#making it feel like you have to stop playing zelda to warp around and run some errands every so often

[anarchopuppy]

After all these years, the Zelda series has reached its full potential

[airplanned]

Zelda Trill AU part 3!

It’s absolutely shocking that I’ve never written anything involving Star Trek.  SHOCKING.

So this was really fun and useless.  Enjoy!

***

Part 1

After his unpleasant time in Hylia's presence and his turning down an away mission and his mild sinus infection, Link was very much looking forward to spending some time with people who liked him and appreciated him and weren't about to spread rumors that he was untrustworthy or...or...

She wouldn't say anything about the actual mistakes he'd made.  She couldn't with implicating herself too.  If she took him down, he'd take her down with him.  But it was the things that he hadn't done that concerned him.  She was not above lying.

And he couldn't stop thinking abut her.  Not just Zelda, with her flashing hair and flashing eyes.  But hauntings of Tetra.  Of Sheik.

He'd made the mistake of reconnecting with her once.  He wasn't going to make that same mistake again.  He'd seen how it turns out, how inevitably after too long, people turn on each other.

He needed to spend some time with his short-term friends.  Friends who knew only Link and could pull him out of his own history.

He wasn't the last to arrive at Ruto's quarters for her weekly card game.  Most of his friends were endearingly bad at cards.  He half suspected that they enjoyed losing.  Otherwise they'd find something else to do together.

"Liiiink!" Ruto called.  "You made it!  I was worried, because heard you weren't feeling well."

He flopped into a chair between Yunobo and Russel.  "I've had the worst day.  I wouldn't miss it for the world."

Ruto preened.  Yunobo gave him a concerned look.  "We're all having...what's this again?"

"Andorian barley ale," Groose said, holding up his mug.  In addition to trying out card games every week, the group tried out "drinks from around the galaxy."

"Yeah, that," Yunobo said.  "But we can get you some tea if you want."

Link grinned.  See?  Best friends.

The door chimed and Ruto straightened.  "Oh!  Since Malon couldn't come, I invited the new girl.  Come in!"

Link's blood froze.

And there she was.  All the memories hitting him again like a hammer.

So maybe they weren't the best friends after all.

"Zelda!  You made it!  This is Groose, Yunobo, Link, and Russel.  Everyone, this is Zelda."

There was a chorus of "Hey, Zelda," and she flashed a brilliant smile at them all.  Her eyes met Link's briefly, then swept away without even the slightest hint of  reaction.  Groose popped out of his seat to pull out her chair for her, like a smitten gentleman, and Link thought he might throw up at the lovestruck look on his friend's face.  "Thank you all so much for inviting me."  She beamed up at Groose, and the guy's ears turned red with pleasure.  When he took his seat, he scooted it closer to hers.

Link would have to pull him aside later and make up something horrendous about hooking up with Trills.  Would Groose believe they had spikes?

"I'm actually feeling pretty bad," Link said, half way out of his chair.  "I think I should--"

"You do not feel bad.  You're just shy," Ruto said.  "This is why I didn't tell you a new person was coming."

Rude.

"Anyway, we're playing a game called Ben'tick and we need six people."

Ben'tick.  Of course.

Yunobo slipped a mug of tea in front of him and Russel grabbed his shoulder, pressing him back into his seat.

Zelda sat directly across from him.  Which meant they were going to be partners. 

"Excuse Link.  He's shy."

"You're both Trill," Groose said.  "Do you know each other?"

"There actually is a whole planet full of us," she teased.  Her half smile made his heart hurt.  "We don't all know each other."

"Oh.  Right.  Sorry."

That lie wasn't going to last, especially after their scene in the commander's office.  But he did appreciate it for the moment.  They could pretend they didn't know each other.  He could do that.

Goorse asked, "Have you played before?"

"No.  You'll have to teach me."

Link was ignoring her, so he didn't roll his eyes.  Tetra Hylia was a fiend at Ben'tick.  She'd taught him.  Her eyes caught his again, and her fingernail tapped twice against the table.  Shut up.

"Of course we'll teach you!" Groose said.  He stretched an arm over her chair to lean in and run through the rules.  Her eyebrows puckered in confusion, and she asked a series of simplistic questions.

Tetra would roll into a bar on the outskirts, and flop down into a seat at the highest rolling table, announcing that she was the best player in the quadrant, and proceed to take everyone's currency without a shred of guilt.  Zelda, it seemed, was ready to con everyone.  Not surprising considering Hylia was a champion liar.  Not surprising considering Zelda had a level of innocent cuteness that Tetra couldn't have pulled off.  She held up her hand of cards to show Groose and bated her eyes with her lips slightly parted.

"She'll figure it out as we go," Link said.

"Link's going to be your partner," Ruto explained, gathering up the card to shuffle them.  "Don't worry.  You're in good hands."

"It is good to have a partner you can rely on," she said.  Only Link picked up on the edge in her voice.

"He's good at this game."  Ruto grinned at him.  "If you need it, he'll carry you through.  And he'll kick you if you make a mistake."

That was a good idea.  He aimed a swift kick at her shin.

And missed.  "Ow!" Groose barked.  He glared at Link and retreated to his own seat, pretending that he was pulling in his arms to collect his hand of cards.

Zelda lifted her eyes over her fanned hand and smirked.  He was not going to survive the night.

She folded up her cards and tapped them twice against the table as if neatening them--A signal from a hundred years ago that she had four face cards.

Link sighed.  There was nothing for it.  He found a low number to throw out, letting her take the first hand.

#

Ruto threw down her hand.  "Okay, we have to have a rule where the Trills aren't on a team."

Yunobo said, "Don't the symbionts communicate with an electromagnetic disturbance?  I think they're talking to each other."

"No, it's the tapping," said Russel.  "We always thought the way Link tapped his cards was a tick.  But she does it too.  They're signalling each other."

"No way!" Groose said.  "Zelda would have to have played this before to know any signals."

Everyone groaned.  Ruto rubbed her temple.  "She has played this before.  She's hustling you!"

Groose snapped around to give her a betrayed look. 

She gave him a sympathetic look.  "Link was carrying me most of the time."  Then she gathered all the chips in the pot and pulled them towards her.

"I'm on shift at 0700 tomorrow," Russel said.  "I should get going." 

That effectively ended the night, and as much as Link tried to delay leaving so her wouldn't have to walk with her, Groose unfortunately noticed and shouted after him, "Hey, Fi, you making a move on Ruto?"

The dangers of Ruto thinking that was true outweighed a brief walk in the hallway, so off he went, following awkwardly behind Groose and Zelda as they discussed his recent shore leave.  He went mountain climbing.  Link knew he fell, but Groose made no mention of that.

"I'm down that way," Groose said, pointing down a corridor away from the turbo lift.  "If you wanna..."

Link would have been better off if he'd left Ruto's claiming he'd needed to be somewhere else, headed to the opposite end of the ship.

Zelda laughed.  "No thank you, but that was a good try."

Groose beamed and gave her a thumbs up.

Link didn't have much choice but to fall into step beside her to the turbolift.

"You don't talk a lot, do you?" she said.  The edge in her voice was back, but not nearly as sharp.

"Leave Groose alone," he said.

"Why?  Are you jealous?"  The turbolift arrived and they both stepped aboard.  "Deck 7."

"Deck 5.  He'd not the brightest, but hes my friend, and I don't want him to get hurt."

"Because I'll murder him?  That's really the story you're sticking with?"

Link clenched his teeth.

"Look," she said.  "I didn't pick this assignment.  If I had a choice, I'd stay as far away from you as possible.  But I don't have a choice, and neither do you.  So are we going to make this work and ignore each other like professionals, or are you going to be broody and impossible forever?"

He turned on her.  "This ship is my home.  If you put a toe out of line, if you put anyone here in danger, if you do anything suspicious at all--"

"As if you wouldn't put this ship with everyone you claim to love onboard on course to fly straight into a star while you escape in a shuttle craft like the coward you are--"

The turbolift jerked and shuddered.  The lights flickered, and suddenly they were falling two floors, three.  They grabbed for each other's elbows as the emergency locks activated, hauling them to a stop with a sickening lurch.  For a moment the lights were off, the hum of the ship silent around them, and there was only the harsh sound of her breath and the fierce grip of her fingers on his arms.  The emergency lights came on, low and red, and they straightened away from each other, instantly on alert.

"We've fallen out of warp," she said.

"Fi to ops...Revali come in."

"Hylia to engineering."

"Fi to the bridge...Emergency override: doors open."

The doors did not open.  Zelda tapped at the dark console, before shaking her head and popping it open, immediately pushing her hands into the wires.  "Power's out.  Let me release the door locks."

There was a hiss, and Link crammed his fingertips into the slit between the doors, gritting his teeth and prying them apart.  The floor of Deck 8 was visible about a meter above the floor of the turbo lift.  The hallway was lit with emergency lighting as well.  Link shook out his hands and then cupped them, offering her a foothold and then hefting her up and out.  He hauled himself up after her and went straight to the console on the wall.

"Main power is down.  Some sort of energy spike."  He tapped away as she eased closer to watch over his shoulder.  She was so close that it pricked his neck.  "Propulsion is down.  Engines are running on auxiliary power.  Life support is functioning off the backup systems. And I can't reach anyone."

"What about comms?"

He shook his head.  "I don't know.  They're running on auxiliary power, so they should be functioning.  This is Lt. Fi to all hands."  They both stared vaguely at the floor, waiting for a response.  Link shook his head,  "Why can't we reach anyone?"

"A localized dampening field?"

"Maybe.  I need to get to the bridge."

"Preferably quickly."

"Yeah." He nodded.  "Let's go."

Part 4

[demonfox38]

Completed - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

Oh, my language is going to be vulgar on this one.

So, I'm a crusty millennial who likes old garbage. Most of the media I like is old enough to drink and be a member of the US congress, but probably couldn't be due to the country that produced it. Now, I'd like to think that I've got good reasons to like older media, particularly when it comes to video games. It's a bit hard for my NES to bug me for microtransactions/DLC and emanate the screams of children and man-children alike. But, as much as I like my retro junk, there's one thing I'm very, very happy about regarding modern video games. The variety of game types now-a-days is a blessing. It's rare that someone is stellar at all game types, and I sure have my weaknesses.

It took me a long time to realize that I could be good at video games, and I wholly blame the glut of 1980s platforming games on that.

Look, platforming is not a forgiving genre. Particularly, back in the day where you had characters dying in 1-3 hits before factoring in death pits. It existed then for the reason that fourteen million instakill indie horror games exist now. Instantly killing the player is a lot easier to code than, say, having to track a health bar or their new position as an enemy swats them into a different room. Sometimes, a coder's gotta do what they can to keep themselves sane.

But, from a player's perspective, this style sucks!

Getting good at a platforming game requires practicing the same levels over and over again, developing a sense of your character's inertia and limitations. Without a save state or a warp to narrow in on a particularly troublesome location, it's hard to get learning to stick. You could lose a lot of games and time trying to put it all together. And some poor little character is always suffering because of your ineptitude! Such failure feels like a fork in an electrical socket. Succeeding in these circumstances requires a great deal of emotional resilience and a contrary attitude. And you know what? That's just not something I had as a kid. In fact, one could say I had my aggression and competitive drive scolded out of me. I'm just now getting that back.

So, yeah. I had a little trouble with "Zelda II: The Adventure of Link."

"Zelda II" is part of a trifecta of NES games that get routinely shit on by retro reviewers. Like its peers "Super Mario Bros. 2" and "Castlevania II", this game is generally considered an inferior game due to an extreme change of gameplay and appearance from its predecessors. And you know what? That attitude sucks. I'd rather have a variety of different games with a cast I like than have them pigeon-holed into one genre. In "Zelda II"'s case, however? The game mechanic shift was so extreme that I can easily see the ire it raises. Hell, I felt it. I wouldn't go so far to say that it's the worst Zelda game ever, but man, does it have structural defects.

In "Zelda II", Link's goal is to save an ensorcelled Zelda from eternal slumber by picking up a Triforce chunk that was pitched into a fuck-off palace way at the edge of Hyrule. (No, not the Zelda from the first game. Another Zelda. Same Link, though.) To do that, he's got to slap six gemstones into various temples across the countryside. Naturally, that includes picking up his trusty sword, leaping into battle, and then maybe straight into a death pit.

That's right. This Zelda is actually a Mario.

Further complicating the matter is a sharp switch in battle style and item accruement. While the previous Zelda game was about room management and ranged combat (or at least, as much as that was allowed), this game is all about jamming Link's dinky sword into an enemy's face and running off as fast as he can. Now, Link can learn a few tricks to help with the slash and dash, like directional stab mechanics and spells. But, as far as getting new weapons to help you? Sorry, bud. No bombs or boomerangs here. Well, except for the assholes throwing boomerangs at you, anyway. You just can't steal them.

The game encourages polishing the player's skill with Link through a level system. After acquiring XP through good ol' fashioned monster murdering, Link can cash his points out, improving his life, magic, or attack power. As the player levels him up, stats become more costly to improve. If Link gets a total game over before you use your XP, it is wiped out. Alright, fine. Fair, I guess. But, I wouldn't recommend looking at Japanese footage of this game if you don't want to give yourself a migraine. It turns out that as a part of some rebalancing, the level-up system was stacked to try and keep players from dumping all of their points into a single stat early into the game. Particularly, attack. Considering how painful and annoying enemy logic gets in this game, it's such a drag to learn that Japanese players literally could cut their way right out of that struggle. Thanks for dicking with the game design again, American publishers.

I guess we got better looking sprites and sound effects out of the deal? Hooray for wiggly Barba.

Even with leveling mechanics and a handful of heart and magic containers, this Link feels much frailer than the original Zelda's Link. Like, it's hard to believe he's supposed to be the same guy. Even at max health and defense, you could get Link wiped out with 8-32 hits (as opposed to 16-64 hits from the first game.) Exacerbating that is a life system that can yoink those health bars at any pit's whim and Link's range/health restoration being tied to a limited pool of magic. It feels like you're playing with a ceramic replica of the original character. You can make it work in a fight, sure, but you'd rather have a sword than a shard of a broken teapot.

If you don't have a bushido-level acceptance of death, you're not going to make it very far in this game. I'm not being hyperbolic. You have to accept that you are going to kill Link. You're going to watch that little fairy boy fade to black as the world flashes around him, and you're going to see that a lot. You're going to toss his bitch ass into the river to get a game over and restock your lives because fuck if you're going to wipe out inside a dungeon and have to start your bitch ass back at Zelda's temple again. That little counter on the main menu isn't how many times you have wiped out. It's how many times you've clawed your way out of the abyss with a middle finger raised.

Oh. Minor epilepsy warning on boss and Link deaths, by the way.

Having gone full bleak there for a moment, there are a few pieces of knowledge that can help slow down the cycle of life and death:

There are towns with nice ladies in red dresses and orange robes that will heal your ass for free. You should talk with them a lot.

There are classes of enemies that will drop items after they have been killed six times. Most of the time, this is a magic bottle that restores MP. Sometimes, it's a bag of experience. No monster will drop anything to heal your HP.

Also, some enemies are literal rat bastards that steal your XP. Some also give you no XP on killing them. Yeah. I know. Annoying.

The Life spell is in Saria. The downward stab is in Mido. (I realize these are very strange sentences if you're more familiar with "Ocarina of Time.") Getting these can make a night and day difference in surviving the game. So, keep that in mind.

You do get a spell that will turn you into a fairy. You can use it to game pits and sneak past lock doors. Just don't abuse it too much. It's expensive.

The dungeons have this little statue in front of them that you can whack with your sword. In most locations, it'll drop either a magic bottle or an Iron Knuckle. Game entering and exiting a dungeon as much as possible to restore yourself to full vitality.

You can get into random fights on the overworld (represented either by a little black blob or a more threatening human-sized blob.) Staying on gold roads will mean these encounters produce no enemies.

Also, you can use those random battles to override forced platforming sections. Not that I would recommend cheating in such a fashion. 😉

The game will give you a level up after you plug a gemstone into a dungeon. If you're close to leveling up anyway, turn around and grind up to the top, cash in what you've got, and then go pitch that gem.

Link has a crouch, not a duck. You think pressing down on the D-pad will evade projectiles aimed at your face, but it does not. Crouching is only good for blocking floor-level garbage. It's best not to think of the down button as much as possible, really. Only use it to pick up crap off the ground and cheese the final boss. Otherwise, jump.

I know that I said earlier that "Zelda II" is mechanically like a Mario game, but you know what other perspective might help? Try and play Link as a Metroidvania Castlevania character. There's an attack style in games like "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night" and "Aria of Sorrow" where you walk, jump, and attack in such a way that you never stop moving forward. That's what you've got to do. Walk, jump at an enemy, bonk on forehead. (Depending on how fast you press the attack button, you may need to delay swinging your sword just a teeny bit. At least, I had a bad habit of swinging too early.) With any luck, when you hit the ground, you will be able to keep on moving. You do not want to get stuck playing "poke-the-hole" with your enemies, particularly with how turtle-y some of them can get.

