This episode, the latest in the “I’m Tired And Sad” series, is brought to you by escitalopram and it’s horrible withdrawal symptoms! Everything I do is exhausting and I now know what it is like for your brain to skip a beat the same way your heart can, so I’m going to take it easy today and talk about one of the first video game accomplishments I ever felt proud of: getting to 1000 hits in Orca’s Sword Training without ever once using my shield, no forward jump attacks, and only dodging via the counterattack system or, as my friends and I called it, “Sword Master Mode.” Prior to the game’s release, I didn’t have a lot of local friends since all the kids my age had moved away with their families some years prior, but when a kid moved in down the block who was my age and shared my interest in video games, I started to actually feel competitive about video games and my accomplishments. Before then, I’d only ever played against my siblings with any regularity and I was hopelessly worse than my brother at everything and untouchably better than my younger siblings at everything, so there was no real competition for me to engage in. This new friend was at my skill level (largely determined by our age and coordination) and I got my first taste of competitive gaming. I didn’t much appreciate it, though, since it didn’t really feel fun to win and always felt bad to lose and have other people so visibily (and often vocally) enjoy having beaten me. When the latest Legend of Zelda game dropped, though, it gave me something I could compete in that actually provided me with something when I did well (a sense of personal accomplishment) and avoided the whole competitive nastiness thing I dislike so much about directly competitive gaming.
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I Won A Chance To Buy A Switch 2 Via Nintendo Online
Amidst everything going on, I appear to have won the small lottery that is “getting the opportunity to buy a Switch 2 via my Nintendo Online account.” I’ll admit that I completely forgot that I’d signed up to particpate way back when they announced that it would be a thing, mostly because I saw the requirements for eligibility and I’m not eligible according to them. I don’t share any of my data with Nintendo, I don’t get advertisements or emails, and there is nothing in existence that would convince me to willingly give a company my data in exchange for a chance to pay that company for a product I’m only interested in purchasing if it doesn’t inconvenience me. When I realized that those were required, I put it out of my mind and resigned myself to taking a lackluster stab at ordering one from a retailer online, which I forgot about until it was too late at night to bother with that. Which really goes to show how unexcited I was for the Switch 2. Still, when I got the email telling me that I could now purchase one (within a seventy-two hour window) and verified that this was not some attempt at hacking my Nintendo Online account (which it could still be since my only way to verify that this was correct was looking for other people getting emails from that same address and this could just be a giant campaign meant to steal the credit card and account information of a lot of Nintendo Online users that has fooled tons of people), I decided to wait a bit to actually buy it.
Continue readingA Mishmash of Gender Thoughts And Reflections On Pokémon Games
I started replaying Pokémon SoulSilver recently as my pre-bedtime wind-down video game. I can’t explain where the hankering came for, but I really wanted to enjoy the simplicity of an older Pokémon game and so turned toward one of my favorite entries in the series. It’s old enough that I can play it on my 3DS, new enough to have a bunch of quality-of-life improvements to the series, and is from a period in my life where I could just enjoy things without being aware of what the larger world thought about them, so I’ve got no difficult feelings or frustrations to ignore while I’m trying to calm down for sleep. As I booted it up, deleted my old save file, and started a new one, I discovered quickly why it had been so long since I played a Pokémon game. I was prompted pretty much immediately to identify as a boy or a girl and that little bit of text reminded me immediately of the complicated feelings around gender in Pokémon games that I developed while playing the latest mainline entry, Scarlet/Violet. Feelings that I might have only started to properly examine in the more recent years of my life but that had been foundational and important to me as I grew up in ways that I’m still figuring out. Feelings that developed as the Pokémon franchise developed depictions of gender via it’s ability to actually present characters and Pokémon that looked different. A thing that existed in the first game as only symbols in the name/nickname entry field, symbols on the Nidoran names to tell you which one you got, and as an abstract concept which, for a long time, my childhood brain literally only understand via hair length because that was how my parents and all the media I had access to explained it: boys had short hair and girls had long hair.
Continue readingFeeling Ambivalent About The Switch 2
I don’t think I’ve ever felt as truly ambivalent about something as I do about the Switch 2. These days, the word gets used to mean “no strong feelings one way or another” or something similar that implies a certain amount of neutrality. The definition of the world does involve a degree of neutrality, which is where the confluence of meanings began, but it’s pretty specifically about a net neutrality as your mix of feelings about something essetially cancel each other out. All of which is a bit of a hair to split even for me, but I have never felt quite so strongly and truly ambivalent about something before in my life so it felt like the specificity was worth the pedantry. I mean, better that than to continue endlessly spinning my wheels about the unanswerable question of whether or not I want to get a Switch 2 any time soon. It’s a bit of a moot point as of writing this (not quite) a week ahead of time, given that all of the preorders have been consumed and, even faster than the original switch, everywhere has sold out, so it’s not like I need an answer right now. My current policy of “get one if it’s easy to acquire without going out of my way” will work just fine for this situation, so there’s really no need to religitate it all over again. But then again, I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t always relitigating things in my head and then writing about them on my blog, would I?
