The Ebb and Flow of Opinion Monday, October 1, 2007 : 12:00 AM EDT By: Chris

Ah, the good old late news post. It's like a second, much crappier update that comes along later in the week. The good thing about a late news post this week is that I've actually had time to play Phantom Hourglass before talking about it. No doubt about it, Phantom Hourglass has the Zelda charm and wholely deserves to be treated with the fanfare that accompanies the console LoZ games. It certainly marks the convergence of handheld Zelda games with their console counterparts in terms of presentation, but also the radical divergence from them regarding gameplay. Everything is executed wonderfully (except for doing somersaults) and, in very stark contrast to Lair, makes you glad that the developers didn't give you the option to fall back upon traditional control schemes. What's strange is that I suspect nobody will complain about the cel shaded graphics this time around. For some reason when Twilight Princess gave players that cool drink of realism they so thirsted for it allowed them to open up and accept Wind Waker and its tangential graphical style. I'd say it's about time.

On a side note, how many versions of a console can a company release before finding the retail sweet spot? Well, Sony doesn't know that answer, but it is apparently greater than four versions...released in less than a year's time. I can't even keep track of what you are actually getting when you plop down X amount of dollars for whatever piece of hardware currently goes under the moniker of PS3. I'll admit, when the current generation of consoles began I was hoping that Sony's previous successes would be toned down, as I didn't feel it was good for the PlayStation brand to continuously dominate the industry. But I didn't want them to do this poorly. While the PS3's hard drive size and price continue to fluctuate, gamer aggrivation continues its rise.