So, the game's a brutal bitch, but I don't want to spend the entire time shitting on it. Let's talk about improvements.

Honestly, I like the sprite style of the side-scrolling sections better than the previous game. Everyone/thing has more room to be rendered, so they look clearer. I can't say the monster or dungeon design here is my favorite, but hey. Easy to see. Yippie. Could have used a map though. Maybe some more tile textures in the dungeons?

NO. STOP. BE NICE.

There are more people around that want to help Link out. Like, whole towns filled with helpful healing ladies and dudes that will teach you magic and the occasional sword strike. Most of their conversation makes sense (although, there's a memetastic fault in translation regarding a character being named Error instead of what I'm assuming should have been Errol.) People good. Want to help people. People help me.

Except for towns where some of the people are monsters, and one of the times they overlapped a healing lady to get text box priority, and then they killed me. Boo.

I'M SORRY. I HAD A HARD TIME.

The music variety is pleasant. Only a few tracks have escaped the game to go into use elsewhere, but there's only one that I'm really iffy on. The NA release did a fine job transposing what they could using a different sound chip, and there are striking uses of the sample channel being used in ominous situations.

But…like…I struggle to see where fighting through this game is worth it. And maybe it comes down to the final boss. Like, the penultimate one? Absolutely cool. A bitch to fight, but I can't knock how massive and intricate its sprite is. But, the final boss? I suppose it comes down to personal tastes, but I find mirror matches/rivals to be exceedingly dull. Like, good for you. You know how I fight. I do too. Come back to me when you know the weaknesses of my style and use a fresh set of skills to throw at me.

Like, it's not the worst ending in the Zelda series. (My vote for that would go to "Link's Awakening.") You do get Zelda saved. But, given that the final boss is some kind of dark clone of yourself…it begs a lot of questions. Was there any concrete plan for the forces of darkness in Hyrule, or were various monster tribes just scuffling around, being dicks without any overarching plan? Were some monsters trying to keep you out of the Great Palace for a good reason? Would there have been any threat of Ganon reviving at all if Link just…sat on his ass behind a castle for the next century or managed his anxiety in a different way? Why does the manual bother to separate Zeldas and the game does not? Oh, wait. The Japanese intro correctly distinguishes this and the American one does not. Why am I not surprised? What's the difference if you don't see the Zelda you saved from the first game, anyway?

This game is a lot of work. I had to psych myself up to play it every time, and by the end, I was rattled enough by my nerves that I literally camped in my bathroom for a few minutes just to make sure I didn't get sick on the couch. Very stressful. And I'm not sure that stress was worth it, frankly. Life's hard enough as it is right now. I literally have a stress rash on my neck from the shit I'm going through in real life. No, you did not need to know about that. But maybe you need to know that I've been having a hard time lately, and this game did nothing to alleviate me from the stresses of reality. And what's the point in checking out from reality if a fantasy world is just going to make me miserable, too?

There are better games to play in this style. Hell, there are better games on the NES in this style. You know what you should go play? "Faxanadu." It's uglier than "Zelda II", sure. An absolute idiot when it comes to basic mathematics. But it's very chill about platforming and death. And maybe I just want to chill the fuck out for a while.

[scaredofheroin]

Captain N - Chapter 12: Passing Through

The first of the group to wake from their slumber was Captain N. As he groggily regained his bearings and remembered he slept on the grass previously occupied by Castlevania, he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. Glancing around, he found Pit, Falco and Zelda still lost in slumberland. Pit laid splayed out on the ground, Falco slept propped up against a tree and Zelda maintained her regal demeanor even in her slumber. Captain N slowly and quietly got up onto his feet, further surveying the area. The sun was only just visible over the lush tree line, transforming the scenery from a dark, foreboding maze of fauna to a lush and vibrant forest. Morning dew formed on the grass and leaves, save for the patches of grass taken up by the four. Captain N stepped away from the four, stretching his arms with a deep groan. With the occasional sound of birds chirping and the gentle breeze brushing through the tree branches, he gratefully drank in this rare moment of peace and tranquility in the middle of such a chaotic few days. The chill of the early hours still haunted the air, so he picked his varsity jacket up off the ground, shook the few stray blades of grass off it and put it back on. Patting his jacket down, his heart skipped a beat when he felt a familiar rectangular shape in his right jeans pocket. Hastily removing the object from his pocket, he found himself holding his phone. His heart racing, he impatiently pressed the power button on the side, but to no avail. His heart sinking, Captain N surmised that the battery died in between being transported to Yamajiro and now. He sighed in defeat, knowing that the hope of recharging his phone is scant in such a strange and foreign world. He sat down on a large rock nearby, still clutching his phone as if he was expecting it to dissipate like Dracula's castle. How long was he gone on Earth, he wondered to himself. Three days? A couple hours? Did anyone even know he went missing yet? Surely his mom or dad would have tried texting, but would anyone else worry? His cousin might, MAYBE a couple of his lab partners whose numbers he acquired to communicate during a group project, but that's all. Captain N sighed to himself, idly rubbing the smooth, near flawless screen of his phone. Everyone back home was probably too busy celebrating Jeremiah Coleman getting another touchdown, or Kimberly Sparks submitting another award-winning art piece to notice that he went missing. The more his mind ran through these thoughts, the heavier the tear in his eye felt.

"Whatcha got there?" Suddenly came Pit's voice, snapping Captain N out of his depressing train of thought. He tried to mask his true emotions towards the phone with a casual shrug, answering with "My phone.". Pit squinted his eyes a bit, walking over to get a better look at Captain N's phone. "Something from your home world?" He asked him, getting a simple "Yep." in response. Pit sat down next to him, further analyzing the strangely simple device. "...What does it do?" Pit asked. Captain N chuckled a bit, never having expected to have to explain the details of something so omnipresent in his home world. "It lets you communicate with people far away, get information from anywhere near instantly, take pictures and videos, write down notes, play music, and pretty much everything else you'd need it to do." He explained, Pit inquisitively nodding along. "How does it work?" Pit asked further. Captain N laughed a bit, shrugging. "I don't know, I didn't build the thing." He remarked, his mood having lifted somewhat. "It looks kinda like the Sheikah Slate." Pit noted. "...'Sheikah Slate'?" Captain N repeated, confused. Pit smacked his head, remembering who he was talking to. "Oh yeah, you don't know about that yet. If you ask Princess Zelda, she'll- actually, you better not." He quickly stopped himself. Captain N was more confused than before but knew better than to prod further. "You wanna show off how it works?" Asked Pit. Captain N shook his head. "Can't. Battery's dead." He explained, hoping Pit knew what that meant. Pit groaned a bit. "Dang, that's never fun." He noted.

"Good morning to you guys too." Falco grumbled, still lying on the ground. "We just didn't want to disturb your beauty sleep, that's all." Captain N joked, eliciting slight snickering from Pit. Falco rolled his eyes as he got up, arching his back with a groan. Zelda woke up soon after, roused slightly by the conversation. "I assume everyone slept soundly last night." She said, sitting up as she rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. Captain N didn't, really. Sleeping on the ground covered only by his jacket proved far less than ideal. Hiding this, he nodded along with Falco and Pit as he slipped his phone back into his pocket. "Well, good, as we've a long day ahead of us. We'll have to return to New Leaf Town before making our way to the warp zone in the Mushroom Kingdom." She instructed as she got up and made her outfit more presentable. "Speaking of which, how are they doing? The town wasn't attacked while we were dealing with Dracula, was it?" Captain N asked. "Thankfully not. From what I can sense, they've been as safe as when we left." Zelda answered. Feeling a slight feeling of relief, Captain N looked across the lake to the path they initially traversed through. "We all feeling ready?" Captain N asked the group. "Yep!" Pit eagerly answered. "Ready when you are, Cap'n." Falco spoke up, adjusting the blaster at his side. Zelda only nodded in agreement, closing her eyes as she drew upon her magic to conjure the path back to New Leaf Town. It took a moment, but she finally opened her eyes back up, eyeing a specific opening between a pair of trees on the other side of the lake. "Follow me." She instructed, taking the lead. "Wait, I gotta do something." Captain N suddenly spoke up just as Pit and Falco started walking. "What is it?" Falco asked with a slight hint of annoyance in his voice. Captain N didn't answer that question, instead searching the nearby tree line. Finding the same branch from last night, he drew his Zapper from his pocket, aimed at the branch, steadied his breath, closed his right eye, and pulled the trigger. Opening his eye back up and assessing the tree, he found that the branch fell to the ground, slightly smoldering near the end where he aimed for. A smile growing across his face, Captain N pumped his fist and cheered "First try!". Zelda let out a slight laugh from his display. "Nicely done, Captain!" cheered Pit. "Yeah, yeah, great stuff, care to get going now?" Falco asked, humoring Captain N. Clutching the Zapper, Captain N nodded, rejoining the three as they began the trek.

The day felt more welcoming as the four traversed the land. Captain N felt much more at ease as he hiked, due to the fact that they're heading towards a familiar and friendly town, as opposed to the mysterious castle of Dracula himself. However, the absence of Simon Belmont made the group feel slightly more empty. Despite Falco's assurance that he made it out alright, Captain N couldn't help but worry about his well-being. Hopefully he'll run into him again sometime in the near future. Conversation was light between the group as they hiked over the grassy hills and through wide valleys. Zelda remained focused on following the correct path, still rattled by Dracula's manipulation in Castlevania despite there being no similar forces overshadowing them now. Falco exuded an aura of annoyance which Captain N picked up, which he surmised had to do with not being able to fly his Arwing back to town. Which reminded him of a question he'd been meaning to ask.

"Hey Pit, can't you fly?" He asked, making Pit feel immediately uneasy. "Uh... kind of?" He awkwardly answered. Instilling only confusion in Captain N, he followed up with "What do you mean? You flew me to Peach's Castle and inside Castlevania.". "It's, uh, tricky actually. Even though I've got wings, I can only really FLY when Lady Palutena's directly helping me. Other times I can just kind of "boost" a little bit." He explained, making Falco roll his eyes. Captain N nodded, knowing that being flown across the sky was a little too much to ask for. "Well.. what about you?" Captain N asked Falco. "...What about me?" Falco asked in return. "Can you, you know... fly?" Captain N clarified. Falco let out an annoyed sound and responded with "No, I can't. Not without my Arwing.". Realizing he should have known this already, Captain N felt flustered realizing how that was kind of a dumb question. "Look!" Zelda suddenly spoke up, pointing at a nearby tree. Upon closer inspection, Captain N and Pit found the tree was populated with plump, ripe orange fruits hanging from the branches. "It's incredibly rare we find a tree of Wumpa Fruit outside the Wumpa Islands!" She excitedly explained, examining the fruits. "Looks like we found lunch." Falco noted, followed with Captain N feeling a rumbling emptiness in his stomach upon hearing food mentioned. "Allow me." Zelda stated, raising her hands at the fruit in the tree. Shortly after, four of the Wumpa Fruits were delicately removed from the branches and floated down to each of the four's pairs of hands. Taking it in his grasp, Captain N noted the firm yet slightly soft texture of the fruit. He looked back to Pit and Falco, waiting for them to take the first bite of their fruits. After Pit's initial bite was followed with a sound of him enjoying the fruit, Captain N took a careful bite of his fruit. His senses were immediately rewarded with this action, as the fruit tasted incredibly sweet, with the juices seeping out of the newly-made opening. The taste was difficult to place further than that, not being comparable to peaches or mangoes or any other fruit he ate back on Earth. His sense of taste, his brain and his stomach voted unanimously to continue eating, which he quickly obliged to, greedily scarfing down the Wumpa Fruit. "You don't have these on Earth, do you?" Pit asked, which he answered by shaking his head. Falco and Zelda ate theirs slower and more carefully, in direct contrast to Pit and Captain N. The fruit disappeared into Captain N's stomach disappointingly soon, left with only a sticky mess on his hands and mouth area. "Looks like Cap approves." Falco smirked at the display. Slightly flustered, he cleaned himself up as best he could to make himself presentable. With a slight giggle, Zelda floated two more Wumpa Fruits down to Captain N, which he graciously accepted with a polite "Thank you, Princess.". The three only had just finished their first fruits, whereupon they were granted two more fruits by Zelda. "I'm confident you gentlemen can eat and walk at the same time, so we should continue our journey." Zelda instructed. With a mouthful of Wumpa Fruit, Captain N could only respond with a less-than-polite "Mm-hm.". Pit nodded along with a hearty "We sure can!". Falco agreed with a determined "Yeah, let's move it.", stowing his fruits under his arms. Satisfied with their answers, Zelda continued leading the group to town.

It took the vast majority of the day to reach New Leaf Town. The handful of Wumpa Fruits only did so much to provide sustenance for the adventurers, eventually feeling the growl of hunger return. The sun sank further and further towards the horizon, the sky slowly shifting colors to match the rapidly approaching evening. Captain N could sense Falco envying the birds flying freely throughout the sky, chirping happily to each other as they soared across the warm breeze. Pit stretched his white, bird-like wings out to take in the nice breeze. Zelda remained as determined as ever to follow the determined path, assigning the task of eating food to the secondary priority. Just before the sun dipped below the horizon, Zelda led the group over the hill overseeing the entrance to New Leaf Town. The townspeople could still be seen walking about, enjoying their peaceful lives without a Kremling or other minion of the three kings in sight. "Ugh, finally!" Falco groaned, quickly hastening his pace towards the entrance, followed closely by Pit. "Thanks for being the guide, Princess. I never had a doubt." Captain N complimented Zelda, which she accepted with a soft yet gracious "...Thank you.". Captain N looked to the side and saw the warp pipe leading to the Mushroom Kingdom in the distance. He felt a strong feeling of uneasiness upon remembering what his true duties entail, separate from enjoying free stays at hotels. Zelda remained at his side, silently understanding his inner conundrum. "...I understand your struggle, Captain." She quietly said to him, feeling the weight on his shoulders as his eyes remained on the large green pipe. He sighed and hung his head, avoiding her gaze. "...Really?" He asked her. Zelda moved to his side to meet his eyes. "I know the pressure of having to live up to everyone's expectations in the face of such dire odds and consequences." She went on. Captain N took in a deep breath, straightened his posture and turned his gaze back towards New Leaf Town. "We better catch up with them, shouldn't we?" He asked, motioning towards Falco and Pit. "Indeed." She agreed, feeling slightly off-put by him suddenly diverting the conversation. "Well then, we better not keep the townsfolk waiting." He said, making his way towards the entrance with Zelda following closely.

The four approaching town was immediately noticed first by young Timmy and Tommy. "They're back! Princess Zelda, Captain N and the others are back!" Timmy shouted to the nearby townsfolk. This immediately caught the attention of Tom Nook and Isabelle, who was meeting with a dark brown owl male with a bow tie and checkered torso, the three of whom made their way over to the two youngsters. "I thought I taught you two better than to cause so much ruckus." Tom scolded his nephews. "But it's true! They're over there!" Tommy insisted, pointing to the field in front of town. Sure enough, the three saw Falco, Pit, Captain N and Zelda approaching. "Oh, goodness! I wish we could have known sooner! We could have prepared for their arrival!" Isabelle fussed, growing worried about pleasing such famous guests. The owl quickly made himself presentable, adjusting his bow as Tom quickly got his two nephews to the side so they could enter. With Pit and Falco having slowed to allow Zelda and Captain N to catch up, the four found themselves crowded once more by the anthropomorphic townspeople. "Welcome back to our humble town!" Isabelle happily greeted them. "What happened?" Timmy eagerly asked. "Didja beat up Dracula?" Tommy asked further. At this point, more townspeople noticed the four had returned, and quickly formed a mob around them. Feeling the pressure, Captain N raised his hands to create some space. "You all can rest easy knowing that Dracula's no longer a threat!" He announced, earning a joyous cheer from the townspeople. "I hate to ask, but would you happen to have retrieved anything of value from Castlevania?" The owl asked the group. "Unfortunately not, aside from that which was meant for Captain N." Zelda politely answered. "Oh, what a shame. It would have made a wonderful addition to the local museum." The owl grumbled. Just as Captain N was about to ask for his name, he perked back up and introduced himself with "Oh, my apologies! My name is Blathers, and I am the curator of the town's museum." with a slight bow. "Well then Blathers, I'll try to snag you something to show off the next time I break into someone's home." Captain N joked. "Wait... where's Simon Belmont?" Tom asked. Falco quickly answered with "He took on Dracula himself, letting us escape with the goods. Don't worry, he's fine". "What did you escape with?" A navy-blue cat with exotic head wear asked Captain N. The eyes of countless townspeople began boring themselves into Captain N, their interests piqued by the prospect of some hidden treasure hidden inside Castlevania. Instead of offering a verbal answer, he stepped back, drew the two Boosters from his back pockets and shot two brilliant beams of fire and ice into the sky. The townspeople were amazed by this display, cheering victoriously as his pride swelled, drinking in the sensation of an entire town cheering him on. "What brings you all back here?" Isabelle asked in the midst of the cheering. "Perhaps you decided to take up my offer on-" Tom tried to ask in return, but was interrupted by Pit explaining "We're just staying the night here. Tomorrow we set off for New Donk City!".

