Medieval Acela

It wasn't all Wii games for us. Amanda was nice enough to get me The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks for the Nintendo DS. My DS appreciated playing something else besides Pokemon and removing the Pearl cartridge must have felt like having that surgery on a benign tumor.

If you have never heard of the DS, then it is Nintendo's current handheld system and descendant of the original GameBoy. Aside from buttons, you have to use the bottom screen as a touch responsive component. So you can scratch off lotto tickets in Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars or choose menu options in the Pokemon games. You can draw images in other games and physically move the characters on the screen by dragging it across the touch pad. And as the name implies, it has two screen stacked on top of each other, which allows for two separate interfaces or a unified view of the larger action.

In this game, you use the touch screen to move our hero Link around. You can also give yourself a heart attack by playing the game's Spirt Flute, which requires you to actually blow into the DS's microphone opening. Having not played a Zelda game since Majora's Mask on the N64, I was not used to anything but a control stick. Spirit Tracks also takes a note from the previous sequels Wind Waker and Phat om Hourglass which all featured an overwold map dominated by water. You had to navigate this by ship, using your items and songs to control the wind. I never played those games, but from looking at images and videos it seemed bery similar to the other overworld maps where you got around by foot or horse.

Spirit Tracks does the same thing, but it has a train. Choo choo! The train has been a major sticking point with Zelda fanboys, which are just one level below Final Fantasy maniacs in fanatical devotion to their quasi-medieval worlds. The main concern is that the train is stupid because Zelda is supposed to be medieval and trains are a 19th century mainstay. If this were the Legend of Zelda: Steam Wars, then that would make sense, but these guys want realism. Realism in a game that features, amongst many other things...

• Androgynous, hairless mountain men that eat bombs for sustenance...
• Anthropomorphized acorns that defend themselves by spitting acorns...
• Barnyard chickens that can unleash the wrath of God...
• Enough enchanted instruments to fill two Vatican secret store rooms...
• Oh, and bombs. Makes as much "real" sense as a train, but we let that one go, right?
  

I am no Zelda maniac, but I do know that the games are filled with items and influences free of the medieval England feel they try to emulate. It has a boomerang, which would make perfect sense in The Legend of Zelda: Outback Odyssey. In that version you need to play the Heaven's Didgeridoo instead of this game's Spirit Flute. It has a spring loaded spiked hook that you can use to climb up surfaces. And some games have Bombchus, wind up bombs that can crawl up walls and look like Speedy Gonzalez after pounding a few Stackers. Where was that in Robin Hood?

When people get mad about story items in games, then I think they are primarily devoted to the idea and not the actual game play. It's like having a room devoted to Jesus, but never going to church because they installed a new PA system. Speaking of which...

With that said...I do not like the train. D'oh!

It is not a story thing, but a game play thing. You need to run all over the world looking for secrets and having to follow the set track makes the whole thing a real grind. You need to catch all the snow rabbits by the snow temple, but then you must return them to the Rabbit rescue in the Forest temple. You spend large portions of the game just chugging along. The few enemies on the tracks are easily dispatched, but can get annoying as usually your eyes roll back into your head from the boredom of passing another pixelated treeline. Except for the Demon Trains, which cannot be killed and only avoided. Imagine playing Pac Man except that PacMan can only move in a straight line, there are no power pellets, and the ghosts blow you up!

Once you get to each station, the game is fun. You do almost everything on the touch pad including swinging your sword and using items. This can get a bit frantic, but adds a nice level of difficulty. In the N64 games, once you learned to Z-target and lock onto enemies, you were pretty much invincible with an eagle eye accuracy. You also get to control Zelda, which is a first! She can sometimes take command of certain enemies and this fires up a neat tag team mode where you have to draw paths for her with the touch screen and team up to corner enemies. So the swordplay is nice, but man do you need to work to get there. I thought that was supposed to be the challenge?

Chooo! Chooo!

Peace!