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 readingSNES
I’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 readingReclaiming Past Gaming
Today, as I consider what birthday plans I have made and what my holiday weekend has in store (this is going up after all that, since I write these a week ahead of time), and I gotta admit that the idea of buying my favorite chips, my favorite sodas, my favorite snacks, foods, and treats so I can hunker down in my apartment to play old SNES and N64 games is so tempting I’m not sure I can deny myself.
Continue reading