"Well, it's an honor to host such esteemed guests! Our mayor is currently off fishing, but K.K. Slider's playing in the center of town!" Isabelle beamed. Falco rolled his eyes at such an absent mayor, but Pit was eager to take her up on the offer. "Sounds great! And I bet K.K. does do!" He quipped. Captain N and Zelda happily followed Pit and Isabelle to the center of town, Falco straying a bit farther behind. Upon arrival, K.K. Slider was playing a song reminiscent of an old western movie from Captain N's home world. Some of the townspeople were too absorbed in the song to notice the four arriving. Captain N found himself taken into the song, soaking in its intricate melodies. But when the song ended, the presence of the four became immediately known, with Isabelle, Blathers and Tom with his nephews standing nearby. "Well well well, looks like our heroes came back champions." K.K. casually noted. "Got any requests?" He asked the group. Captain N, Falco and Zelda remained quiet, while Pit quickly responded "Something smooth!". "You got it, bird dude!" K.K. happily accepted, adjusting his guitar before beginning another song. As the expertly-played song wafted throughout the crowd, Captain N felt much more at ease with his mission. Still feeling his phone in his pocket, he felt stronger and more determined. His chest felt bigger and his height felt greater than before. Zelda and the others enjoyed the song as well alongside the happy crowd, noticeably more relaxed than before. But eventually, the song had to end, resulting in Captain N's tiredness making its presence known. "We ought to hit the hay. Got a big day tomorrow, after all." Falco suggested. "Seems like all my days recently are big days, but yeah, sleep on an actual bed sounds good." Captain N agreed with a smile. "Thank you all for hosting us, you've all been truly wonderful." Zelda thanked the townspeople. "Of course, Princess! You're always welcome here!" Isabelle replied, slightly flustered. "Everyone wish our heroes a good night!" K.K. spoke up, earning a collective "Good night!" from the crowd. Captain N awkwardly thanked them for their kindness, and he quickly made his way back to the hotel with his three allies. The host graciously handed the four room keys to the group as they entered. Ascending the staircase and arriving at their doors, the group quickly exchanged farewells for the day, more eager to sleep on a soft mattress. As soon as he locked the door behind him and fell onto the bed, Captain N succumbed to slumber once more.

[zachsgamejournal]

PLAYING: Super Mario 64

In all the years that I’ve played Mario 64, I’ve never really moved past the first four levels and the first Bowser Battle. So now, much of what I’m playing is unexplored territory. While I’m very committed, my dreamy-eyed, nostalgia-driven adoration is being challenged by 90s game design. Thankfully I’m playing this on the Switch...

It’s Better On Switch

I don’t care what anyone says, the N64 controller was clunky. The analog stick’s resistance was nice, but the rim around base was designed with eight corners. I suspect this was to allow players to commit to one of eight primary directions they would likely want to move. I feel this hypothesis was confirmed when I played Ocarina of Time and discovered Link could only move in one of the eight directions with no in-between. Because the analog stick limited the player, to a degree, Mario 64 was a little more challenging than it needed to be. Especially when combined with Mario 64′s trash camera. That’s right, it is/was trash. The camera often takes on a mind of its own, thinking it’s providing the best angle for the player. In truth, it makes walking a straight line near impossible in certain sections. As the camera adjusts, holding up no longer moves forward. When the player tries to compensate with slight stick adjustments the cornered base often causes an over-correct, and Mario falls off simple walkways. So playing on the Switch grants this one blessing. The analog stick allows the player to easily commit to any direction, not just the main-eight. As the camera jerkfully adjusts to provide a “better” angle, it’s easy to make slight adjustments on the analog stick to compensate. The camera still sucks. Playing it recently, I realized that the camera was somewhat cinematic. It slowly pans and tracks to provide interesting angles. It’s great for capturing cool looking gameplay, but it does not make traveling, tricky jumps, combat, or surveying the environment easy at all. As a matter of fact, it makes it a challenge. The most lethal and terrifying enemy in Mario 64 is its camera. Example: I was trying to collect a 1-Up from the Lava Level. It was hidden behind a column near the edge of the map. To reach it, the player needs to ride a shell like a surfboard. If the player touches the column or edge of the map, the shell disappears and the player gets burned alive. But the space between the column and map edge is fairly wide. While approaching this 1 up from either direction, the map provides a decent angle. But about a full second before reaching the one up, the camera suddenly swings a near 90 degrees and the player--who is likely holding a steady course, will suddenly be slammed against the map-edge, or the column when they try to course correct. Collecting this 1-up is one of the most challenging activities in this game, for no other reason than the stupid camera. Whispers of Zelda

With Shigeru Miyamoto at the head of both Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time, it’s not a surprise that the games share some commonalities. Originally, OoT was going to  have a castle that Link explored to warp to different levels, just like Mario. (It wouldn’t have been bad, but very different, and OoT wouldn’t have been the mother of 3D action adventures it became...maybe.) But I didn’t realize till now how much M64 may have influenced OoT. While I always felt Mario 64 was kind of a test-concept for what Ocarina of Time would perfect, I’ve started sensing way more influences. The first was pointed out by my wife. The music playing when Mario races down a slide is the same music OoT uses when Link is racing Epona. I later went into a basement area and found the Hazy Maze level, which reminded me a whole lot of the bottom of the well in OoT. The more I play M64, the more I see OoT. Given the strange, inorganic level layouts and the wacky mechanics, it really feels like Mario 64 was about exploring ideas more than creating a cohesive experience. All those ideas make it not just a precursor to Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but essentially all 3D action adventure games. (I’ll need to check some dates.) New Territory So, I’ve broken out of the old levels and I’m starting to see/do new things. Big Boo’s Haunt was interesting. I was a little disappointed by it’s simplicity. It kind of showcased how dated Mario 64 is. It also showcased how frustrating the camera system can be. But it also introduced new enemies and challenges--just when I suspected there was nothing new. I then played through The Hazy Maze Cave. This felt so much like a Zelda dungeon. It was also confusing. I no longer felt like Mario 64 represented “freedom” as I did before, but it did create a somewhat unique experience. While also creating some of the most frustrating challenges. Like the platform that requires you to step on buttons to drive it in different directions. But hitting a wall causes it to shake violently. And anytime you jump, it immediately stops--so when you’re trying to slide it under a rail while hopping over the top, there’s small margin for error. This wouldn’t be so annoying if it wasn’t such an ordeal to climb back up and try again. But collecting the Metal Mario Cap was entertaining because you can collect about 5 1-Ups at the beginning, and I kept failing (without losing a life), so stocked up pretty easily on life. I then moved to Lethal Lava Land. Not one of my favorites, but also reminded me of the Fire Temple in Ocarina of Time. I hate catching fire, as Mario becomes difficult to control. I almost wish lava would kill Mario instantly. It took me a little while to get the hang the level, and the camera angle made simple obstacles obscenely challenging. But I liked the creativity behind the log-puzzle and having to burn myself to leap into the volcano. That is the only way in, right?

Next is the infamous Shifting Sand Land. Not sure if it’s infamous for the rest of the world, but I spent over four hours here trying to collect a single star. Most of the stars aren’t too challenging. I hate that once you’re inside the pyramid, you can’t get out--but that’s a mild frustration. What’s frustrating is the stand on the four pillars star. Kindly, Mario can run up the sides of the pillars. But the fourth pillar is inaccessible by land. That means you can’t run up it. There are three ways to get there, fly with the wing cap, ride the turtle shell, or use the sporadic twister. It’s challenging to get enough height to fly the cap onto the pillar, so that’s not a great way. It’s hard to get off the shell without taking damage so getting on top of the pillar was easy, getting off the shell was near impossible without falling into the sinking sand and dying. Finally, there’s tornado...but even then, it takes as much luck as practice. Frustratingly, the level has so many insta-death scenarios with the sand, that even when I mastered the ability to get on the fourth pillar, I often slipped and or misjudged a jump before I could accomplish the other pillars. It took me hours to work out my best tactics to navigate the level and reach all four pillars. But that’s phase one. Phase two has the top of the pyramid pop off. Now the player has to get to the top of the pyramid. But the surfaces of the pyramid is super-slippery, and the base of the pyramid is sinking sand. So as soon as you slide off on to the side, you’re basically dead and have to repeat phase one. The trek up the pyramid is insanely treacherous itself. The first three levels of walkways are two units wide. Just enough to casually run along, but thin enough to allow for few mistakes. That’s frustrating because there’s flying fire-ball shooters, and stationary turrets along the way, making the simple act of climbing the pyramid very difficult. And then the final level or two of the pyramid is only a single unit wide. Even without enemies, that’s a near impossible task with slippery Mario who can’t just stick a landing like Crash Bandicoot. But guess what, they put enemies up there--often blocking the path you need to take. So more often than not, you end up sliding down the pyramid and sinking into the death sand. So my success rate for completing the four pillars without dying was about 5%--and then my success rate for climbing the pyramid was...well it was 0%. Point is, I spent HOURS and HOURS trying to do this ONE TASK for ONE STAR! I had to return to the Lava level to collect lives. I would play it 3-5 times until I got over 10 lives, then I’d go lose them all in the Shifting Sands. This routine happened at least 5 times. Somewhere in the middle of this, I learned that with a wing cap the player can triple jump without moving. This allowed me to launch into the air and fly. This new found ability increased my rate of success on the four pillars, but it also revealed some design issues with the cap. Just when I was trying to use the wing cap to reach the top the pyramid, it dawned on me that there was a turtle shell. I kinda hated myself for forgetting about. But it made quick work of the pyramid, sliding up to the top without issue. But the first time I reached the top, I overshot and grabbed a different star. Which meant I had to restart the whole procedure (and failing several times). But finally, I made it to the top. That’s when I discovered there’s a PHASE THREE: A BOSS Fight!!! The player is lowered down in an elevator and given access to hidden passage. Inside this passage is a fight! I was mortified! How many more hopeless hoops could they force me through??? I looked up how to defeat him. Not too challenging: just punch the eyeballs in the palms of the floating hands...wait, isn’t this in Ocarina of Time???? I did ok at first, but then one of the hands knocked me off the edge and I died. I was heartbroken. THANKFULLY the game starts you off on the elevator upon reentry. I beat him this time. Really, reaching the four pillars and blowing the top of the Pyramid should have resulted in a star bouncing out the top and landing some where safe, like on the stone structure with the turtle shell. Then the next star could have started the level with the pyramid top removed and the player’s only task to get in and challenge the boss. Ah well, it’s been 24 years--they’re probably not going to fix it now. It’s interesting, I don’t like hard games that are hard for the sake of it. But yet I wouldn’t give up on this task. I guess I appreciate that this game gave me the choice to keep pushing for one star or to move on. So I wasn’t mad at the game for blocking my progress, though I really, really, really hated this star!!!

[dany36]

SIGH so i’m done playing breath of the wild. i beat it about two weeks ago but i just now completed all shrines and sidequests. i thought about hating myself even more by trying to collect all 900 korok seeds but it’s not worth it just to have that 100% in the map screen (plus korok seeds stopped being useful a long time ago). i have 100%d all zelda games i own (except OoX) but i just can’t be bothered for this one.

having replayed all zelda games at least twice, i can’t say i will be doing the same for botw. here are my [long] thoughts about it (spoiler-free):

i can’t say i loved it. i think i was just playing just for the sake of playing it because....duh, it’s a zelda game (plus i sort of spent a crapload of money on the game+console). as a long-time zelda fan, it just...didn’t feel like a zelda game to me. i’m not opposed to change, in fact i was extremely excited to finally play this game, but the overall product just didn’t satisfy me at all. it just felt like a very dull and unfulfilling experience.  

- the overworld. i kept saying it over and over in my head while playing this game: it’s just too damn fucking huge for its own good. and it’s boring as hell to traverse. there aren’t really that many interesting things to do other than look for shrines. oh cool you can climb that mountain way over there? for what? oh haha a korok seed. most of the time, nothing. good job. it just felt tiring and bothersome to explore huge empty spaces of nothing. horses aren’t very useful since most of the time i was warping to try to not bore myself from wandering around empty spaces. i replayed the original loz at least like 5 or 6 times and i absolutely adored exploring every corner of the overworld. botw’s? yawn snore zzzz.

- weapon durability. i mentioned it in an earlier post but i hope this is something that never comes back to a zelda game. it’s especially shitty when you beat a shrine and your reward is a weapon. oh, a weapon that will break after 20 hits or less. so your reward disappears instead of it being something useful that you can actually keep for the rest of the game. this might just be a personal preference but i just hated the weapon system, especially when you find out that the master sword and the hylian shield can actually also break instead of being able to use them infinite number of times (and don’t tell me “oh it’s because otherwise you would never have used any other weapon!” bc idgaf, frost weapons and spears are cool and i would have used them either way)

- the story. oh my god. i know this is supposed to be a throwback to the original zelda, where you can go straight and kill ganon, but my goodness....it’s 2017. how is it that we got such a barebones story?? when i finally got to zora’s domain i was excited. i was finally getting to the story. boy i was wrong. the game gave me zero reason to care about saving the world and its inhabitants (except the gorons, which i think were the greatest in this game). i fucking hate that the story is mostly told through memories. the worst part is, the story told through the memories is more exciting than the one you play through the game. i hate that we are told from the start “you have to save hyrule and the princess because um....you’re a hero, you just don’t remember haha! so GO!!!!” instead of showing me actual, emotional reasons to want to save these people. through the memories we just become spectators, instead of the story actually making us bond and feel something for the people we are saving (except, again, yunobo, who i will save 1000 times if i have to). not even princess zelda’s incredible character growth (which, once again, HAPPENS IN THE MEMORIES and NOT in the present) can save the story from being lackluster. i would talk more about this but then it’d take up the whole post.

- the music. i’ve also complained about it before, but it’s a fucking joke, especially since it’s a zelda game, which are mostly known from having really good soundtracks. for me, there are zero memorable soundtracks. i think i only liked two, the one where you are near a Tower and when you are near a shrine. even minecraft, a freaking indie game, had better ambient music than botw. exploring the overworld becomes 3600% more BORING because as you’re walking, all you hear is link’s footsteps and clanky armor. so the overworld becomes twice as empty because 90% of the time, there is no music. except the five random ass piano keys you hear from time to time. it’s just bad and it makes me sad. people seemed to have hated SS’s OST, but at least it gave us Fi’s Theme and the magnificence that is the Lanayru Sand Sea theme. now THAT’S music that truly takes you into the game and gives it the proper ambiance that the overworld tries to portray. botw? a sad, sad attempt. i’m honestly wondering what they will play during botw’s section at the symphony of the goddess’s tour.

- the sidequests. 90% of the sidequests are boring fetch quests and “kill this type of enemy plz”. it’s just boring and tedious and the rewards are a joke (mostly, rupees, materials which you can easily find ANYWHERE, or food). it’s time for zelda to step up in the sidequests department and give me good, engaging, emotional-investing sidequests that tell me more about a certain character, or which tell me more about the world, or overall just make me CARE about its inhabitans that i’m trying to save. MM is the king of sidequests and botw once again pales in comparison.

- the dungeons. the first one (Vah Ruta) was cool. then it got boring and repetitive, really fast. all the dungeons look identical. the dungeons are for the most part short. there are no enemies inside the dungeons except these flying skeletons that die with one hit. oh yeah and maybe a robot here and there. so there’s some enemies but nothing tough. the premise revolves around manipulating the dungeon by rotating it to discover new areas. so it’s like playing four Stone Towers from MM. Except i guess the Gerudo dungeon, which added an element of electricity (that was cool). but other than that, all of the dungeons are pretty much the same and after you’ve played one, you’ve pretty much played them all, which is sad because it takes away the element of surprise and “oh man i wonder what the theme of the next dungeon will be?”

- the enemies. the lack of variety is a joke. there’s like 4 or 5 types of bokoblins, which just differ in their color and strength. oh and that’s the same for octoroks, moblins, lizalfos, chuchus, lynels, and wizzrobes (which are a fucking joke in this game. remember when wizzrobes were actually tough in the original game?). oh crap, i’ve actually mentioned 90% of the enemies you will face in the game... i think in total there might be 10 or 11, which is PATHETIC when you consider how fucking huge the overworld is. sad sad sad.