Continue readingGotta Switch 2 A Different Way Of Economic Planing
Well, we finally got the Switch 2 news that everyone wanted. And a whole lot of news people didn’t want. According to the reactions after the fact, the Switch 2 is far too overpriced, the games are overpriced, and Nintendo has ruined everything! That’s quite a lot of responsibility this one console release has to bear, especially considering that a launch price of $450 is fairly reasonable considering the other consoles on the market. I mean, sure, Nintendo has, historically, been the cheaper option and the underperforming console in general (in regards to the technical specifications, I mean), but I figured it wasn’t going to last forever. Screens are actually really expensive and including one on a console is a pretty pricey part, even if the rest of the console has cheaper parts to make up for it. All of which is to say that I’m not surprised, this is what I expected given the price increase in some of Nintendo’s most recent games, but I was a bit surprised by the lack of anything that made me actually want to acquire one on launch day. I mean, I got the Switch on launch day because of the new Legend of Zelda game that was launching with it and while the Mario Kart game coming out as a launch title for the Switch 2 is interesting enough to make me break my habit of ignoring every new Mario Kart game, I don’t think it’s enough to make me want to go through the hassle of trying to get one on the day of release. A month and a half after that, there’ll be a new 3D Donkey Kong game for the first time in decades and THAT is definitely intriguing, but I’m not sure it’s interesting enough to contend with scalpers, waiting in line for several hours, or endlessly refreshing a webpage in hopes of getting a reservation.
Continue readingEchoes Of Wisdom Echoing The Legends of Zelda
I’ve gotten a bit further in Echoes of Wisdom now, far enough that I’m no longer travelling in disguise (which also apparently means being able to unlock additional outfits, as well as the “special” clothes given to the “Priestess of Legend”). What strikes me is that the entire game feels like someone was told to make a Legend of Zelda game where Zelda is the protagonist but the only stuff they can reuse from previous games is the names of specific characters. We’ve got plenty of familiar faces (Zelda, Link, Impa, the King of Hyrule, and even the bipedal pig/moblin version of Ganon) and even a few less familiar and interestingly odd choices from past games (Such as Dampe being an inventor now, rather than a gravedigger, and Lord Jabu-Jabu who is just sort of there, eating people again), but the power left behind by the three goddesses, in three parts, is called the “Prime Energy” rather than the Triforce or sacred stones or medallions or whatever else has popped up as some kind of source of power in the Legend of Zelda games. Which is to say that it isn’t strange that there’s a new kind of power in these games, just that it feels so strange for them to basically describe the three pieces of the Triforce but never actually call it the Triforce. Really, the whole game feels like it’s a shade off from what I expected. Not in a negative way. In an “uncanny valley” way. It feels like a Legally Distinct Legend of Zelda game and I can’t understand why they might have made something like that.
Continue readingStrong First Impressions In Echoes of Wisdom
After a few days of delay spent finishing Unicorn Overlord, I’ve finally started to dig into The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. While I’ve been mildly excited about it for a while, I purposefully kept my expectations lowered because there’s been just so much interesting fan art for what a Zelda-As-Protagonist video game might look like that any actual implementation of the concept would probably fall short. It was promising that, rather than go with the stylized but fairly proportional look of the two most recent main-line Legend of Zelda games, Echoes of Wisdom was adopting the more cartoony style that was used for the Link’s Awakening remake. I appreciate a game that isn’t trying to take itself too seriously and Echoes of Wisdom’s fairly simple but still highly detailed art has made for a refreshing look at a brand new game. I half-expected to only ever see that art style in future remakes of games from that era (by which I mean all the LoZ games that originally came out on a GameBoy of some kind), so I’m glad to see that they’re continuing to work with the look that they’ve established for that category of Legend of Zelda game on the Switch. In fact, the only issue I have with the visuals of this game (please keep in mind that I’m still not very far into the game, so there might be something up ahead that changes this opinion of mine) is that the game lags pretty heavily when you’re in “busy” towns with water features. I know that they want to make these games look nice, but they absolutely didn’t need to all-in on the water like they did. I’m not entirely sure that this was a “sacrifice performance on the altar of visual splendor” decision, but it sure is starting to feel like they’re expecting these games to be played on a console that’s more powerful than the seven-year-old Nintendo Switch. I’m not really one to dig too deeply into rumors of the Switch 2 or pass around conspiracy theories about making bad games to keep a franchise fresh in everyone’s mind, but I’m starting to feel like ignoring what seems like a bunch of stuff planned for a more powerful console that just hasn’t materialized would be more foolish than contemplating the idea that some new console has been held back for a couple years now.
Continue readingWrapping Up Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
Spoiler warning for the recently re-released twenty-year-old video game, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. They’re casually sprinkled throughout, so best skip this post if you want to remain unspoiled for some reason.
Continue readingReopening Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Twenty Years Later
Content Warning for discussion of childhood trauma in the context of a retrospective about Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. There’s also spoilers for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door in there, too, but not super specific ones.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 23
I’ve been replaying The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in my evening game time for the last month or two. I’m trying to re-experience the game without all the urgency I felt last summer and to take the time I feel I need to explore and enjoy it more fully. So far, it has been a better experience. I’m frequently lost and unsure of what I’ve been doing or have already done, but having the Hero’s Path means I can at least check where I’ve physically been. That, plus getting the Korok Mask and Sensor upgrade much, MUCH earlier this time around means that I’m reasonably confident that, for everything but my first twenty-to-forty hours of this file, I found all the Korok seeds and Shrines in those areas. Being on my second pass of the game means I’ve been able to more specifically target my efforts. I can easily prioritize the stuff I encounter because I already know how most it will turn out and I can more directly tailor my nightly gaming experience to what I want. Some nights I focus on shrines and filling up my map of the Depths with marks for lightroots. Some nights I spend trying to explore the depths in a fun but still efficient manner (so it stays fun to explore them rather than getting tedious like it did in my first playthrough). Some nights I focus on running quests, filling out my map, or just exploring interesting looking ruins. It’s a lot more fun this time around, even if I’m not as excited about it as I was the first time around.
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