To make ZUCast and the ZUBC (or Zelda Universe Broadcasting Corporation) a little more visible on the site, I’ve made a ZUBC Headquarters page. I’ve also made it more obvious how to subscribe to ZUCast, our community podcast, by removing the RSS link to the Podcast and making it a subscribe via iTunes-only deal. In addition to all of that, the ZUBC / Podcast menu on the right sidebar has been expanded with a link to the Headquarters.

I’m happy to announce that our Super Smash Bros. Brawl Characters page has gotten a slight face lift in the form of images with transparent backgrounds. This is the first part of an improvement we’re hoping to bring to the rest of our Zelda sections as well - the highest quality images on the internet. With that said, I have a few announcements about images!

Just a quick update here - I’ve added two previously missing items to our Merchandise pages, on the Clothing page specifically. If you look amongst the shirts and caps, you’ll see we now list the “Don’t Make Me Go Zelda on You” t-shirt, as well as a fashionable Legend of Zelda Pin on the page.

If you’ve found some Zelda merchandise we don’t have pictures of, make sure to send them to us!

So, it’s been a month since I last posted a mailbag, but I finally decided to as a good way to start the new year.

You can check it out by clicking on this link.

You can also send me more emails by clicking on this link.

And I also wish everyone a Happy New Year as well.  Hopefully we hear some new news on a Zelda game this year.

That’s all I have for now.

From all of us at Zelda Universe we hope your 2009 is safe, happy, economically sound, and - if we’re lucky at all - Zelda-filled. As always, we’ll be spending the beginnings of the year hunting for any news of the next Zelda game, while also working to expand on our already vast array of Zelda information. With any luck, 2009 will be an amazing year for Zelda fans.

I, personally, just returned from an amazingly fun New Years get-together with old friends. What have you guys done for the new year?

I’ve added two new pages to the site underneath the Site Related section on the left sidebar that I can’t believe I didn’t add sooner, and I’m convinced ZU will become better for it. What are these pages? Why, so good of you to ask.

Submit News is a page with a special contact form with special fields that allow you to, well, send out an email containing information about news we haven’t reported on yet. The form automatically sends out an email to all of our news staff. We hope and pray that one of us is going to see it and post the news! The more news people submit through that form, the more stuff that appears on the front page - so long as the stories you’re submitting aren’t old as heck or completely irrelevant to Zelda Universe.

Submit an Article is, you guessed it, another page with a specialized contact form. I’ve been contacted quite a bit recently with a few articles people want to get published on ZU, and I think that’s awesome - I wish I could see more of that! If you’ve written a piece of higher-level Zelda literature that you’d like to get published and archived forever on ZU, wrap it up neat in a doc or docx file (or anything that holds text, really), and use the Submit an Article form to send it over. This form actually goes straight to me! Once I get it, I’ll post it for all of staff to look at and review - if we like it, you’ll get an email back and we’ll work together to peer review and make the article great so we can post it on the front page.

This is all a move to make ZU just that much more interactive. Social networking buttons can now be found beneath the “Similar News” box on each post, so even if you’re not submitting news or articles to us, you can share our news and articles with your friends on a bajillion social newtworks. Hopefully, in the end, it’ll all lead to a much more active and higher quality Zelda Universe for all of us.

Due to a bug in our cPanel software, our databases got knocked out last night at around 10:30pm. We immediately began dumping them and repairing them. Luckily, nothing was wrong, and we were able to restore the databases completely. No data was lost, but there might be some rampant bugs. The wiki is down at the time of this writing; a database repair should fix the issue. I’ll post here when the wiki has returned (UPDATE: It’s back online now!), and I’d love for you guys to submit any bugs you encounter in the comments. Obviously there are a few issues that are immediately noticeable, and I’m doing everything I can to make sure ZU is back up to speed as quickly as possible. I thank everyone for being so patient with all of this; it’s been a real headache for me.

For those of you who haven’t noticed, ZU has had a search bar underneath the scrolling game menu ever since our revamp six months ago (what, it took you six months to notice?). But for those six months, our searching abilities have been pretty… well, crappy. That all changes now.

The search bar has gotten a serious upgrade: it now searches everything, even highlights keywords and sorts by relevance. You can find pretty much anything that you want to know about Zelda now by using that search bar, and hopefully your results will be pretty good! I’ve run a bunch of searches, and I must say, compared to the old search system it’s quite an improvement. It isn’t perfect, and it isn’t Google, but it’s a great tool for navigating ZU if you know exactly what you want to find.