- stamina is stupid and so is climbing. stamina was tolerable in SS because of those silent realms you had to beat: you had to be careful of running and climbing and wearing out your stamina because of those crazy-ass guardians. so it made sense because it adds a challenge to the silent realms. in botw, for a game that focuses so much on exploring and climbing, stamina becomes a hindrance that actually makes it annoying to explore the world. you better not run out of stamina while trying to climb that mountain over there lest you run out and have to start all over!!! joy.

- the graphics. can nintendo please try something else with zelda graphics now. don’t get me wrong, i loved TWW and SS, but....these cel-shading graphics (or whatever they’re called) are getting tiresome. i didn’t like how most of the time the game looks bloom-y and blurry af (it’s especially bad when it’s raining or snowing). people complained about TP’s bloom effects but i feel like botw’s light effect (or whatever the hell that causes it to look like someone just put 200% of brightness on an image using photoshop) really takes away from trying to enjoy the scenery and view that the game tries to offer. for the next game can we try something like hyrule warriors or tp or hell even mm 3d? thx.

- the rain. it. rains. so. fucking. much.

haha oh man i never realized how many things i didn’t like about this game. i think i’ll stop here and talk about the things i did like:

- the shrines. although i didn’t like how all of them had the exact same design, the puzzles in them were cool and very zelda-ish.

- the warping system. thank god there are so many warp points to traverse the overworld because otherwise i would have never finished this game.

- the clothes system. i really liked all of the costume options the game gives you, and the fact that you can change the color of the clothes. it takes me back to the OoT days except with more variety. very nice.

- the runes. i loved not having to worry about running out of bombs and the ice rune was very cool and useful: it’s like having infinite ice arrows from MM to make platforms on the water! also the puzzles that involved stopping time with the statis rune were awesome. oh and grabbing treasure from underwater with magnesis never gets old.

- yunobo. yunobo is pure and great and needs to be protected at all costs.

- lynels. for once, a deadly enemy you actually have to be careful with and prepare yourself with good strategy to beat. i remember when i saw my first lynel i was so scared to approach it. they gave lynels such a great treatment and it’s the same one that wizzrobes should have gotten.

- the variety of the weapons.

- revali’s gale. saved me from having to climb so many mountains with its gust that elevates you so high. also after 3 it re-generates in 5 minutes. a blessing.

- the towns. i loved how lively they look. it’s like clock town from mm and it’s great.

- princess zelda. great character development and she has become my second favorite zelda (behind ST Zelda which will always be the best [while oot zelda continues to be the worst])

summary: while i enjoyed some aspects of the game, overall it just was very tiresome and unfulfilling. for a game that boasted about being open world, the world itself was just so barren of interesting things to do and explore. exploring the world of Xenoblade Chronicles, a fucking Wii game, was way more exciting because the environment, story, and music had more to offer. if there’s one thing i can thank botw for, is that it re-awoke my love for zelda games such as TWW, TP, and SS, which i will probably re-play next. i’m all for evolving the zelda series, and i thank botw for trying, but i honestly hope this game will not be the new zelda formula to follow. PEACE OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[thegeminisage]

today’s zeldablogging, big big huge very much spoilers everywhere:

WHERE DO I EVEN GO FIRST there is. so Much

out towards the ocean, i suppose...i see a shrine, and something else glowing that could be a settlement or lava or even a great fairy, and there are those islands to think about

GOD IT'S A COMBAT SHRINE a minor test of strenth okay okay i can do this

oh pffft that was easy

and i got...a giant ancient core, which sounds nice but probably won't let me upgrade my rune

how come the bokoblins can use bomb arrows in the rain and i can't?!

OH MY GOD....

first skeleton bokoblins, then skeleton lizalfos, and now skeleton moblins?!?!

wish i had marked that other glowing thing with a pin...i can't find it now lol

and i am at the islands!! man these bridges sure are tiny and high up

all this climbing i want to do and its about to rain :/

oh good. more flying guardians :|im trapped on top of this island in the middle of a lightning storm in the night besieged by moblin skeletons and keese swarms and my only non-metallic weapon is a korok leaf smh

mkay i am All Done with the islands im gonna warp back to the tower and mark the glowy thing this time

oh they just look like mushrooms?? well i'll go pick them i guess

OH OMG IT'S A FAIRY FOUNTAIN SKDFGH YES!!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!

only 500...but i know it gets worse :| im saving up

oh this one is blue!! how pretty

haha i still think they look more like mermaids...can't see their legs and they pop up outta water :3

OMG I SEE THE FIRE DRAGON

THE DIN ONE

IN THE DISTANCE AAAAH!!!!

so far away ;u;

i can't even take a good picture!!!!

oh no

oh NO

skeleton moblins...and now a skeleton hinox ;___;

...skeletons only take two hits. im gonna go fight it

omg the hinox fight music plays nooooo rip m having eventide flashbacks

oh my god! wow! okay! this one takes more than two hits!!

it's lightning too i can't even use my bomb arrows what did i get myself into........

OMFG HE IS TEARING OFF HIS OWN RIBS TO THROW AT ME LSKDJFHG

oh the lightning is a hinox thing. Great i only have metal weapons rn

aaaand he ran away with the dawn. ok

oh dude this shrine is cool you have to like play putt putt golf hahaha

OMG IM GOING TO CRY

i found another memory and it's of zelda saying she's prayed all her life like her father wanted and she still can't make the gods hear her......im so sad for her

there's nothing wrong with you my sweet daughter!!!!

this is cool tho the talk of her father and mother and grandmother and link's father

they have families and lives, it's so neat, i wish i knew more about them

tho ofc almost everyone who knew and loved link is long dead now......

ah. i paraglided her, but

to get out i have to bypass all these flying guardians. Great

NO SKDFGJH ONE SAW ME

so its laser grazed me and only took one heart and i was like thats it?! i'll fight you!!

then i got hit directly and it nearly killed me so now im running

NOOOO THERE'S A LYNEL HERE JESUS GOD

I JUST WANTED TO GET TO THE SHRINE AND I RAN RIGHT INTO HIM SDLFGJH

god and a blue hinox in the way too Why

omg i unlocked a monster shop lskjghf now i will see him in villages at night!!!

ah the shrine is on top of this huge rock pillar, how do i...?

maybe i can glide from a nearby cliff!!

okay...okay...it's not sheer rock, there must be resting places, if i glide form here maybe i can do it

i can't glide from where i'd like bc of the hinox (:

I MADE IT

they better not make me solve a fucking puzzle too

ah good they didn;t

FLAMEBLADE thats so badass

oh god another blue lynel

maybe it's even the same one

my dude i just wanna travel....i promise, i promise

FINALLY the akkala research lab!!!

dude better have some sick duds or something for me i swear to god

the music in here is lit i love it

uh

there's a...blue glowing statue

looks like something out of the tower of the gods awww

haha it's damaged! poor thing

this old man like "show me the wounds on your body you suffered" bro are you asking me to strip

oh my gOD his electric guitar pose thing

jesus chrkjrgh

EVERYONE IN THIS GAME IS A GIANT HAM

im doing a quest where you have to carry fire

AND IT STARTS RAINING

this game has made me LOATHE rain! i thought that was impossible and yet!!!!!

im running out of map stamps :/ why would you give me a world this big and limit me to only 100...?

aaaand it's raining

and my ONLY TORCH BROKE god i keep accidentally using it to hit things!!!

FINALLY i did it!!!!! god that was so tedious

oh my god this guy could make me such amazing gear, but i don't have the materials </3

now to check out this maze building it looks super weird and i can see a shrine in it......

how the fuck are you even supposed to get there i hope my glider can take me

lovely. the wind's blowing against me and i see flying guardians from here

noooo they're EVERYWHERE and i have to do a MAZE oh my god

i can solve it on my map and mark the dead end routes, fortunately

i still kind of want to explore those routes lol

oh they're so bare......maybe not

if i miss something like a korok seed or whatever a guide will direct me back here later

or...maybe not

i mean im next to the shrine but it's surrouned on all sides by wall?

bet it's too tall to climb even with potions and my gear

ooh or if it isn't those lfying guardians will fuck me up in a snap

YES i got lucky and found my way in from the top

or no i found...a sword, great, how do i get into the SHRINE

YES here it is

dude i got an ATK+ helmet!! i got GEAR!!!! YES

AAAAH I GOT ATTACKED AS SOON AS I GOT OUT

nope fuck this im fast traveling. goodbye forever, maze island

geez i guess that must be nearly it for this province then i got one shrine left i think and then i could........go to death mountain?

tbh kinda tempted to go back down to lake hylia but i'll pass for now, i want more Plot

i suppose i didn't do akkala beach but it's small and remote so i'm ok with that for now - i can clean up the endgame stuff later when better guides are out

there's a stable next to this shrine!! yay!!!!!!

omg there's a goron here!!!!! hi!!!!!!!!!!!!

finally hit 10k rupees

ooh this guy is talking about a legendary sword...GIMME MY MASTER SWORD

tbh i'll be disappointed if there's no special quest to get it tho like you just...find it? kinda weak

AAAH I CAN CHANGE MANES HERE........jemma has a floral mane now ;w;

too bad i didn't find this before, i can't ride her up death mountain, unfortunately - it's so much faster to fast travel, and she might get hurt, and i'll have to get on and off of her so much... ):

oh wait, i haven't explored the lake yet! i forgot! i can take her there <3

all the guardians here scared the shit out of me but they arent functional, thank god

NO FUCK THERE ABSOLUTELY IS A LIVE GUARDIAN HERE.....fuck fuck i can't KILL them

omg no i see TWO of them

if it was just one i might try my luck, but...no way

i'm sure in the future i'll be able to get more guardian arrows but right now i have, like, 4? so i can't waste them

and when i have the guardian armor that'll help too but. not Now

aaah i found somsone whose ancestors died at that tower...apparently the last stand was made there at what used to be the fortress after the castle fell ;_; and he wanted to pray there but it's too dangerous and i am AD oh my god

i can see the death mountain tower and a shrine from the akkala tower, but i can only reach the shrine by gliding. the tower is surrounded by (UGH) snow

lol the shrine is by a stable too

AAAH kass is here!!!!!!

AWWW he said the song he's playing was used by the ancient hero to call his horse!! gonna cry omg

bro lmao there's an ostrich running around here what kinda shenanigans

oh my god this dried lava under the tower is SO COOL it's so BIG and i feel so SMALL

ah, eldin tower - so this is the eldin province

wow the first stops are quite a ways up on this one! lucky i have so much stamina

ooooh my gosh the eldin map is HUGE and FULL OF LAVA im not sure im Prepared for this!!!

lol in a fun twist the temperature gets HOTTER as i gain altitude. ohhh man

i guess...i wanna do plot. i'll try to make it to goron city, and come back and explore later

when i have more fireproof elixirs lol rn my inventory is packed so i could only buy 3

oh my god i can't use wooden weapons, my arrows turn into fire arrows as soon as i get them out, even the loot will catch fire if you leave it too long, this is Intense

OH MY GOD A STONE TALUS BUT IT'S LIKE, MAGMA-Y

okay this is cool i wish i hadn't waited so long

lmao i accidentally drank a defense elixir and erased my fireproofness early OOPS

omg you can't use bomb arrows either dkgjhdfg the heat makes them explode instantly

unfortunately the only thing that makes a dent is ice arrows and i just don't have enough rn....BUT I WILL RETURN god that is so cool okay anyway

all right......i really like this region. normally i'm a water person, ESPECIALLY in zelda games, but rain and lightning have been nothing but a pain in my ass since i started playing. maybe i was ready for some #Heat

HA there's the fucking blood moon good thing i DIDN'T kill him it would have been erased right after

the blood moon looks kinda cool when the air is already like this tbh but i still hate it

like on a gameplay/story integration level it's a cool way to explain monsters coming back

but also im angry on behalf of hylians and everyone else like

no matter how hard they fight every month it comes back, it's all in vain

the music here is super cool, also

omg i found a little camp of gorons!!

ooh, a hylian...and he'll give me fireproof armor for lizards OOOO:

hahahaha...they can't dig up ore because of a lizard monster

my heart twisted, fondly

geez i wish i had time to catch some lizards...........

i caught a few but not 10, and i only have one elixir left, since i used one early. i guess if it comes to it i could try to make another but

YES okay i did it!! good

and armor i now have!!

altho i hope i don't run out of armor inventory space that would SUCK what with all the work that goes into collecting and upgrading it tbh

LOL i hit an emu or ostrich or whatever it is and the meat it dropped immediately became roasted oh my god

HOLY FUCK THE MOUNTAIN IS ERUPTING

NOW THIS SHIT BRINGS BACK MEMORIES OH MY GOD

running for cover!!!! almost dying!!!!!!!!! good times im so happy

it's like getting to do it the very first time all over again

oh my god i just got a divine beast cutscene as i got to goron city i am quaking in my boots it is SO BIG

and now i'm out almost 3k rupees but i have full fireproof armor!

oh my god you can get a goron massage at the inn

"it doesn't hurt a bit" yeah i bet

[cue lots of screaming]

omg theres a gerudo lady sleeping here!! are you not on fire?!?!

SO IS PAINTER DUDE...?

omg they must have elixirs ldfjkgh

"abandoned mine - do not stray from path! both literally and figuratively" slkdfjgh what does that MEAN...

aw, they sleep on beds of hoat coals

man this shrine im doing is so complex!! like many multiple rooms, it's neat

i got like 9 orbs now i need to find somehwere to trade them in

omg so im lookin for the goron who went to get the stuff out of the vault and HE'S TALKING IT'S SO WEIRD it still always shocks me

how do i..? my bombs don;t work, so

OH OMG I CAN USE THE CANONS i thought maybe you had to wait for permission lol

poor goron he's scared and trembling...haha just like the ones in the fire temple. bye

HE TALKED IN HIS OPENING CUTSCENE...IM SO GLAD

yunobo! aww he's precious i love him

i suspect this is the area where i'll have to get inside the divine beast tbh bc of all the cannons

lol almost yped it with one n. shh

the embers here are so pretty...next time i paint hotland i'll remember them

i wanna paint THIS, tbh

like, anything. from this game. god Damn

ooooh a daruk statue

omg IM GETTING A MEMORY YES!!!!!!

I LOVE HIM

I LOVE DARUK

WHO PATS BACKS TOO HARD AND PUNCHES OUT ROCKS

oh my god he had the same kind of barrier that yunobo put up around himself are they related!!!! im gonna cry i love them so much

yep hahahaha the next words out of boss's mouth!

oooh he has the blessing, that's what the barrier is

yunobo's at eldin bridge...? that's MILES away

OH!!! omg my brother reminded me there are two in tp hahahaha so i guess i got them mixed up

so where is eldin's bridge actually......

too bad i cant swim up lavafalls lol

i found a minecart and put it on the track but bombs dont make it go and i can't magnesis it when its under my feet??

AHA, STASIS

okay that was super fun but i hate beating up my weapons like that

there's a shrine here but the glowing orange blends right in with this lava, i nearly missed it

AWWW yunobo's gonna be the canonball! bless him

omg is he gonna follow me!!!! I HAVE A FRIEND

IM GONNA CRY FINALLY IM NOT ALONE <3333

oh god okay here we go i guess??? im so scared

like. its so big.i cant impress upon anyone who hasnt played it. how big it is. and the mountain is so much bigger and i am so small. i keep saying that but i'm like. DWARFED by this thing, it's truly incredible

ohhhhh an escort mission.......and stealth, which im Bad at. man, the elephant was a lot cooler so far

AWW omg we snuck past the first one and he went "hee hee!" and it was so cute i love him so much

he stands at attention so quick when i do the stop whistle please please i love him

also i feel like i recognize SO many voices in this...i gotta imdb it later

the voice acting isn't even anything extraordinary, it's like, not awful but nothing jaw dropping

but the fact that they speak blows my mind every time

i used to fantasize about that in a "fff yeah right the day after never" kinda way and here we are.....

omg i got stuck and talked to him and it's like. what he said was completely useless but it's like having a companion!!! oh god i've been so lonely

oh god i looked up too far and saw the beast and it is. so big. i know i keep saying this but it is gargantuan. it's HUGE. i can't believe how big it is

lol i couldnt figure out why the trail ended and spent half an hour wondering what i was supposed to do

turns out i should have been firing at the divine beast this entire time so i gotta go back and start over and walk up the trail again LMAO

at least you only have to clear the sentries once

ah FINALLY im inside!

