This is the first game in a while where I've pulled a straight "all day gaming" session like I did last weekend. I must have played 10 hours last Saturday.

Sisyphean fun!

Pretty much the only game where I don't necessarily attack monsters on sight.

OH SHIT YOU CAN USE IT TO CLIMB WATERFALLS??? Although I am almost disappointed, since most waterfall basins are remote, isolated places where I needed some good hardscrabble to get there. Still, this is a big time saver.

Totally. I always get up to go make some tea or something when it's loading, only to find that I don't have nearly as much "time off" as I was expecting.

I wish I could remember… When you combine certain ingredients, the music changes vs the normal cooking and Link does a little dance. Then it gives you the same status effect but something like 5 extra hearts on top of what you might expect, given the ingredients. And it's specific. If you use same tier but slightly…

That's fine, except that there are definitely SUPER recipes that completely destroy anything that you can come up with by throwing things together. So one must keep track of those somehow. Plus it would be fun!

My strong suspicion is that that content was forcibly cut out, so that the game wouldn't play better on the Wii U than it did on the Switch. The full gamepad functionality seems practically built into the game, and it suffers from its absence.

C'mon now, my point is not whether I like those game - I played through five 2D Zeldas on my 3DS - but rather that their price point was more palatable based on the fact that I owned a 3DS and I had no expectation that I would be able to play a large-scale game on the 3DS. Once you are playing those games on the same…

Maybe I'll task my kids with tracking the recipes.

Would that really be so bad? My prepared meal inventory is such a grab-bag of different dishes that I root through it for a minute at a time just to find a healing item appropriate for my situation.

This is why this seems like a bad strategy overall. If you can buy a real-deal 3D Zelda game for $60, who is going to shell out $40 for a 2D one like they would if it was on the 3DS?

As I said above, the lack of a cookbook is a boggling omission. I'm never going to remember the recipes to all kinds of things and I have no intention of writing it down. And it would give me great joy just to fill out a cookbook with new selections. My kids and I have some fun experimenting with finding out new…

Ok, but it would still be really, really nice to have an in-game cookbook (or even favorite recipe?) book that I could create. I'm holding out hope that some kind of patch will incorporate that in.

I ALWAYS forget the ice power. I'm usually doing some stupid shit with stasis for 10 minutes before I notice that the thin sheen of water on the ground is more than just window dressing.

Wow, awesome. This is a much more complicated riddle than I would have expected from BOTW. I saw the electricity dragon a couple of time before I ever shot an arrow at it. It just looked too majestic for me to immediately consider trying to kill it. Also, in another section of the game, I discovered another dragon…

I'll give Attic Mia another try. And that's very encouraging news about the X-ray glasses. I did a whole guide-assisted playthrough on easy where I picked everything up, and I've just been aware of how little I want to follow that up with another guide-assisted run.

My Resident Evil 7 madhouse run was immediately aborted by the fight with Mia at the beginning. Where is my circular saw for that, huhn? And also I realized I wasn't looking forward to collecting a bunch more ancient coins. But was it worth it? I really enjoyed the first playthough.

Agreed. My Wii U has a bunch of games that I have loved to play and a bunch of games I still look forward to playing. A lot of my favorite games from the last few years have been Wii U games. I bought it 2 years into its life cycle and that has ensured that there were always more quality games for me to play than I…

Yea, it's like I really, really don't want to focus because the exploration is so much fun. But I'm also keeping one eye on my normal tendency to lose interest. Historically I usually complete Zelda games in two major, non-contiguous blocks. A few months of fun at the outset. A six month break. And a month of…