Ever wanted to try your hand at coding, but found the task too daunting, or the lessons too boring? CodeCombat is an online game where you’ll solve puzzles using real-text code.
As you make your way through the levels, you’ll learn coding concepts and use real coding languages such as: JavaScript, Python, or C++. You will even have an opportunity to use your coding knowledge to see how it works in web development and game development.
Once you’ve mastered the basics, you’ll even have an opportunity to try your hand at the AI Combat league where you get to pit your own computer code against others around the world, making changes and adapting your code to match what your opponents are doing to make your code as strong as possible.
Your Vaughan Public Library card is your key to adventure and a future in coding. Come and check out CodeCombat and see what it’s all about.
For more coding programs and resources, check out: Coding Buddies, and our new Robotics Club featuring Vex Robotics.
For more advanced coding resources, check out the courses available through LinkedIn Learning.
So the Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom has been out for just over three months now, and at the time of writing this, I still haven’t beaten the thing. It’s a game of Gleeok1-sized proportions with so much to do and/or faff about with. I’m enjoying the heck out of it, and so is my fiancée, who doesn’t get that into games very often. I shouldn’t be surprised about that, though; we both got really into the game’s predecessor, Breath of the Wild. And I’ve been playing Zelda games since Ocarina of Time3, only skipping Spirit Tracks for mainline releases4. So, while I don’t know if I count as a super fan of the series, I’m at least at least a long-time player.
But this post is only partly about the games. What I want to discuss here is other media surrounding the series, which means I’m starting with a collection of manga. These mangas take the admittedly fairly basic stories of the Zelda games and imbue them and their characters with more personality, expand the lore behind the game, and, perhaps most importantly, give silent protagonist Link a personality and voice. So naturally, I’m going to start out of order and talk about The Four Swords, wherein Link gets split into four versions of himself by the titular sword, each with a different personality. This manga makes the story of one of the most remote Zelda games, Four Swords Adventures, accessible to more players. This game required every player to have their own Game Boy Advance and a link cable to connect it to the Gamecube, making the cost of entry pretty high, but it was an absolute blast if you had a group that met the requirements. It’s co-op but with a competitive aspect of who could collect the most force gems5. This aspect is explored in the manga, where Link’s clones aren’t necessarily always helpful in the quest to rescue Princess Zelda from the Sorcerer Vaati6. The villain alone makes this one worth checking out, as Vaati has only appeared in three Zelda games, and two of them required friends to play with7 while the other has only recently been released from Game Boy Advance prison to the Switch online expansion pass. Sadly, we can’t help you play the game, but we do have a good selection of games for newer consoles than the GBA.
So for my last post, I wrote about TTRPG-inspired books and linked to a few rulebooks to help burgeoning GMs or players get started. What I only did once, and didn’t point out, was a link to a System Reference Document, or SRD. That was the Pathfinder link; there’s also a Pathfinder 2nd edition SRD, a D&D 5th Edition SRD, a Gumshoe SRD, and many others. These documents exist so that companies and GMs can create new adventures for existing systems or branch off these systems to develop their own games, as Pathfinder did from D&D 3.5e. They’re also an excellent place for Players and GMs to learn the rules of a game, and if all you can get hold of is a campaign book from our collection or you want to create your own adventure, these are a great, free place to start. They don’t contain all of your options and won’t have trademarked creatures in them, but they have enough to run a campaign or create a character; I know this first-hand.