DARUK IS TALKING TO ME ;_;

HE ALWAYS KNEW LINK WOULD BE BACK im so sad. i feel human emotion

oooh it's all dark in here

and blue flame!!

ohhhhh man i love these 3D maps

OH MY GOD YOU CAN TURN IT

it's so big. oh my god

wait it isn't hot in here! i can use any item i want!

god i forgot how the music becomes creepier the closer you get

i can't believe this...turning the whole dungeon...some stone tower temple shit

ooh okay still hot OUTSIDE of the divine beast...too bad

noooo i found the cockpit pod thingy...like are their skeletons just decaying in there or

ooh boy oooookay last one here we GOOOO...

"PAIN IN THE CRAG" LOL NINTENDO PLS

omg daruk cheering me on as i fight ;______;

awww that wasnt too bad ive fought WAY worse enemies just roaming around on the map

oh ew GROSS

DARUK ;_;

me after daruk sent link away: aaaww i love him but that wasn't as gut-wrenching as mipha's

me after daruk saw yunobo from a distance and they waved at each other: literally actually crying, there are tears really on my face

WHY COULDN'T MIPHA SEE HER FAMILY FROM A DISTANCE, HUH

if it doesn't happen i swear to god i will draw it if i have to

oooh boss is talkin about the master sword

it's in a forest - that's gotta be the lost woods or i'll eat my pointy green hat

but i mean. if you just find it. there's gotta be some kinda quest or build up

wow, i'm finally at the tippy-top opf death mountain...i feel like i could go anywhere from here

omg i flew to a shrine and i have to complete a training thing to get in??? oh my god

oh no. i have to climb the thing. #why

aww that wasn't too bad. did it on the first try

i found the end of the map on "land" ... it's a deep gorge and you die if you go too far down, probably even if you're on foot

but there's land beyond that, even on the map, so it doesn't feel as freaky as just MEGA WIND on the ocean

why is there a hinox EVERYWHERE i try to go. why.

dude theres a giant skeleton of some sort on my map...omg

probs a hinox there too tbh

...wait a second.

i'm at a HOT SPRING

i recover hearts by swimming, so maybe i could fight this hinox...

AND i have daruk's protection, three whole charges, two fairies, my hearty radish food, and mipha's grace.........i can do it!!

wow okay and i just used up the grace and one fairy on this bokoblin camp so nevermind

tbh i don't even like fighting them...i suck at combat and the rewards are almost never worth the fight

okay but i literally could get anywhere from death mountain i think and i do mean LITERALLY that isn't hyperbole, assuming i had infinite stamina. damn. thats a Big Mountain

gonna go investigate the skeleton

there's monsters under it! i am standing above them on the ribcage and cheesing it with bombs

also it says eldin great skeleton was this a dragon.........

was this in the trailers or was it somewhere else?

standing inside the skull of this thing 

i realize just how BIG the dragons are

like. damn

everything in this game makes me feel like an ant

lol this is the First Ever shrine i'll have to come back to not bc i can't figure it out but bc i ran out of fucking arrows. incredible

the problem is i can't really explore here bc my fire armor hasnt been improved at all, my defense SUCKS

i just died bc i found a talus lol and it two-shotted me and like. i have a pretty good amt of hearts, here

also next time im exploring first i feel like i'll never know if ive seen everything or not bc i'm all lost and don't know what i looked at and what i didn't :/

i hate to like, leave it and say i'll come back to it bc i know i probably won't, but games are supposed to be fun! and attempting to explore this area with all my armor at 3 defense is like. not fun. dying over and over: Not Fun

i feel like seeing or doing something new!!

what i need is my own copy of the map on the computer so i can just mark off the areas i wanna explore later

oooh i found an interactive map!! which i can't. screencap and annotate for myself, but

oh well, it's too much trouble to find one, and ps would be really slow rn anyway since i havent used it in awhile

however this map DOES have memory locations, so i'm gonna grab a few of those

okay NOW i found a shrine idk how to do. tbh i can't be fucked rn, i wanna go get memories

holy fuck the first memory i unlocked had like a PILE of dead monsters link just fucked up, including a silver maned lynel, which my ass has NOT killed yet, holy shit

ONWARD

HOLY SHIT the one i just got was in the trailers!! zelda crying on link ;_;

i'm glad tbh bc i was lowkey like...well i know you get her out of the castle bc she cries on you later

but no!!!!

also he strains of zelda's lullaby, them being covered in mud, and link's master sword! MAN

i can't get to anymore atm so i guess i decide where i go next...

tbh i wanna do gerudo next like my brother which means going thru lake hylia!! so it will be a long time before more plot, i guess

ah! the blood moon! gonna warp to the stable and watch it with that guy

lol he's all beautiful moon tonight, eh, finally the blood moon

UM HE'S FREAKING ME OUT HE JUST STARTED RUNNING AROUND AND SAID HIS BLOOD WAS BOILING???

"IT'S SO GLORIOUSLY RED, ARISE MONSTERS" WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU

and he acted totally normal after!

"oh you were researching the blood moon too?" WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM YOU FREAK

yep goodbye im leaving

upgraded my armor as much as i could with the fairy, STILL can't afford anti-guardian tech, am actively dying without it, will attempt gerudo and/or lake hylia tomorrow

[kevstreehouseisfull-blog]

Late to the Game: Ni no kuni Wrath of the White witch.

So a while back a buddy of mine was looking to shift ownership of his ni no kuni 2 revenant kingdom collector's edition. The thing came with a music box, art book and steel case for the game he gave me a fair price for the whole thing and I hadn’t seen him in a bit so I thought, “great two birds one stone.” I took a day off work hopped into my car and drove to his place which was 2 and a half hours from me. He let me check over the stuff told me to be careful handling the music box as it is fragile and then to sweeten the deal he tossed in a copy of Ni No kuni wrath of the white witch for free. It was a supremely nice gesture, (despite the fact he claimed he was really just trying to make space.) We enjoyed the rest of the day geeking out and shooting the shit before he had to go to dinner with his family and I started on the car journey home. I’m not going to lie I was excited to get home and start bingeing the crap out of both games. I got home let both games install whatever arbitrary updates they might need and settled in for a grand sprawling fantasy JRPG adventure.

Full transparency I feel I should note this is the second time I had played Ni No Kuni the first. Back when I was 18 or so I had bought the digital copy on sale and got fairly stuck into it. I got to the fairy island fought the boss there and headed to the next area and then I stopped playing. I had for some reason or another just neglected to play the game so much by the time I went back I had no idea what I was doing, where I was or who everyone was (aka the Game neglect effect). This isn’t a sleight against the game so much as it is my fault. I can’t remember how or why but for some reason I had gone ages without playing it, not cause I wasn’t enjoying it, but because life got in the way as it so often does. So when I got a second chance to play through this juggernaut of a JRPG I jumped right in. I mean seriously Ni No Kuni is probably one of the most highly revered JRPGs of the last decade, regularly making it into top ten lists of the best JRPGs of all time. I’ve even seen it top some of those lists from time to time. So my question is why do people ignore and elect not to mention some of this games massive shortcoming?

Okay so, disclaimer. I do not hate Ni No kuni and the wrath of the white witch. I actually enjoyed my time spent with the game however there are very real problems with this game that soured my overall experience and that prevent me from loving it. First let’s talk about the pacing and padding. The first and second acts of the game have tremendous flow both from a gameplay point of view as well as from a narrative one. You start the game get introduced to the characters, villain and struggle early on. The first town teaches you about combat the manner of which you solve quests by mending people’s hearts with pieces they’re missing from other folks with an abundance of that piece of heart. We get a dungeon, a boss, a few spells to enable progression, meet a new monster and recruit 2 new party members before we leave the first continent. Overall really great stuff. At each chapter of the story we’re given a clear goal e.g find the sage, learn from them, and cure the major npc afflicted by broken heart syndrome (It’s kinda like losing your soul in Yu-GI-OH.) Grinding is minimal or at least was for me especially if you’re doing the side quests which net niffty rewards not only by just completing them but by visiting the quest centers in the game and exchanging the brownie points for completing quest for handy quality of life changes to the game. For example every time you finish a side quest you receive merit stamps which go on a merit card, for each merit card you fill with stamps you get a single merit point which can be redeemed at quest hubs for stuff like faster walk speeds, more exp from enemies etc. It’s a stupid smart way of encouraging players to do side quests in order to make the game smoother and a little bit more manageable. However it what we might come to call the third act of the game this breaks down hard. The third act of the game in my mind occurs after Oliver and company obtain Oliver’s third wand the mornstar, Ni No Kuni’s equivalent of the master sword from Zelda. However the wand is incomplete. So we set out to find some pirates who have a map to where the stones to fix the stick are. You fight a dragon are forced to fix another dragon who you are then given ownership of fly to the island with the stones only to find they aren’t there. So we return to the pirates have a think about it try a bunch of spells on the map and find three more locations we need to go to and we’re off. So we go find the stones with 2 being in dungeons and one being on a ship.

Here’s where problems began. The first temple I visited was a shire to some evil snake dude who had turned a prince into an immortal frog man. We see his whole tragic backstory fight the snake demon and free the prince from his curse and reunite him with his lover. Overall it’s kind of a fun area in the game with a cool motif and a mechanic that turns your party into frogs that isn’t used as well as it could be but it’s still a bit of fun. The other two locations are nothing like this at all. The second stone is on a haunted ship which sounds as derivative as it is. If like me you stopped using the boat at this point because the game gave you a dragon to fly around on you’ll have encountered the same problem I did. You need to be on a boat in order to interact with the ship. The issue is if you fast traveled the boat returns to castaway cove which is a good bit away from the pirate ghost ship. So you have to go the long way round. If like me your boat is with the pirates that give out free dragons guess what that area is even further away. The ghost ship also moves at the same speed your ship does meaning you have to wait till it completes its forward movement cycle and turns to face you to catch it. even with the boat movement upgrade this is turn and the boat already feels like it’s swimming through syrup so It’s boring to be on the high sea. So we finally catch up to the boat and we get into a boss battle like a fully blown one. Except it’s not the real one. No after defeating the attacher the captain of the ghost ship a skeleton pirate fights you. it’s a little unfair seeing as how you have no way to replenish your health and mp before the fight unlike every other fight up until now, but fine yeah whatever. You beat the boss get the stone and are tortured with a cutscene of the disembodied voice of the captain bidding farewell to the crew of his ship. It’s suppose to make you feel for him and the crew but he mentions all the horrible stuff he did with them so it undoes any sympathy it was trying to gain as well as reminds you of the fact that; this dude was a prick before you fought him, his was a prick while you fought him and he’s a prick after you kill him.

okay so the third stone is in a temple in the snow lands which is good cause by now we haven’t seen any new environments or unique enemy types in awhile due to all this other stuff taking place in areas we’ve already been to. We fly to where the map points only to be guided to a village south of the dungeon to talk to a village elder or some such. Like seriously there’s nothing even you have to do other then that. Oh wait except talk to 2 completely pointless NPCs spend a night at the inn and then talk to the elder who gives your crew winter clothes. Like that’s the only reason. You then go through an ice cavern where it’s supper easy to use a lot on mp solving puzzles but the town does provide you with faire weapons which are super handy here. You find the boss beat them and hooray we can fight Shadar. Except on no we can’t cause the stones are too big for our wand. Apparently just making one item bigger or the other three smaller we have to return to one of the major cities in the game. Only to be told by the sage there he can’t do jack shit. So we’re given a new town to go to where we fight another boss fix all their problems and get ourselves a fully working wand. Now we’re ready to go. Except we’re not. We have to get a flute to lift the fog on the evil Wizards marsh. So we get some magic wood or some such from the second town which we can thankfully warp to, then go back to the first town only to have it stolen by a mouse. Turns out we have to fix the mouse’s shit before we can proceed so we find a dude fight a boss fix the mouse talk to a giant cat and then go to the third town for the 2nd time is like 2 hours. We get some drama about how the guy here can’t make the flute cause he doesn’t know how but the dude in our party is his brother and he knows how so it’s fine. We return to the entrance of the marsh and you’d think we’d be ready to go but you are wrong.

You see at this point my crew and I were level 40 or higher. Nothing had given us hassle or at least wasn’t one shoting us. That was until the dark wizards marsh. Turns out you need to be level 60 or higher to get any real damage done here. No problem I’ll just grind. Here’s the thing though the overworld monsters are notoriously stingy with exp even the higher level ones in the marsh give nothing. So unless I want to spend another 10 hours on a game that was already annoying me with all the backtracking I was doing then no thanks. A quick google search later revealed there was a rare monster which roamed the area outside the village beyond the marsh. These bitches gave out 2 sometimes even 3 levels for everyone one killed even at my late game level. The problem? The run away from you as soon as you get close and fade away before you can catch them. The solution? A spell which makes you invisible to monsters. Sorted? Nope. As I said this is a rare monster with a tiny spawn rate. Meaning I had to cast the spell run around to see if I could find one and if I couldn’t I had to reset the map by teleporting back to the village. This paired with some choice game grumps episodes and a few of my favourite podcasts was how I spent my next seven evenings. My free time became more like work. I knew I was in the last stretch of the game I just had to power through. Was I hit level 60 I’d bust the magical equivalent of a cap in that evil wizard’s ass.

I returned to the Marsh with a new found confidence the grinding I’d sone not only made me stronger but gave me chance to try some new monsters so I was riding high. I tore through the swamp reaching a boss. Whom I tore to pieces. Then a cutscene. More story. and we’re back to the village before the marsh! The boss I’d so savagely eviscerated had for story reasons returned me here to fight me again all so i could obtain a new spell I’d probably use like 5 more times throughout my playthrough. I returned to the marsh luckily there was a portal that sent me back to where I’d first encountered the bastard that sent me back a town. Before me stodd the Evil wizard’s palace. I scaled it along with my party felling demons and evil minions along the way however I was not prepared for more backtracking in the palace itself. I grit my teeth, I was close. I finally came face to face with the greatest evil in the studio ghibli generated world that had become my own hell. The battle that ensued was hard fought but was won nonetheless. And then Shadar pulled a Frieza and transformed. I was prepared for a second state, it was the third form that got on my nut. Not once but twice does this discount Voldemort pull the “This isn’t even my final form” shit on me. I kill him without thoughts of impending death due to my previous grinding. I’m treated to a serious of cutscenes of why Shadar wasn’t wizard Hitler for reasons that are weaker than the punches of an armless infant. I pretty much was skipping cutscenes now I just wanted to be done. After it’s over the castle crumbles the gang escapes and marches off with a severe lack of credits!

The game had not ended! No in actual fact the true villain had appeared. By which I mean plot I didn’t care about or want at this point happened forcing me to play another 4 hours of game. I now had to revisit each of the major cities in the game, AGAIN! This time with all the towns folks turned into zombies and with a boss where the monarch of the city should be. There’s was also more story revelations about the ghost girl who only I can see is but at this point Oliver’s main goal and drive is gone so I checked out and skipped all those cutscenes. we also get a new party member! Who is 20 levels below everyone! So yeah more headache then fun at this point. we go to a new palace fight some robots then another evil wizard, before coming face to face with the witch. Oh yeah the witch also has three form! If you're wiped out by any of them you have to start from the first one all over again. You don’t even level up between the fights so you have to carry on with all your low health and mp for all three fights, the last of which is between you a boss and all his minions. It’s annoying and aggravating and leads to my least favourite thing in the game, the combat issues.

So in Ni No Kuni you either control the human characters who are small and weak or the familiars who are small and strong? It’s kind of like the tales games but instead of being full 3d action RPG it goes for like a weird pseudo turn based action combat system. You move around the battlefield freely but all your actions outside moving have cool downs. Basic attacks refill almost instantly special attacks take a little longer to cool as does defense options. what’s bull shit is that magic despite have a plethora of spells shares one cool down bar. Meaning you could cast cure but you have to wait another ten seconds before casting literally any other spell. This is a major disadvantage to you due to be outnumbered in this fight by a mob of enemies the main focus of which is constantly casting debuffs and damage spells your way while the minions that it creates way to quickly physically block you from attacking the source. Not only that but there’s a handful of spells and attacks in the game  that have small cutscenes that literally interrupt the whole fight. So if you were say using an item to rez a fallen teammate guess what you wasted that turn and item cause that dick just cast sleep on everyone. This happened so often to me in the last boss fight I was actually screaming at my monitor. It took me 3 attempts to feel this beast going full out and I barely managed to bring it down. Hell I skipped the cutscene that followed just in case they tried to psych me out with another, another, another form but alas it had ended. Then the credits rolled. Then at no point was I given the option to save my progress before being prompted back to the menu screen. The White Witch lived.

My problem here is that the only proof I have that I finished Ni no kuni and the wrath of the white witch is my own word and maybe a psn trophy. This is one thing I hate in games. It ultimately raises the issue of why even finish the last boss, just watch the ending on YouTube, especially when beating the boss makes you feel this empty and hollow inside. That was how my journey with Ni No Kuni ended bitter and with nothing to show for it. I’d be hard pressed to recommend Ni No Kuni and even more conflicted to say it’s one of the best JRPGs of all time. It’s a fun coming of age story and if you love the work of studio Ghibli definitely check it out, just keep in mind there are definite flaws to this gem. Maybe just play this one and easy mode with a guide handy.

