Typical wear and tear Posted on Friday 24Nov06, at 4:56 pm. Keys in the Zelda series seem to have their own warped, but internally consistent, laws of physics. Every door in Hyrule has the same kind of keyhole, and keys crumble to dust after a single use. One wonders if the likes of Moldorm and Arrghus ever get aggravated with, perhaps, the locksmith. As you might have guessed, we are currently suffering from Zelda envy. Lacking a Wii or even a viable route toward acquiring one, our reactions to the glowing reviews of Twilight Princess -- according to the gaming press, better than Ocarina of Time -- have transitioned from ecstatic relief to a sort of Gollumesque craving. Today is Black Friday, the Christmas shopping peak of the year. The thought was that today would be a good Wii acquisition day, but no luck so far. However, we did recently pick up Yoshi's Island DS, which is quite excellent. If you can't find a Wii on the shelves either, I think a new Yoshi epic would tide you over for a while. It's been a paradoxically slow week for gaming. That's all for now. Check back Monday for a new comic.

Always have a spare set Posted on Friday 24Nov06, at 5:19 pm. Keys, in my experience, are meant to provide access to locked things. This typically means having a key to re-use. As one might note in the Legend of Zelda universe, keys are rendered unusable after a single unlocking. You need to get through a locked door to get to the other side. As I often must do to get into my garage, you fight through several skeletal, bloodthirsty Stalfos to obtain that room's key. Once you're through the door, you find a room full of keese, that are there solely to prevent you from getting the key in that room to go to the next room. This sounds bad, but try looking at it from a different perspective. If you are on the run from, say, a serial killer, and he/she is chasing you to your house, you are going to need to unlock the door, and then lock it behind you. You run up, breathless, make wild grabs for the key, and shove that metal wedge into the hole. Frantic, you miss the hole a few times as the killer nears. You twist the key, grab the handle, jump inside, and lock it behind you. At last, you're safe within your house. Suddenly, you realize safety is fleeting, because you left the key in the door. As you hear the grinding of gears in the lock behind you, you curse the day you bought reusable keys. Despite the obvious advantages of single-use keys, I can see how, in the same scenario, it could be disastrous. You're running, running, running, and you feel the cold metal slip out of your pocket. It's too late as you look at the last pieces of the key scatter with the wind. Say, however, you are able to hold onto it long enough to get to the door, but a slight defect made it unable to survive the very unlocking process. See figure A for details on both such predicaments. Figure A: I suppose, rather than worrying about what type of keys you use, you should contemplate why exactly you are on the run from a serial killer. Drawing this comic was fun, mostly because of the villains, but it was one villain that nearly killed me in the drawing process. Originally, it was going to be Aquamentus, the original Zelda boss from the first dungeon, whose complaint to the locksmith was the subject of the comic, but the screenshots from the game provided so little help as to what it looked like, I just couldn't get together how it should look. There were pictures in the manual and such, but those pictures were just no good. The only real picture of that type I could find was in a strange position not at all similar to both what I needed, and what it was like in the game. When it came time to actually draw, it looked like some sort of horribly disfigured, yet happy green unicorn.