The Lelda Of Zegend: Breath Of The Weath

I finally got a Nintendo Switch. It is adorbable and teeny-tiny and I can't handle that.

I have now played Breath of the Wild, seven million years after everyone else already moved on from it. I'm only about an hour through the game, but I'm going to see how long I can get through it without putting any pants on Link.

I was hoping to have paid for it from art commissions, but that requires a paypal account and a paying audience and not being in a ruined state in terms of artistic growth. So my dad bought it for me.

The shame at being such a pathetic baby that needs his parents to buy him his toys is palpable. But I seriously don't have anything else going on in my life, I've lost a lot of heroes in the last couple of months and I doubt I'm going to have a chance to be an adult anytime soon. If I'm going to waste the days until I'm dead, I might as well do some wacky shit in Hyrule.


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~A.H.

Colours And Contrast

I know this is just as annoying as that guy who was mad that Diablo III had TOO MUCH colour. As far as problems with video games go, it’s not the end of the world or anything, but it still bugs me when modern games do this. Especially when they rely on BS excuses like “it’s supposed to be dark and edgy and dark and gritty and dark and dark”. When in practice, it just makes everything look flat and uninteresting.


And yes, Dark Souls III in particular does have screenshots you can find with some colour and contrast. But I’d argue that in order to be a part of the franchise, it should really look closer to something like this:

But hey, what do I know? Maybe they’re only showing us the really bland, gray, flat-looking areas before we get to see the REAL art design… or something. But there's a reason why Fallout 4 was so colourful and had such high contrast and saturation: because Skyrim and Fallout 3 looks like a black and white picture of a turd. If people have to mod your game to make it look good, then your game's art design sucks. I don't care how many polygons you have to work with.

I was really hoping that video games had finally gotten out of its' "Gears of War, gray and gray and more gray" phase.


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~A.H.

Majora's Mask: "Blue Shell"

Via zeldawiki.org

I never finished Majora's Mask. I always meant to, but either it was too "weird" for me at the time, or I just needed more time to recover from the impact Ocarina of Time had on me. But even having only gotten about halfway through, I still remember it leaving an impression on me. I've played more than a few horror games in my day, but this is one of the few video games I'd call "haunted".

After seeing some very thoughtful video analysis on it, I decided to give it another go. And that will surely lead to my own extensive, thoughtful analysis of its' themes, its' mechanics and the understated effect it had(or should have had) on the games industry, in the shadow of a giant.

Or I can just be really bitter about the Goron Racetrack.

Fucking Mario Kart isn't that cheap.

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~A.H.

E3 2013: Nintendo

A more thorough write-up is below the cut:

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80% Chance That Navi Was Better

To the people who swoon over Ben Croshaw like he's video games' Gene Siskel, here's a podcast about the Zelda series(Skyward Sword in particular), demonstrating how to properly criticize a game while being British. See, they put in the effort. They tried to like it. They acknowledged its few successes, but don't let it get away with being(what sounds like) a really annoying waste of time, AND for treating the player like a complete imbecile. It also features one of the guys from Extra Credits, so there's that too.

Yeah, it's schadenfreude. But if any series deserves to be taken down a peg, it's this one. We haven't had a decent Zelda game since Wind Waker, and even that had to throw in pointless padding scavenger hunts in the last act. Even with that fucking Ocean, at least it knew what it wanted to be and came close to hitting that target. It didn't suffer from an identity-crisis like Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword.

Maybe the reason people look back so fondly on WW is a simple one: It's the last Zelda game that doesn't have a sidekick in the dungeons. That's right, that's the last major title in the series that didn't assume you've suffered brain damage, or just paired you up with a useless bitch.

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~A.H.

Mapstalgia

"I played the hell out out this game in my youth. And now, every time that I’m stressed, I’ll play it. I find it to be very relaxing. I go through the motions of a game that I’m so familiar with. It helps me clear my head.
Honestly, I’ve probably beat this over a hundred times."

That came from a post on "Mapstalgia", a tumblr account where you submit drawings of old level maps from video games, BUT only from memory. No references.

And I think it does a great job at explaining why I play through old games I've conquered many times. Even though there's nothing new for me to see. And perhaps it explains why I was so miserable last year. I kind of stopped my yearly tradition of going through an old game I adore. Figured I'd be sick of it by now.

Well now, in addition to Kirby's Return to Dreamland, Pokemon Heart Gold, Halo: CEA and the Mega Man Zero Collection, I'm also chipping away at new playthroughs of Wind Waker and Kirby Super Star.

Courtesy of vgmuseum.com

Good times.

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~A.H.

Separated At Birth

He's "The Hero". He wears a recognizable green ensemble, and fights for the weak and useless.

He has no personality. He has only one facial expression. He kills and is unkillable. He is treated like a God by everyone that meets him. His enemies foolishly charge into his attack radius, despite the fact that that strategy didn't work out for the hundreds of other enemies he vanquished with ease. He has no family, no backstory, suffers no moral crises and has nothing to say. He blindly throws away any pretense of free-will, excusing a lack of backbone with "fate" and "responsibility".

He is boring.


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The Legend Of Zelda: "Terminal Pancreatitis"

I've mentioned before that the obviously terrible video games don't bug me. At least, not as much as the games that were so close to being great. The titles that had greatness within their reach, and let it slip away for reasons of hubris or incompetence.

Twilight Princess made me stop believing Nintendo was my friend, or that they wanted to make great games anymore. It taught me that games aren't just made to make money first; they're made ONLY with profit in mind by greedy assholes who look at consumers as the enemy. This is the entry that proved to me that Shigeru Miyamoto doesn't give a shit anymore, and instructs his team to paint by numbers. This is the game that convinced me that every Zelda title will just be Ocarina of Time, over and over again, because people mistakenly believe that's all this series should be. This is the game that convinced me that Koji Kondo is a has-been, long past his prime.

This isn't a review. It's an autopsy.

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