearly still know how to make an enjoyable 16-bit game. heck they're geniuses over there - two of my top five favorite games of all time are capcom games (mega man 3 and street fighter 2).

anyway, so far it's really sweet. i can always dig a new zelda game - there's a feeling really unique to that series, just like with metroid and with mario games... no matter which system you're playing on or which game, you get that feeling when you finish a tough dungeon in zelda, or solve a really tough puzzle that you've been staring at for 20 minutes... or when you beat a particularly tough boss in metroid... that's why we keep buying these remakes of old NES games - nintendo knows how to carry on the valuable parts of a tradition while innovating at the same time.

oh yes, and meet the fockers = hilarious and awesome.