This was my second year at Camp Hyrule, which isn't really a camp but more of a limited time chat room and message board. It's mainly silly, but they always give away something so why not enter. This year the camp's theme was the new Legend of Zelda game, Twilight Princess... so on Day Two they announced that Twilight Princess has been delayed from November '05 to sometime after March '06. That sent SHOCKWAVES through the camp, I can tell you.

In addition to the overall Zeldiness of it all, other recent and upcoming Nintendo games pop up as sponsors of locations on the map. This year we had a Mario Sports Complex that talked about Mario Baseball, Mario Strikers and Mario Kart DS. Kirby Canvas Curse sponsored the mess hall, DK King of Swing had a treehouse, we had a Pokemon Center, and there was a Nintendogs kennel out back. There were associated chat rooms with all of these, as well as a couple of short flash games to play. To keep things interesting, there's a plot that develops over the course of the week that makes changes to the camp map. The map began the week in darkness but was gradually lit up as campers completed minigames. Each day, we saw animal footprints circling a different section of camp, which was a clue to let you know where to go to play that day's minigame. In a surprise move, about two hours before the closing ceremonies, the entire map was set on fire and the buildings were all destroyed, the result of a Moblin raid.

I was assigned to Cabin 9, which was named (by my fellows) as the K-9 Kennel. The naming process requires that campers hash it out inside a chat room, which is a predictably shameful affair. Generally, you're going to see cabin names that reflect the number of the cabin and a Nintendo pun. So Cabin 8 is ALWAYS going to be 8-Bit Something, Cabin 10 is going to be NinTENdo something, and Cabin 7 is going to include the Seven Stars somehow. Luckily the looming release of Nintendogs overshadowed the knee-jerk reaction to have Cabin 9 be NINEtendo Something. Although, truth be told, my suggestion was to name ourselves the Ninetendawgs XD, as a badassier Nintendogs pun with the "Nine" emphasized. I also lobbied to add "XD" to whatever was chosen, to make fun of the sure-to-be-awful new Pokemon non-RPG cash-in battle game, Pokemon XD.

Every day, the camp counselors put up a list of tasks, and every task you submit earns points for your cabin. Cabin 9 took an early lead in task completion, so when it looked like we had a chance of winning, I jumped in and did all the assigned tasks for the last two days. Last year I was in a dunce cabin that was bottom of the pack right out of the gate, so it was nice to have been randomly seated in a motivated cabin that started strong and continued to dominate. At the end of the week, we were several hundred points ahead of the second place cabin.

The tasks are generally dippy Photoshopping projects or middle school level creative writing assignments, like "compose a haiku about Camp Hyrule." Here's what I submitted for Wednesday and Thursday's tasks:

They always do face painting, where they post a pic of one of the Camp admins and you're supposed to wreck it somehow. This one is of Shaun, who has a reputation for being an ass. You know there's always one camp counselor who's all gung ho for his cabin and talks trash about everybody else? Shaun is that guy. There's also some kind of stupid pickle in-joke about him, but I'm not about to hang out in a chat room long enough to have the joke explained to me. So his face painting picture was actually of an inflatable pickle. The pickle reminded me of Burger Time.

The other art project of the day was to design a faceplate for the upcoming overpriced Game Boy hardware iteration, the Game Boy Micro. Although I love the idea of changeable faceplates, there's no way I'd pay $100 for this. Old tech made pretty does not make it worth more than an SP or only $30 under the price of a DS. Keep your Apple-based pricing away from this one, Nintendo. Get that price down before the holidays. Anyway, I did a Pikachu theme. This one actually made the display page as being the best submission from Cabin 9.

The other task for Wednesday was a crazy internet scavenger hunt, but the admins dropped it because it was too easy to cheat on it.

Thursday's face painting was at least a real person, Jack. I took the opportunity to make a sort of Animal Crossing editorial cartoon. WE WANT ANSWERS, NINTENDO.

Then there was a DK King of Swing art project, to prove that Nintendo hasn't forgotten to release games for the GBA. You just had to do something based on Donkey Kong, so I turned it into a clever pun on Katamari Damacy. That makes two non-Nintendo games I included in my artwork.

The creative writing project for Thursday was to write a theme song for Camp Hyrule, Weird Al-style. I'm ashamed to say I wrote a song based on "This Fire" by Franz Ferdinand. If I could reproduce it here, I would, but I typed it straight into the submission box so it is now lost forever. All I can remember is that I wrote the lyric "If any camper gets out of control, we're gonna ban that camper, ban that camper." Oh yeah.

Realistically, this represents about 15 minutes inside Photoshop. But that turned into 8 points for the K-9 Kennel, which, as I said, we didn't need anyway. Regardless, I'm getting a damn t-shirt. A playable demo of Twilight Princess would have been better, but I'll take the t-shirt.