Project Lore

I don't know about you, but I absolutely love chocolate and peanut butter.  The combination of two of the tastiest forms of caloric intake is pure win.  The sweet and the salty are a perfect menagerie of taste that excite my tongue while soothing hunger pains.  There are only a few things in World of Warcraft that successfully blend two of my loves together, and I stumbled upon one of them last week. I stood there locking down the paladin in the Faction Champions encounter of Trial of the Crusade when I realized that I didn't know the next fight, Twin Val'kyr.  Anub'arak, no problem, but all of the TotC attempts I've made before had ended, or begun, before the ladies had made their appearance.  I owned up to my shortcoming, and asked if there was anything special I needed to do.  A long-time gamer friend of mine simply said "Its [sic] Ikaruga" and left his description at that.  It was all I needed. Ikaruga is one of the newer games in the shoot-em up genre that revitalized the classic video game design.  As a lone spaceship (or if you are good enough, as both spaceships), you are tasked with destroying hordes of bad guys.  Your adversaries can come as stationary and moving targets, as with numerous other titles, but Treasure twisted the classic design on its head by implementing a new mechanic, color coordination.  If your ship is black, then it can absorb black bullets, and deal damage to white targets, and vice versa by flipping your ships color at the push of a button.  Sound familiar?  It should, because it's the exact strategy to killing Eydis and Fjola. The fight is nothing more than a gimmick, but I absolutely loved it.  After my friend dropped me the hint the raid leader gave a full description, but the two words was all I needed.  The fight mirrors the properties central to Ikaruga so closely that there was no learning for me, as DPSer, to do.  I just had to recall the hours lost to the greatest unheard of Dreamcast/Gamecube (now XBLA) game.  From powering up via careful absorption to unleashing the cache in a fury of fire, it was all accounted for in Blizzard's flattering design. The battle with the Val'kyr and the encounter's lifted mechanic saved Trial of the Crusade from being a huge yawn for me.  Now I need to go dig my Gamecube version out of a box and pop it in the Wii.