[fairyberries-blog]

Sonic The Hedgehog Pick Up Lines

I want to wear you like a Razer headset Gaming Equipment I’ll slam you against the wall like my controller General Are you a torch? Because you light up my world. Mindcraft Hey baby, you wanna see my hidden blade? Assassin’s Creed Call me Kirby, ’cause I’m talking you to Dreamland. Kirby I’d jump over a thousand barrels to save you. Donkey Kong Hay baby, can my patrol enter your Hidden Vally? Fall Out Nice pants, baby. What’s the drop rate? World of Warcraft I’ve got one heart left and it’s beeping for you. General Baby, I’ve been Z-targeting you all night. Legend of Zelda Wanna see who’s got the longer Dagger of Xian? Tomb Raider I’ll never skip the cutscenes of your conversation General They don’t call me Super for nothing. Super Mario Brothers My Heart is BOP and you just rolled Need World of Warcraft Let’s breed chocobos… the old-fashioned way! Final Fantasy You’re the Princess Peach to my Mario Super Mario Brothers Whoa! Those pants make even yer butt look buff! Tomb Raider There’s a Himalayan idol somewhere in my pants. Tomb Raider Want to touch my Staff of Rampant Growth? World of Warcraft Like Ezio, I’m great from behind and above Assassin’s Creed What do you say I take my flag to your base and score? Halo Are you a Wii? Because I love your joystick Gaming Equipment I’d rather ride you than Yoshi any day. Super Mario Brothers I’d like to fertilize your crops with my bonemeal. Mindcraft I’ll make sure the Road to Dawn is a loud one. Kingdom Hearts Zidane: You wanna see something my tail can do? Final Fantasy Is it true what they say about British duchesses? Tomb Raider Yeah, that’s right… I’m hung like a tauren. World of Warcraft I wanna make you wetter than the Zora Temple. Legend of Zelda Are you a slimeball? Cause you make my piston sticky Mindcraft If I were an NES cartridge would you blow me? Gaming Equipment I’m like an Xbox; I can go 360 all night long Gaming Equipment Are you a Deku Nut? Because you’re stunning me. Legend of Zelda You must be a pressure plate, because you turn me on. Mindcraft Wat out… I just ate a big dot and I’m coming after you. Pac-Man Are you Donkey Kong? Because I want to Super Smash. Donkey Kong Are you Mortal Kombat? Your beauty has finished me Mortal Kombat I’ve got one heart left and its beeping for you. Legend of Zelda Not even the sands of time could pull us apart. Prince of Persia Why don’t you seduce me? My resistance is low. World of Warcraft Your heart is like a dungeon; large and full of treasure General Baby, you look beautiful and pure, just like Aeris. Final Fantasy Wanna take my Swift Pink Hawkstrider for a ride? World of Warcraft Nice guns, but ya really should accept no substitutes. Tomb Raider I took an arrow to the knee! From cupid, after seeing you. General Come on, girl… I have the blessing of protection! World of Warcraft Girl, I’ve got a gold ring with your name on it. Sonic the Hedgehog Want to fuse Kinstones? I’d bet they fit perfectly. Legend of Zelda Call me Lara Croft because I’m about to go Tomb Raiding. Tomb Raider I’m no Kobald, but you can take my candle anytime! World of Warcraft Baby, not even Namine could erase my memories of you. Kingdom Hearts Can I show you how it feels to wear a Deadlock suit? Ratchet & Clank Are we playing Assault? Cause I’m pretty sure you are the bomb. Halo If you were a warp tube, I’d be in you all day. Super Mario Brothers If you were a map pack, I’d download you. First Person Shooting Game Are you Alienware? Because you are out of this world Gaming Equipment You just made me shoot a MOAB in my pants. First Person Shooting Game You must be from nether, because you are out of this world. Mindcraft Are you up for a little tactical insertion? First Person Shooting Game Without you, I feel like I’m in a world that never was. Kingdom Hearts You don’t have to turn on a game to play with me. Super Mario Brothers It’s dangerous to go alone! Here, take this! (Hold their hand) General Looking at you makes me feel like Gordon Freeman…speechless. Half-Life You gave me hardened pro in just 6 seconds. First Person Shooting Game I want to ride you harder than Mario rides Yoshi. Super Mario Brothers I’d better buy a bigger bag, because you are the BOMB! Legend of Zelda You’re not 18 yet? No problem, I know the Song of Time. Legend of Zelda You must be lava, you’re so hot and I can’t help falling in you General Flash Man must be nearby because when I saw you time stopped. Astro Boy I’ve got an idea for a dig I think you’ll be interested in… Tomb Raider Your body is like an open world, I never want to stop exploring General For you I would travel all levels around the world. Super Mario Brothers Your eyes are so blue, they remind me of 24 stam gems. World of Warcraft Are you the patch notes? Because I can’t get enough of you Online Gaming I’ve got a full set of leather equips back at my Mog House Final Fantasy If I were Cloud and you were Tifa, I’d be glad aeris died. Final Fantasy You’re so hot, you warm my cold-blooded heart. First Person Shooting Game Sitcky going out! Sorry, you’re just that hot! First Person Shooting Game Girl, is your name Roxas? Because you’re rocking that ass. Kingdom Hearts Do you have a Diamond Pickaxe? Because I’m as hard as Obsidian. Mindcraft Are you a vendor, because I’d like to browse your goods. World of Warcraft How many COD points does it take to unlock you? First Person Shooting Game I use Full Metal Jacket for deeper penetration. First Person Shooting Game I’m gonna be Bigocto this time, and I’m gonna suck you up. Legend of Zelda Full character customization could never capture your beauty Online Gaming Is that a creeper in your pants or are you just happy to see me? Mindcraft What’s a girl like you doing in a Forest Temple like this? Legend of Zelda Have you ever procced flurry on a Gizmo-tron jackhammer? World of Warcraft Cloud: My hair’s not the only thing that’s pointy right now! Final Fantasy Are you a telo-eksplosija?? Because you’re blowing up my mind Resident Evil Once you go Demacian you never go back, I Garen – tee it. League of Legends Are you sitting on the F5 key? Because that ass is refreshing Online Gaming I’m not possessed by Majora’s Mask, I’m just crazy for you. Legend of Zelda Are you a magic flower? Because you are burning me up. Super Mario Brothers You must be a redstone torch, because you’re extending my piston! Mindcraft I’m like a zombie and you’re like the sun – you light me on fire! Mindcraft Are you my somebody? ‘Cause I’d like to become one with you. Kingdom Hearts You must be made of bonemeal, cause you make me grow 10 feet tall. Mindcraft I better put on my Goron tunic, because you’re too damn hot. Legend of Zelda Do you play World of Warcraft? Because you make me say WoW World of Warcraft Care to come over for my house for a little co-op? First Person Shooting Game Are you related to Glass Joe? Because you’re an easy Knockout! Street Fighter Are you a magic mushroom? Because you are making me grow. Super Mario Brothers I was following the indicator of where to score and it brought me to you. Halo I’d better put on my Goron tunic, because you’re too damn hot. Legend of Zelda Baby, did you just cast thundaga? Because you are electrifying! Kingdom Hearts How ’bout you come back to my place and I show you my Longshot Legend of Zelda My staff can use a little enchant. I have mats and will tip! World of Warcraft Wanna leave this lobby and go into a private match? First Person Shooting Game Baby, did you just cast firaga? Because you set my heart aflame! Kingdom Hearts Do you need a Magnum because I’ve got one right here for you. In my pants. Halo Are you a part of the Triforce? Because you’re my missing Link. Legend of Zelda I think something is wrong with my auto-aim. I can’t take my eyes off you. Halo You’re like a cutscene – beautiful at first but then you never shut up. General I know my way around the cleft of dimension, want me to show you? Final Fantasy I think you might be a heartless because you just stole my heart. Kingdom Hearts If we lived in Minecraft, I’d build you a mansion out of nether quartz Mindcraft Baby, did you just cast aeroga? Because you swept me off my feet. Kingdom Hearts Wait till you see what my combo points can do in the bed room. World of Warcraft Is that a keyblade in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? Kingdom Hearts You must be whitemane, because you just made my champion arise! World of Warcraft You must be a Rogue because I was stunned when I first saw you. World of Warcraft Baby, do you need a phoenix down? Because you’re drop dead gorgeous! Final Fantasy Baby, did you just cast graviga? Because you are out of this world! Kingdom Hearts Baby, did you just cast blizzaga? Because time froze when I met you! Kingdom Hearts Is that a Handcannon in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? Resident Evil Baby, I’m going to have to summon Shiva, because you’re just too hot! Final Fantasy That’s not an m60 in my pants, I’m just happy to see you. First Person Shooting Game I’m like a plasma grenade. Let me get on you and you are guaranteed to explode. Halo You must be ice, because I’ve been waiting to pick you up for a long time. Mindcraft Are you a vault hunter, because you’ve got a loot chest that I want to open. General I must have defeated a boss, because I just found a heart container. Legend of Zelda I would run around the world for you… without lightweight. First Person Shooting Game So it’s all about survival with you, huh? Wanna help the species survive? Tomb Raider (eyeing the breast plate) I am a master dual wielder. Mind if I give those a go? Halo Man, I feel like Sonic in the water, ’cause you’ve got breathless. Sonic the Hedgehog I think something’s wrong with my auto-aim, because I can’t take my eyes off you. Halo I have never found true love, until you opened the Kingdom to my Heart. Kingdom Hearts Don’t worry babe, I’m a gamer, so you can trust me to be good with my fingers. General Forget that rogue. As a Druid, I’ve got the strength AND the agility. World of Warcraft You should come back to my place. My master sword needs to be polished. Legend of Zelda I usually press “X” to pick up weapons. Does that work for picking YOU up as well? Halo Rose are #FF000; Violet are #0000FF; All my base are belong to you. Super Mario Brothers Warlocks are masters of shadow magic. That means we do it in the dark. World of Warcraft You should audition for the next final fantasy! You’re already one for me. Final Fantasy I would like to gain access to your base. Shall I enter from the front or the rear? Halo I’d catch a grenade for you… it’s ok, I’ve got FlakJacket pro! First Person Shooting Game How ’bout we meet at Underpass and I’ll Tactically insert you. First Person Shooting Game I think something’s wrong with my auto-aim, because I can’t take my eyes off you. General I usually press “X” to pick up weapons. Does that work for picking YOU up as well? General I know how Mario must feel, ’cause I really want to clean your pipes. Super Mario Brothers Get down with me, baby, and I’ll make you have a Limit Break all night long. Final Fantasy Are you a care package? Because you must’ve fallen from heaven. First Person Shooting Game When I came near you, the announcer said “unfreakinbelievable”… I would have to agree. Halo Watch out girl, my predator missile is coming at you from behind! First Person Shooting Game

[shruki-blog]

Mary Sue

Shrub here, to talk about Mary Sue.

Because this is the blog where Ruki and I post our writing for Zelda fanfiction, we also like to post about writing in general here. Discussions, advice, tips, reflections, etc. 

In any case, this little post here was inspired by a Trope Talk video:

I love all of Red’s talks here, so I really recommend watching all of them. 

I think the important key to any good writing is to be aware of what you’re writing and why you’re writing it. That seems to hold true with everything. It also helps one avoid the Mary Sue problem.

I also once wrote a thing on Mary Sues myself in a forums where I did a lot of written role playing, but I feel Red hits it on the head in an entirely different way and better than I did. Still, I’m going to kind of combined the two different ways we looked at Mary Sueism here. 

The first thing anyone does when they start talking about Mary Sue or any other writing concept is to define it.

I defined Mary Sue as more of the attitude of a writer rather than as specific traits that a character has. Red started with the history of the Mary Sue, the term originated in fan fiction writing specifically, though she and I both eventually get to the same point of what a Mary Sue does to a story and other characters around them:

Reality bending, is what I like to call it.

Red focuses more on what a Mary Sue does and is in a literary sense. I focused more on how and why a Mary Sue happens. However, it still comes down to what the Mary Sue does.

So “reality bending” is when a character becomes such a priority that things, rules, the attention of the reader and the other characters in the story are distorted so that the Mary Sue is the center of the universe. Other “rules” get bent for these characters too and for seemingly no reason except just because. The story and everything in it is created or warped to serve the image--the glory--of the Mary Sue character. 

It’s wish-fulfillment as Red points out and something I call the unconscious pull of the ego, which I think is what is at the center of why Mary Sues happen, even if people tried to avoid her later and ended up creating the next generation of different types of Mary Sue as described in the video.

And I do love and agree when Red doesn’t hate on people who just wanna have fun and write with wish-fulfillment in mind. 

Again, if you’re writing just for kicks and don’t really want to worry about pleasing an audience that’s totally fine (some people still love Mary Sue shit, so you still might get an audience but you’ll probably get a whole bunch of haters too). Just know what you want, I guess, and then run with it. So who cares if it ends up as a wish-fulfilling Mary Sue so long as you’re getting what you want out of it. This is perfectly fine for solo-writers to do. As Red says, you do you.

This is more of a problem in role playing communities, where you’re not the only writer contributing to the story. So it can’t all be about you and your wish-fulfillment. It’s also a problem if what you want out of writing is something other than mere wish-fulfillment. Do you want to create a compelling story that really pulls people in and says something about life or humanity or something? If you do, then again, it can’t be all about your wish-fulfillment fantasies. I belong to both those things, but I can also understand just wanting to have fun. You can find a happy balance, but you have to be willing to give up on having everything your way for wish-fulfillment. 

So that’s why it’s so important to know what you want out of writing. 

Fan fiction writers of the past probably weren’t that self-aware other than just the drive of wish-fulfillment, so when they received the harsh backlash and scorn of readers and other writers, they just reshaped her into the next generation of Sues--but she still ended up doing the exact same thing as before: bending reality of the story to make her the center of everyone’s universe and the only real thing in the universe, as Red states in the video, everything leads back to Mary Sue. Even if she’s tragic, a villain, a jerk, or a woobie--anything. If the character, male or female, becomes a “singularity” of the story (as Red states), glorifying one character at the expense of all else--that’s a Mary Sue and that’s what makes it a boring story. It doesn’t make sense and not many readers are just going to accept at face value that we’re supposed to love the character just because. People at heart, for the most part, need more than wish-fulfillment or watching a writer squee over one character. 

But let’s face it, people still aren’t all that self-aware now, and nor were the readers and writers criticizing the Mary Sue. 

Because all they did was attack traits of the character rather than go to the core of what makes a Mary Sue, as Red points out. This was also something I realized as a writer myself. I had seen characters with supposedly “Mary Sue” traits be written well and actually were rather enjoyable. I found “Mary Sue” traits in my own characters and struggled to understand what this meant for me as a writer and for the characters I loved so much. 

Red raises the Mary Sue from the character trait level to the story level, how a story flows around the character and what becomes a priority: the story or the glory of one character. Because I did most of my writing in role playing, I focused more on what drives a writer internally to bend reality around their characters in RPs with other writers. 

So I ended up terming it as an “attitude” a writer has about even just one of their characters or others of their creation. I focused more on how people’s ego can leak into characters and cause this to happen even if they are aware of Mary Sues--they might not be aware that Mary Sues exist beyond the level of a mere trait. That even if they somehow avoided all the “traits” they could still end up trying to bend the reality of the RPs to serve their characters and even try to bully or coerce other writers to accept it. In essence, they could still end up writing in a Mary Sue way.

This sort of thing can really ruin a role play too. I've seen some writers get scary when you try to even point out the fact they’re trying to make everyone accept the reality that their character is the best in an RP with multiple writers and their characters. I’ve even seen some who were so good at manipulating the other writers that they usually succeeded most of the time. Yeah, it was scary, and that’s why I’m very careful of who I chose to write with.

That’s also usually why I called it the unconscious pull of the ego. It can sneak up on writers sometimes if they’re not paying attention. Or some are so blind to this spot in their writing that they practically just live there in trying to get everyone to accept their wish-fulfillment. The ego can be a scary thing. So just always try to be self-aware about what you are writing and why.

That being said, I’ve also struggled with people being hyper-sensitive to Mary Sue “traits” as Red described in her video. Because it’s not about the traits. It’s how the character exists in the rest of the story.

I even once created a character who was practically almost perfect in every way. I did this because I was curious of how and if I could pull of such a character. It was sort of an experiment, and also because the version of the character I was writing sort of just went there naturally. He wasn’t completely perfect, I actually gave him a terrible and manipulative personality--because again, it felt like a natural way to go for the character. If you were good at everything, how easy would it be to just ... mess with people? Manipulate them into doing what YOU want them to do?