If you’ve never used ZU’s search abilities, now’s a great time to start if you’re looking for some good Zelda information. Once again, the search bar is right underneath the scrolling game selection menu - give it a try, why dontcha?

That’s right! For all you people of very many denominations, merry whatever-it-is you may be celebrating tonight, tomorrow, sometime during the holidays. And with that said… we’re gonna take a short break as well and relax ourselves (news-wise, anyway - I’ve got lots of work to do on the server this Christmas eve). See you after the 25th!

As a side note, when we come back our super-editor Margar of ZUCast fame has finished fixing up that interview with Anton Wiklund, ZU’s designer, at long last. That’ll be made available on the 26th - I’ll make a nice post about it then.

This is long overdue, but due to database issues we were unable to update the Phantom Hourglass Visual Walkthrough page with the completed guide. I’ve fixed the issue and the guide has been updated with the last few parts! No need to search for them on the front page of ZU anymore - they should all be there. If you have any problems watching the guide, just let me know in the comments.

Ah, snow. As you know what they say - when it rains, it pours (erm, snows a lot), so I’ve taken the liberty this morning of dousing the Zelda Temple with some fresh white stuff, and the forums to match. Hopefully it’s started snowing in your area - and if not, hopefully this is close enough to the real brisk blanket of wonder you could be experiencing if you lived further up north.

Now, I’m not master super-realistic 3D rendering designer Anton Wiklund, but I can do stuff when fueled by eggnog and the souls of innocents. Can you spot everything I’ve done to the place? Yeah, besides the snow. Look in the top right corner for a huge constellation of everyone’s favorite symbol (wrapped in a cozy star-scarf for warmth), and then to your left to catch a glimpse of Ol’ Saint Nick. At the foot of the temple, it looks like someone’s turned Ezlo into Santa’s hat and stuffed a pom-pom into his mouth… he can’t be too happy out that!

Please, please enjoy your holiday season, no matter what politically correct denomination it might be. And if you’re going to be playing some Zelda over your holiday, make sure to tape a Santa hat to your screen - I don’t think Link can dress in festive holiday gear on his own.

Over the last two months, the coolest thing happened: The awesome people across the internet spoke and voted ZU October and November’s Board of the Month. With nearly 40% of the total votes, we kicked butt, proving once and for all that Zelda fans are the best kind of fans out there. Also, Derek’s forum-styling expertise might have helped a little bit, too.

So raise a glass (of a non-alcoholic substance) and celebrate: ZU is the best! And since we also have the badge to prove it (shown in upper left corner of this post), I’m going to work it into the Temple forum skin as I redo the site to be all happy and snowy. Oh yes, there will be snow. It’s going to be a regular Snowpeak around this place come next week.

I’ve recieved the last of the Phantom Hourglass visual walkthrough from awesome staffer Hylian Hero, and I think in celebration of this epic completion… well, I should post them! One per day, every day, starting today - for a whole week.

Part 22 will be up later today, and there will be a new part every day until we reach the end of the walkthrough at Part 28. Woohoo!

It’s finally here - Zelda Universe’s Link’s Crossbow Training section, that is! It’s taken a little while, but we are now one step closer to completely covering everything Zelda. Now there’s just Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland to go and all of the dreaded “coming soon” messages will be gone from our site!

First up, we have the Characters page, which is rather short, because LCT is rather small itself. Don’t worry, though, not all of the sections are short - our Levels page is huge, and guides you step by step through each of LCT’s stages. Be sure to step to admire the visually appealing selection screen, because Jason is very proud of it. We also have pages for Items/Equipment and Enemies/Bosses.

I am happy to announce that we’re currently putting the finishing touches on the first four sections of ZU’s Link’s Crossbow Training section - Items and Equipment, Enemies/Bosses, Characters, and Stages, and will have the entire shebang out this coming Wednesday. It’s been a little while since LCT came out, we know, but we pooled all our resourced into the SSBB section first!

LCT is a small game as well - those of us in staff who had never played due to lack of cash to fork over for a Zapper (speaking of which, a few of us would really like a Zapper, wink wink) discovered how mind-bogglingly small this game really was. The end result is a rather small section - with the exception of the Stages information. Man, Zarah sure can write a lot! I can’t imagine anyone getting stuck on an LCT stage with the kind of complete information we’ve got packing in that Stages guide.

At any rate, look forward to Wednesday - the second section to launch since ZU’s revamp at last comes to live!