Bet you didn’t see THIS coming after yesterday’s post! Or maybe you did, if you read my blog daily. I have pretty clear habits, I feel. A spate of thoughtful pieces, maybe some poetry, a few posts about mental health, and then one of these. Can’t be sad if I’m thinking about The Legend of Zelda! It’s a good mood corrector for me, honestly, even if the sentence before this one sounds like an unhealthy method for avoiding my problems. Also, I just want to take a moment to mourn my hopes that I’d be able to play Breath of the Wild 2 in 2022 (the year of the 2 as I’ve been calling it) since it was recently announced that the game’s release was delayed to Spring 2023. Which will be rough, since I’m gonna be in a wedding that’s probably happening sometime not too long after that. Decisions.
Continue readingVideo Gaming
Kirby And The Forgotten Land Is Perfect
A new Kirby game came out last week. Kirby and The Forgotten Land tells the story of what would happen if Kirby and his fellow Popstar residents got sucked through a strange rift into a world that vaguely resembles our own (in proportion and technology) perhaps a thousand years after all Humans vanished from it. Being a completionist with very little time to play video games over the past few days, I’ve only gotten to the second area, so there is likely more to the story than I’ve found before writing this. That said, the story of a Kirby game is never the reason you play it. They’re all basically the same: something bad happens, Kirby and Co. team up to save the day, and evil forces are thwarted. A story frequently told entirely without words, relying entirely on cutscenes, music, and good facial expressions to tell the story.
Continue readingFinishing Earthbound Left Me Feeling Disatisfied
I finished Earthbound last night. It took a bit longer than expected, since I wound up spending way too long in an area near the end because I was being too conservative with my resources. I was trying to get to the final boss while spending as little as possible, alternating between using the Switch’s state saving method to find a path foward with only a few encounters between the last save/healing spot and the final boss and grinding against the enemies in the same area so I’d be strong enough to easily blast through them. It was only a few hours, but that was spread across a couple nights and really cut into the building tension between the rather confusing lead up to this final area and the nightmarish final boss.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 12
One of my favorite techniques for wasting time, resources, and my enemies in Breath of the Wild is attaching things to Octo Ballons. If you get the right number of balloons for your object, you can cause it to float at about chest height, which puts it in the perfect position to blown wherever you like using a Korok Leaf. Since you’re not striking anything with the leaf, a single leaf can last you through a number of battles. Unfortunately, the balloons will pop after a short time, so you have to be precise, quick, and dilligent. Otherwise your carefully arranged maze of traps you’re going to blow onto the unsuspecting Bokoblins will fall at the wrong time and ruin the whole effect. After all, it’s only impressive if YOU set off the series of explosions that causes fire or shock or ice to rain upon your enemies.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 11
At one point into my first play-through of Breath of the Wild, probably at 1 or 2am on a night I had to be up early for work since that was pretty much the entire month following the release of the game, I discovered that I could hold items I’d been collecting in my hands. For whateve reason, it never occurred to me that this could serve any purpose other than to cook things over a fire. I’d, of course, discovered that you could interact with objects in the world before you picked them up, but it had never occurred to me that it might be useful to put them back into the world once I’d put them in my pockets.
Continue readingStory Dictation Or Discovery In Video Games
I’ve been playing a lot of Super Nintendo games recently. Most of which I played previously, but some for the first time thanks to them being freely available as a result of my Nintendo Online subscription. I may have started playing them because Earthbound was recently on it, but I’ve played more than just the one game. While many of them are nostalgia plays or simple, mindless enjoyment I don’t have anything interesting or useful to say about, I’ve been thinking about the approach to storytelling the games developers took in this early, limited medium.
Continue readingI’m Sorta Okay At Destiny 2, And That’s Alright
There’s no better reminder of how “a step above average” you are at a video game than seeing the performance of a high-skill group of players who have practiced their coordination and communication. I used to get this through watching the professional Overwatch league, back in the days when I watched and played that game before I chose to uninstall all my Blizzard games for reasons of moral concern (which has only gotten worse over the years since). Now, I get it by watching my friend and his fellow members of what our (I kept writing “his/my friend’s clan” even though I’m a part of it because I’m still only dipping my toes back into Destiny 2, but I changed it all in editing because I’m trying to push myself to become a more active member of the group) clan calls Team 1 as they prepared for the latest raid and now practice for future guided raids.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 10
It has been a lot, the past few weeks. I find myself feeling just broken-hearted, exhausted, metaphorically out of breath, and incapable of mustering the energy to do any of my usual blogging stuff. So, I am turning to my old, familiar fallback of writing about The Legend of Zelda. This time, I’m going to talk about the very first Legend of Zelda game I ever played. It was a well-received game, lauded by many as the pinnacle of the franchise (though I’d contest that) and a game-changer in terms of what a player could expect from a top-down adventure game, so much so that it is still being used as the gold-standard decades later when people make games in a similar style. For those of you who haven’t guessed it already, I’m talking about A Link to the Past.
Continue readingDestined To Always Return To Destiny
For the third time, I’ve decided to get back into Destiny 2. The first time was following a normal lull in play as I ran out of content to enjoy, hit the point of grinding for small increases, and couldn’t get a group of friends together for the end-game type content (a raid). I stopped playing when I hit that same point again, though this time we did manage to get enough people together to do the first raid before the next one properly came out. The second time, I got back into Destiny 2 with the release of some new content in an attempt to maintain connections after I moved away from my now ex-roommates and we tried to find ways to spend time together during the various peaks of the pandemic. I fell out again because I couldn’t even get a group together without a lot of schedule work to do the small-team weekly activities and I’m not one for playing these types of games by myself. I’d much rather do it with other people. Never once did I stop playing because I wasn’t enjoying the gameplay, the story, or any of the content. I always stopped because I just didn’t have people whose company I enjoyed to continue playing with.
Continue readingWhat You Leave Out Of Stories
I’ve been thinking about stories a lot lately. Which, you know, is nothing new. I was going to start this next sentence by saying “what is new is…” but none of this is actually new. I’ve been thinking about story craft for decades at this point and recent years have only seen the amount of time I spend on it increase. In the past, I’ve mostly thought about the way books are written and how stories are told in that format, from what gets included to what gets left out and how not enough of either one can make an otherwise enjoyable story unpleasant. My go-to example for that has always been the level of unnecessary mundane detail that started getting included in the Wheel of Time books after the conclusion of what was originally intended as a trilogy. There are only so many times I can read about characters’ individual hygeine habits in a two-week period that was initially skipped over before it was returned to so the author could describe what happened during that period in detail. For as many memorable, cool story moments I remember from the series, I have an equal number of gripes about frustrating repeated details that shouldn’t have been included.
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