He turned out being one of my favorite characters, because he was such an asshole and because of the complexity that I eventually developed with it.

But then, of course, I got called out on how he was hot, incredibly intelligent, and in general too awesome. The usual typical Mary Sue complaints. Despite all the flaws I gave the character where I honestly think it mattered most: his personality, his morals, etc. The critic I had was completely unwilling to accept those. All they could see was hot, perfect, too good at everything. The Mary Sue stereotype.

And you know what I did?

I decided, fuck them. This character did not bend reality. He was not a singularity. There were other characters that had their own stories and complexities, and none of that was sacrificed to make this one character be the center of attention.

I’ve had another person criticize a character for being really good at really just one thing--but then they blew it so out of proportion they claimed I made them better than all the canon characters of the fandom in practically every way. They legit said every way, when it was really only one trait they were harping on.

So these are examples of readers and writers being hypersensitive to what is now the Mary Sue stereotype. Which, ironically I think is just insecure readers oddly projecting their inferiority issues on your original characters. It gets weird like that sometimes. I seriously wanted to yell at one of them to stop being jealous of my fictional character who doesn’t exist.

That’s why you should always do what Red says: stop the conversation at the fact that you are allowed to have your own preferences. Anyone who is not willing to respect that isn’t really worth your time. 

But don’t use that either to not question and do a little self reflection of: is this character bending reality? Did that unconscious pull of the ego sneak up on me without my realizing it?

Always do a little of that, but once you’re sure--don’t let the haters bother you.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Zelda's Switch inspirations, the modding scene of Cities: Skylines, & lots more.

As for other things going on this week - still relaxing after the end of GDC, & have been playing some Night In The Woods, which is charming & totally my speed of game, as well as Chime Sharp, which is still one of my favorite puzzle games, despite a slightly basic PS4 conversion.

No luck getting a Switch yet (since I only decided I wanted one after playing it at GDC after its release, haha), but there's plenty of stuff to keep us all going on PS4, PC, iPad & elsewhere, right? Talking of that final option, keep an eye on the Apple indie game celebration, which looks like it has some kickass timed iOS game releases like Mushroom 11, Beglitched & maybe Kingdom: New Lands. And onward to the links...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta provide an in-depth look at how some of the convention-breaking mechanics were implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. [SIMON'S NOTE: Yep, this is pretty much unmissable.]"

Horizon: Zero Dawn and the evolution of the video game heroine (Jonathan Ore / CBC News) "Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster."

Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell (Daniel Marx / Gamasutra) "On a basic level, Orwell is a mostly text-based narrative game that constantly confronts players with choices of varying moral weight. Unlike a typical interactive novel Orwell does not present players with an explicit decision between a set of juxtaposed options (multiple choice) on how to continue the story or which action to take next."

Is Halo Broken? (Nathan Ditum / Glixel) "Today, the series is overseen by 343 Industries, a Microsoft internal studio created specifically for the job. Most recently it helped Creative Assembly to release the in-universe strategy game Halo Wars 2, which is both quite good and unlikely to stop the series’ slow slide to the margins. So what can 343 do to fix Halo? Is it already too late?"

Balancing Metas (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "Meta games and balancing are always interesting to me so I thought it'd be fun to go over how these things can work in different contexts and what forces meta games to evolve."

How two Cities: Skylines modders turned hobbyist work into life-changing careers (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer) "Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC."

Hookshots, Wii U Maps, And Other Things Nintendo Cut From Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "To make a game as massive and astounding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the developers at Nintendo needed to take a lot of experiments. As a result, they left a lot of ideas on Hyrule’s floor."

The 'Card-ification' of Competitive Gaming (Steven Strom / Red Bull eSports) "Increasingly, though, developers are codifying the benefits of progression behind something new: virtual, collectible cards. From Clash Royale and Hearthstone on iOS, to Halo Wars 2, Paragon, Paladins, Battlerite and a helluva lot more on PC and consoles, digital cards are becoming the de facto method of displaying player skills."

'Rust Belt Gothic': lead writer Scott Benson unpacks the art that inspired Night in the Woods (Nate Ewert-Krocker / Zam) "From Flannery O’Connor to Richard Scarry and Symphony of the Night, we talk with animator/writer/Twitterman Scott Benson about what makes everyone's favorite new indie adventure game tick."

Reviving Ocarina of Time's long-lost Ura expansion (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer) "The Legend of Zelda series has always dabbled in alternate realities - mirror worlds, sunken pasts, waking dreams, futures that might have been. This is the story of one such lost future, a dream originally dreamt by the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, kept alive by a fervent underground community of fans, modders and artists."

Lights, Camera, Distraction: The Problem with Virtual Camera Systems (Jack Yarwood / Waypoint) "The average gamer rarely notices the camera, and when they do it's usually to complain about what's wrong with it. This is in spite of the camera being the most important tool for communicating a chosen situation to the player. Done well, its presence can be almost imperceptible, framing the action perfectly. Done poorly, it can ruin the experience, causing frustration and disorientation."

Meet the Man Behind the Most Acclaimed Board Game in Years (Steve T. Wright / Glixel) "Now, with the second "season" of Pandemic Legacy just around the corner, Glixel spoke with [Rob] Daviau to chat about the cardboard life, his former corporate overlords, and the travails of self-employment."

In the Land of 'Dying' MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot (Robert Zak / Kotaku) "My second time-warp into venerable MMOs takes me to the cross-mythological lands of Camelot, where, after 16 years, a sizeable number of players remain embroiled in a never-ending war."

The importance of cultural fashion in games (Matt Sayer / RockPaperShotgun) "Virginia’s career in cultural fashion began out of a desire for self-expression. After spending her childhood immersed in African culture, she couldn’t ignore the severe lack of traditional African fashion in The Sims’ wardrobe. With nobody else attempting to rectify the issue, Virginia was left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands."

Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" (Talks From Google / YouTube) "Veteran game designer Ron Gilbert has been making games since the 1980s, most notably as writer, programmer, and designer for LucasFilm Games / LucasArts, producing classics like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Today he is putting the finishing touches on his crowdfunded pixel-art puzzle adventure Thimbleweed Park."

Pixelated popstars: Japan’s dance dance revolution (Jack Needham / Dazed) "Rhythm-based video games dominate Japan’s arcades, and their popularity has influenced everyone from major pop stars to underground electronic producers."

A Video Game Immerses You in an Opera Composed by Dogs (Katie Rose Pipkin / Hyperallergic) "In David Kanaga’s latest game, Oiκοςpiel, an immortal Donkey Koch (of the Koch brothers) commissions a group of dogs to produce a digital opera for an arts festival scheduled for 2100. [SIMON'S NOTE: this game won the IGF Nuovo (art) prize, and you may be able to work out why! Full interview text here.]"

Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian) "Shortly after completing Maniac Mansion, his first classic graphic adventure, Ron Gilbert started sketching ideas for his next game. “I wanted to do something that felt like fantasy and might kind of tap into what was interesting about fantasy,” he remembers, “but that wasn’t fantasy.” "

Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics (Danny Day / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day (Desktop Dungeons) explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game."

Reverse-Engineering The Industry (Ernie Smith / Tedium) "Third-party developers weren’t always quite so revered in the video game industry, but a pair of legal decisions helped them earn their place at the table."

Art of the Impossible (Joel Goodwin / Electron Dance) "I played an amazing looking game this week, Fragments of Euclid by Antoine Zanuttini, a short first-person puzzler that appears to be set inside the art of M. C. Escher. For me, however, it's more like a dry run for William Chyr's Manifold Garden, a game I've been looking forward to for a while now."

The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please."

Frustration Can Improve Video Games, Designer Found (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "In video games, frustration is often viewed as a dirty word. If you’re feeling frustrated—like you’ve hit a wall and can’t find a way over, under, or around—the designers must have made a mistake. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, game makers try to make you feel irritated, or even livid."

Why I love Peggle and hate Peggle: Blast (Henrique Antero / Medium) "Peggle is divine. Peggle: Blast is an aberration. This is a story on how a videogame first touched perfection and then became a vessel for evil. It could be compared to The Fall of the Abrahamic religions, when humankind was collectively expelled from Paradise— if the Demiurge was perverse enough to have invented microtransactions along the way."

The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer) "We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims. Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright)."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[allcheatscodes]

super mario 3d land 3ds

http://allcheatscodes.com/super-mario-3d-land-3ds/

super mario 3d land 3ds

Super Mario 3D Land cheats & more for Nintendo 3DS (3DS)

Cheats

Unlockables

Hints

Easter Eggs

Glitches

Guides

Get the updated and latest Super Mario 3D Land cheats, unlockables, codes, hints, Easter eggs, glitches, tricks, tips, hacks, downloads, guides, hints, FAQs, walkthroughs, and more for Nintendo 3DS (3DS). AllCheatsCodes.com has all the codes you need to win every game you play!

Use the links above or scroll down to see all the Nintendo 3DS cheats we have available for Super Mario 3D Land.

Genre: Action, 3D Platform

Developer: Unknown

Publisher: Nintendo

ESRB Rating: Everyone

Release Date: November 13, 2011

Hints

Turn To A Statue

Collect a gray tanooki leaf in the special world and a red or green bandana will apper around your neck perform a ground pouned to turn to a statue.

Best 3D In The Game

When you enter level 5-2 you will see 2 blocks jump on top of ether one now turn your 3D all the way up then press up on the d-pad then on top of the block, jump and don’t just tap it hold that thing down believe me it looks AMAZING (works even better if you have a tanooki suit).

Unlimited Lives: World 1-2

Find the three Koopa Troopas and three coin blocks immediately after the checkpoint flag in World 1-2. Step on the first long coin block on the ground, then walk down onto the Koopa Troopa below when it moves directly below the coin block. If timed correctly, you can bounce off the Koopa Troopa repeatedly and get unlimited lives.

Fire Ball 1-ups

I’m going to tell you how to get a 1-up with a fire ball! First, go to any level what has a koopa troopa. Next (if you have the fire suit), whack a koopa troopa 5 times after it hides in it’s shell. Don’t worry, the koopa troopa won’t escape like on NSMBW. As I said, whack the koopa troopa 5 times when it hides in it’s shell. There you go, you have a fire ball related 1-up!

How To Get Past World 5 In Bowsers Castle

You need 20 or more lives then lose them till you get to 3 or 2 then a wing will pop up next to the super takoonior tanooki then hit the wing one and it will fly you to the goal flag. I did it once bowser was hard but I like cheating sometimes.

Life Turtle

When in level 1-2 I think you see three turtles don’t get the star in the room go to the turtle next to the rectangular shaped box and get his shell to repeatedly hit that block and then jump on the edge of the? Box to get rapid fire lives (limit is three crowns and does not count for your score on the game) now when you lose a life it doesn’t matter.

Alien Invasion!

In World 1, Level 3, look through the binoculars. Wait a while, then zoom in on a white, grayish object. It’s a UFO! It disapears after a while. Also, in World 4, Boo’s house, go to the flag pole. Wait a little bit, then a wierd ghostly alien will appear for a while. It looks like Shy Guy though. (I found these on Youtube)!

How To Get Photo #12

You must beat the last place in SW 8 and it will send you to the huge castle in world 8-7 and beat that but be carfull bowser is stronger than ever.

Secret Shortcut!

In W1-3 there will be to piranha plants – kill them. Then you will see a Green Shell Koopa Troopa – kick his shell off the mountain. Then go back to where the second piranha plant was and jump off the left side. There will be a warp pipe that will take you a further to the end of the level!

Dodge the Spikey Ball

Go to w1-2 and press the L or R button to go under the spikey ball. If you time it correctly, you’ll go right under it and won’t get hit. It’s all in the timing and pressing the right buttons.

Neverending Lives

Go to s1-1 and when you get the first star keep hitting the spiky things until you get the second star. Make sure that the first star didn’t stop before you get the second star and you will get more lives. Then when you get to the top get the star and hit them you should get three lives while you hit the people on the top then all you have to do is to get to the top of the flag pole and repeat it and watch your lives go up.

World 1-2 Shortcut

In World 1-2, its cool going up that wall and straight through the orange pipe! It’s a nice shortcut.

Secret Room

Go to world 2 level 3 then go to the end of the level past the flag poll and you can go in the castle.

Secret Coins

You need fire flower! At the end of the level 1-2 before the pipe there will be a thing with wood that is supposed to be lit but it is not so light it with fire and there will be coins on the floor.

Mini Hat Or Normal No Hat

Have you ever wanted to have a mini Mario or Luigi with a hat or normal size with no Hat? Well i’m going to tell you how. First you have to use the infinite life cheat in world 1-2 until you get triple crown lives. Then after you have triple crown lives for mini with a hat you just get hit (like how you would normally) and you would be mini with a hat. For large with no hat just have a power up like tanooki or fire power and get hit and you will have no hat.

Extra Stars

For extra stars in regular worlds go to even number worlds and find the mystery box and beat the monsters, then the star before time runs out. For extra stars in special worlds go to mystery box beat the monsters and get the star before time runs out.

Zelda Level

On W5-2 the camera will be fixed overhead why its a Zelda level! How do I know this? Well if you get the fire flower in between the 2 blocks on the first room (invisible) and just go right you will come to a room with 4 pots with wood in them, light all 4 on fire and you will hear the old Zelda song and the gate will open Saguaro Meomoto also said that it was a tribute to Zelda’s 25 Anniversary!

Lives Cheat

When you are at the first boomerang boss in the airship you jump on it the when its in its shell keep jumping on it and you get a certain amount of lives.

How To Jump To World 2

In level 1-2 after the check mark and you are in the next room. Jump onto the second? Block then jump up again onto a hidden platform and go right. Then keep going and then jump a gap. Keep going you will find an orange pipe. Go down the pipe and you will appear in World 2.

Level 7-3 Quick Way To The Finish

YOU NEED TO HAVE A TANOOKI LEAF! First go to level 7-3. Then go through the level a tiny bit and you will see a piranha plant on a flying platform. Defeat the piranha plant and jump on the flying platform. Then fly over to the tight ropes all the way over there and you will land on one. Continue through the level (it doesnt take long) and you are at the end in no time!

World 2 Shortcut

When you are in World 1-2, there are three “?” coin blocks after the flag pole. Jump on top of one of them, then jump further up and away from the screen. You will land on a narrow ledge. Run past this part of the level. When you reach a gap in the higher area, jump over it, and keep running to reach an orange pipe that will take you to World 2.

World 5 Shortcut

In World 4-2, near the end of the level, while jumping up the large shaft via the spotted bouncy platforms, use the last bouncy platform to angle your jump to left to reach a narrower shaft. Note: You may need to do some wall jumps. Go up and to the right. Run all the way to the right to reach an orange pipe that will take you to World 5.

Cheats

Extra Lives

If you reach the goal post when you’re holding an item, it will convert to an extra life.

Unlockables

Unlock Special World

To unlock the special world, clear world 8.

Unlock Luigi

To unlock Luigi, so you can play as him, you must clear Special World 1.

Star Icons For Saved Games

Successfully complete one of the following tasks to get one additional star on your saved game file. Note: Die fewer than five times in each level to make the stars more shiny.

1. Defeat Bowser in World 8’s last level.

2. Successfully complete all levels with Mario.

3. Successfully complete all levels with Luigi.

4. Collect the gold flag on all levels.

5. Collect all star coins.

Photo Albums

Complete the worlds (and games) to unlock the photos

Photo #2: Successfully complete World 1.

Photo #3: Successfully complete World 2.

Photo #4: Successfully complete World 3.

Photo #5: Successfully complete World 4.

Photo #6: Successfully complete World 5.

Photo #7: Successfully complete World 6.

Photo #8: Successfully complete World 7.

Photo #9: Successfully complete the game with Mario.

Photo #10: Successfully complete the game with Luigi.

Photo #11: Unlock Special World.

Photo #12: Successfully complete Special World, then complete the game.

Effects On The Flagpole

Hit the flagpole at the end of a level with the last digit of your time ending in one of the following numbers to get the corresponding effect:

Balloons: Have the last digit of your time be a “6” to have balloons appear.

Fireworks: Have the last digit of your time be a “3” to have fireworks appear.

Streamers: Have the last digit of your time be a “1” to have streamers appear.

Unlock Alternate Title Screen

While playing in any Special World, save and exit the game. An alternate video will play at the main menu. To disable this effect, save and exit the game while playing in one of the first eight worlds.

