Nintendo’s Wii and DS consoles have controls that afford a more recognisable sense of mapping (as discussed in this week’s lecture). I acquired my DS earlier this year, and the first game I played on it was The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, a game whose controls were very intuitive and fun to use.

Phantom Hourglass does not even use the digital controls to control the protagonist, Link. Instead, these buttons are used to access menus and equip items, but all of the functional abilities of the character are performed using stylus gestures. I found the gestures to be very easy to pick up and they added greatly to the gaming experience.

Movement is performed by holding the stylus tip (or thumb if I’m feeling lazy) on the touch screen, between the character and the intended direction. So to move north, I would press an area of the screen above Link, and he would move in that direction until I stopped pressing. Jumping from or up to high areas was integrated into this movement gesture – if the Link was commanded to walk off or into a ledge, he would respond by jumping and then resume walking.

Link can be made to somersault – useful for dodging enemies – by drawing small circles in the edge of the screen. Even though the game world was generally presented in a top-down dimetric view, the circles drawn mapped well enough to a side-view representation of somersaulting, so the gesture wasn’t too hard to understand or recall.

To throw the boomerang, equip it and draw the path you want it to take

Wielding Link’s sword was also intuitive. To perform a stab, I would have to ‘draw’ a quick stroke from Link’s position to the point I wanted him to stab towards. Swinging the sword was simple a matter of drawing a line in front of link, parallel to his shoulders, to simulate the path taken by his blade’s tip. Finally, Link could be made to hold his sword outwards from his body with two hands and spin full circle, to slash enemies close by in all directions. This was done by quickly drawing a circle around Link.

There are other interactions Link can make with the game world with the stylus. One of the trademarks of Phantom Hourglass is making notes on the area map. Instead of important messages and locations being marked on the map by the game, it was up to the player to record this information. In order to do this, I would select the map from the game menu, and then use the stylus to write or draw on it. Instead of a command to erase text on the map, I would also have to select the eraser tool, and run the stylus over the screen to erase my markings.

These are only a few of the interactions in The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, but it is easy to see what Nintendo have achieved with an excellent mapping technique. On top of the decent narrative and melodramatic characters, the controls have made the game a pleasure to play.