Star Medals Details

Get the indicated number of Star Medals to unlock the corresponding Star Medal level:

S1-Bowser: 110 Star Medals

S2-Airship: 120 Star Medals

S3-Airship: 140 Star Medals

S4-Airship: 160 Star Medals

S5-Bowser: 180 Star Medals

S6-Airship: 200 Star Medals

S7-Bowser: 220 Star Medals

S8-1: 230 Star Medals

S8-2: 240 Star Medals

S8-3: 250 Star Medals

S8-4: 260 Star Medals

S8-5: 270 Star Medals

S8-Bowser: 290 Star Medals

W1-4: 3 Star Medals

W3-5: 15 Star Medals

W4-3: 30 Star Medals

W5-3: 40 Star Medals

W5-Bowser: 50 Star Medals

W6-5: 60 Star Medals

W7-3: 70 Star Medals

W8-3: 80 Star Medals

W8-Bowser 1: 90 Star Medals

W8-Bowser 2: 100 Star Medals

Easter eggs

Currently we have no easter eggs for Super Mario 3D Land yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Glitches

One Up Glitch

Go into the room right after the chek point in world 1 2 and face the middle koopa and jump on it right as its about to hit you.

Guides

Currently we have no guides or FAQs for Super Mario 3D Land yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Zelda's Switch inspirations, the modding scene of Cities: Skylines, & lots more.

As for other things going on this week - still relaxing after the end of GDC, & have been playing some Night In The Woods, which is charming & totally my speed of game, as well as Chime Sharp, which is still one of my favorite puzzle games, despite a slightly basic PS4 conversion.

No luck getting a Switch yet (since I only decided I wanted one after playing it at GDC after its release, haha), but there's plenty of stuff to keep us all going on PS4, PC, iPad & elsewhere, right? Talking of that final option, keep an eye on the Apple indie game celebration, which looks like it has some kickass timed iOS game releases like Mushroom 11, Beglitched & maybe Kingdom: New Lands. And onward to the links...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta provide an in-depth look at how some of the convention-breaking mechanics were implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. [SIMON'S NOTE: Yep, this is pretty much unmissable.]"

Horizon: Zero Dawn and the evolution of the video game heroine (Jonathan Ore / CBC News) "Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster."

Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell (Daniel Marx / Gamasutra) "On a basic level, Orwell is a mostly text-based narrative game that constantly confronts players with choices of varying moral weight. Unlike a typical interactive novel Orwell does not present players with an explicit decision between a set of juxtaposed options (multiple choice) on how to continue the story or which action to take next."

Is Halo Broken? (Nathan Ditum / Glixel) "Today, the series is overseen by 343 Industries, a Microsoft internal studio created specifically for the job. Most recently it helped Creative Assembly to release the in-universe strategy game Halo Wars 2, which is both quite good and unlikely to stop the series’ slow slide to the margins. So what can 343 do to fix Halo? Is it already too late?"

Balancing Metas (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "Meta games and balancing are always interesting to me so I thought it'd be fun to go over how these things can work in different contexts and what forces meta games to evolve."

How two Cities: Skylines modders turned hobbyist work into life-changing careers (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer) "Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC."

Hookshots, Wii U Maps, And Other Things Nintendo Cut From Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "To make a game as massive and astounding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the developers at Nintendo needed to take a lot of experiments. As a result, they left a lot of ideas on Hyrule’s floor."

The 'Card-ification' of Competitive Gaming (Steven Strom / Red Bull eSports) "Increasingly, though, developers are codifying the benefits of progression behind something new: virtual, collectible cards. From Clash Royale and Hearthstone on iOS, to Halo Wars 2, Paragon, Paladins, Battlerite and a helluva lot more on PC and consoles, digital cards are becoming the de facto method of displaying player skills."

'Rust Belt Gothic': lead writer Scott Benson unpacks the art that inspired Night in the Woods (Nate Ewert-Krocker / Zam) "From Flannery O’Connor to Richard Scarry and Symphony of the Night, we talk with animator/writer/Twitterman Scott Benson about what makes everyone's favorite new indie adventure game tick."

Reviving Ocarina of Time's long-lost Ura expansion (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer) "The Legend of Zelda series has always dabbled in alternate realities - mirror worlds, sunken pasts, waking dreams, futures that might have been. This is the story of one such lost future, a dream originally dreamt by the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, kept alive by a fervent underground community of fans, modders and artists."

Lights, Camera, Distraction: The Problem with Virtual Camera Systems (Jack Yarwood / Waypoint) "The average gamer rarely notices the camera, and when they do it's usually to complain about what's wrong with it. This is in spite of the camera being the most important tool for communicating a chosen situation to the player. Done well, its presence can be almost imperceptible, framing the action perfectly. Done poorly, it can ruin the experience, causing frustration and disorientation."

Meet the Man Behind the Most Acclaimed Board Game in Years (Steve T. Wright / Glixel) "Now, with the second "season" of Pandemic Legacy just around the corner, Glixel spoke with [Rob] Daviau to chat about the cardboard life, his former corporate overlords, and the travails of self-employment."

In the Land of 'Dying' MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot (Robert Zak / Kotaku) "My second time-warp into venerable MMOs takes me to the cross-mythological lands of Camelot, where, after 16 years, a sizeable number of players remain embroiled in a never-ending war."

The importance of cultural fashion in games (Matt Sayer / RockPaperShotgun) "Virginia’s career in cultural fashion began out of a desire for self-expression. After spending her childhood immersed in African culture, she couldn’t ignore the severe lack of traditional African fashion in The Sims’ wardrobe. With nobody else attempting to rectify the issue, Virginia was left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands."

Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" (Talks From Google / YouTube) "Veteran game designer Ron Gilbert has been making games since the 1980s, most notably as writer, programmer, and designer for LucasFilm Games / LucasArts, producing classics like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Today he is putting the finishing touches on his crowdfunded pixel-art puzzle adventure Thimbleweed Park."

Pixelated popstars: Japan’s dance dance revolution (Jack Needham / Dazed) "Rhythm-based video games dominate Japan’s arcades, and their popularity has influenced everyone from major pop stars to underground electronic producers."

A Video Game Immerses You in an Opera Composed by Dogs (Katie Rose Pipkin / Hyperallergic) "In David Kanaga’s latest game, Oiκοςpiel, an immortal Donkey Koch (of the Koch brothers) commissions a group of dogs to produce a digital opera for an arts festival scheduled for 2100. [SIMON'S NOTE: this game won the IGF Nuovo (art) prize, and you may be able to work out why! Full interview text here.]"

Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian) "Shortly after completing Maniac Mansion, his first classic graphic adventure, Ron Gilbert started sketching ideas for his next game. “I wanted to do something that felt like fantasy and might kind of tap into what was interesting about fantasy,” he remembers, “but that wasn’t fantasy.” "

Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics (Danny Day / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day (Desktop Dungeons) explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game."

Reverse-Engineering The Industry (Ernie Smith / Tedium) "Third-party developers weren’t always quite so revered in the video game industry, but a pair of legal decisions helped them earn their place at the table."

Art of the Impossible (Joel Goodwin / Electron Dance) "I played an amazing looking game this week, Fragments of Euclid by Antoine Zanuttini, a short first-person puzzler that appears to be set inside the art of M. C. Escher. For me, however, it's more like a dry run for William Chyr's Manifold Garden, a game I've been looking forward to for a while now."

The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please."

Frustration Can Improve Video Games, Designer Found (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "In video games, frustration is often viewed as a dirty word. If you’re feeling frustrated—like you’ve hit a wall and can’t find a way over, under, or around—the designers must have made a mistake. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, game makers try to make you feel irritated, or even livid."

Why I love Peggle and hate Peggle: Blast (Henrique Antero / Medium) "Peggle is divine. Peggle: Blast is an aberration. This is a story on how a videogame first touched perfection and then became a vessel for evil. It could be compared to The Fall of the Abrahamic religions, when humankind was collectively expelled from Paradise— if the Demiurge was perverse enough to have invented microtransactions along the way."

The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer) "We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims. Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright)."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Zelda's Switch inspirations, the modding scene of Cities: Skylines, & lots more.

As for other things going on this week - still relaxing after the end of GDC, & have been playing some Night In The Woods, which is charming & totally my speed of game, as well as Chime Sharp, which is still one of my favorite puzzle games, despite a slightly basic PS4 conversion.

No luck getting a Switch yet (since I only decided I wanted one after playing it at GDC after its release, haha), but there's plenty of stuff to keep us all going on PS4, PC, iPad & elsewhere, right? Talking of that final option, keep an eye on the Apple indie game celebration, which looks like it has some kickass timed iOS game releases like Mushroom 11, Beglitched & maybe Kingdom: New Lands. And onward to the links...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta provide an in-depth look at how some of the convention-breaking mechanics were implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. [SIMON'S NOTE: Yep, this is pretty much unmissable.]"

Horizon: Zero Dawn and the evolution of the video game heroine (Jonathan Ore / CBC News) "Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster."

Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell (Daniel Marx / Gamasutra) "On a basic level, Orwell is a mostly text-based narrative game that constantly confronts players with choices of varying moral weight. Unlike a typical interactive novel Orwell does not present players with an explicit decision between a set of juxtaposed options (multiple choice) on how to continue the story or which action to take next."

Is Halo Broken? (Nathan Ditum / Glixel) "Today, the series is overseen by 343 Industries, a Microsoft internal studio created specifically for the job. Most recently it helped Creative Assembly to release the in-universe strategy game Halo Wars 2, which is both quite good and unlikely to stop the series’ slow slide to the margins. So what can 343 do to fix Halo? Is it already too late?"

Balancing Metas (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "Meta games and balancing are always interesting to me so I thought it'd be fun to go over how these things can work in different contexts and what forces meta games to evolve."

How two Cities: Skylines modders turned hobbyist work into life-changing careers (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer) "Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC."

Hookshots, Wii U Maps, And Other Things Nintendo Cut From Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "To make a game as massive and astounding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the developers at Nintendo needed to take a lot of experiments. As a result, they left a lot of ideas on Hyrule’s floor."

The 'Card-ification' of Competitive Gaming (Steven Strom / Red Bull eSports) "Increasingly, though, developers are codifying the benefits of progression behind something new: virtual, collectible cards. From Clash Royale and Hearthstone on iOS, to Halo Wars 2, Paragon, Paladins, Battlerite and a helluva lot more on PC and consoles, digital cards are becoming the de facto method of displaying player skills."

'Rust Belt Gothic': lead writer Scott Benson unpacks the art that inspired Night in the Woods (Nate Ewert-Krocker / Zam) "From Flannery O’Connor to Richard Scarry and Symphony of the Night, we talk with animator/writer/Twitterman Scott Benson about what makes everyone's favorite new indie adventure game tick."

Reviving Ocarina of Time's long-lost Ura expansion (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer) "The Legend of Zelda series has always dabbled in alternate realities - mirror worlds, sunken pasts, waking dreams, futures that might have been. This is the story of one such lost future, a dream originally dreamt by the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, kept alive by a fervent underground community of fans, modders and artists."

Lights, Camera, Distraction: The Problem with Virtual Camera Systems (Jack Yarwood / Waypoint) "The average gamer rarely notices the camera, and when they do it's usually to complain about what's wrong with it. This is in spite of the camera being the most important tool for communicating a chosen situation to the player. Done well, its presence can be almost imperceptible, framing the action perfectly. Done poorly, it can ruin the experience, causing frustration and disorientation."

Meet the Man Behind the Most Acclaimed Board Game in Years (Steve T. Wright / Glixel) "Now, with the second "season" of Pandemic Legacy just around the corner, Glixel spoke with [Rob] Daviau to chat about the cardboard life, his former corporate overlords, and the travails of self-employment."

In the Land of 'Dying' MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot (Robert Zak / Kotaku) "My second time-warp into venerable MMOs takes me to the cross-mythological lands of Camelot, where, after 16 years, a sizeable number of players remain embroiled in a never-ending war."

The importance of cultural fashion in games (Matt Sayer / RockPaperShotgun) "Virginia’s career in cultural fashion began out of a desire for self-expression. After spending her childhood immersed in African culture, she couldn’t ignore the severe lack of traditional African fashion in The Sims’ wardrobe. With nobody else attempting to rectify the issue, Virginia was left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands."

Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" (Talks From Google / YouTube) "Veteran game designer Ron Gilbert has been making games since the 1980s, most notably as writer, programmer, and designer for LucasFilm Games / LucasArts, producing classics like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Today he is putting the finishing touches on his crowdfunded pixel-art puzzle adventure Thimbleweed Park."

Pixelated popstars: Japan’s dance dance revolution (Jack Needham / Dazed) "Rhythm-based video games dominate Japan’s arcades, and their popularity has influenced everyone from major pop stars to underground electronic producers."

A Video Game Immerses You in an Opera Composed by Dogs (Katie Rose Pipkin / Hyperallergic) "In David Kanaga’s latest game, Oiκοςpiel, an immortal Donkey Koch (of the Koch brothers) commissions a group of dogs to produce a digital opera for an arts festival scheduled for 2100. [SIMON'S NOTE: this game won the IGF Nuovo (art) prize, and you may be able to work out why! Full interview text here.]"

Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian) "Shortly after completing Maniac Mansion, his first classic graphic adventure, Ron Gilbert started sketching ideas for his next game. “I wanted to do something that felt like fantasy and might kind of tap into what was interesting about fantasy,” he remembers, “but that wasn’t fantasy.” "

Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics (Danny Day / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day (Desktop Dungeons) explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game."

Reverse-Engineering The Industry (Ernie Smith / Tedium) "Third-party developers weren’t always quite so revered in the video game industry, but a pair of legal decisions helped them earn their place at the table."

Art of the Impossible (Joel Goodwin / Electron Dance) "I played an amazing looking game this week, Fragments of Euclid by Antoine Zanuttini, a short first-person puzzler that appears to be set inside the art of M. C. Escher. For me, however, it's more like a dry run for William Chyr's Manifold Garden, a game I've been looking forward to for a while now."

The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please."

Frustration Can Improve Video Games, Designer Found (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "In video games, frustration is often viewed as a dirty word. If you’re feeling frustrated—like you’ve hit a wall and can’t find a way over, under, or around—the designers must have made a mistake. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, game makers try to make you feel irritated, or even livid."

Why I love Peggle and hate Peggle: Blast (Henrique Antero / Medium) "Peggle is divine. Peggle: Blast is an aberration. This is a story on how a videogame first touched perfection and then became a vessel for evil. It could be compared to The Fall of the Abrahamic religions, when humankind was collectively expelled from Paradise— if the Demiurge was perverse enough to have invented microtransactions along the way."

The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer) "We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims. Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright)."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Zelda's Switch inspirations, the modding scene of Cities: Skylines, & lots more.

As for other things going on this week - still relaxing after the end of GDC, & have been playing some Night In The Woods, which is charming & totally my speed of game, as well as Chime Sharp, which is still one of my favorite puzzle games, despite a slightly basic PS4 conversion.

No luck getting a Switch yet (since I only decided I wanted one after playing it at GDC after its release, haha), but there's plenty of stuff to keep us all going on PS4, PC, iPad & elsewhere, right? Talking of that final option, keep an eye on the Apple indie game celebration, which looks like it has some kickass timed iOS game releases like Mushroom 11, Beglitched & maybe Kingdom: New Lands. And onward to the links...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta provide an in-depth look at how some of the convention-breaking mechanics were implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. [SIMON'S NOTE: Yep, this is pretty much unmissable.]"

Horizon: Zero Dawn and the evolution of the video game heroine (Jonathan Ore / CBC News) "Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster."

Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell (Daniel Marx / Gamasutra) "On a basic level, Orwell is a mostly text-based narrative game that constantly confronts players with choices of varying moral weight. Unlike a typical interactive novel Orwell does not present players with an explicit decision between a set of juxtaposed options (multiple choice) on how to continue the story or which action to take next."

Is Halo Broken? (Nathan Ditum / Glixel) "Today, the series is overseen by 343 Industries, a Microsoft internal studio created specifically for the job. Most recently it helped Creative Assembly to release the in-universe strategy game Halo Wars 2, which is both quite good and unlikely to stop the series’ slow slide to the margins. So what can 343 do to fix Halo? Is it already too late?"

Balancing Metas (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "Meta games and balancing are always interesting to me so I thought it'd be fun to go over how these things can work in different contexts and what forces meta games to evolve."

How two Cities: Skylines modders turned hobbyist work into life-changing careers (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer) "Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC."

Hookshots, Wii U Maps, And Other Things Nintendo Cut From Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "To make a game as massive and astounding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the developers at Nintendo needed to take a lot of experiments. As a result, they left a lot of ideas on Hyrule’s floor."

The 'Card-ification' of Competitive Gaming (Steven Strom / Red Bull eSports) "Increasingly, though, developers are codifying the benefits of progression behind something new: virtual, collectible cards. From Clash Royale and Hearthstone on iOS, to Halo Wars 2, Paragon, Paladins, Battlerite and a helluva lot more on PC and consoles, digital cards are becoming the de facto method of displaying player skills."

'Rust Belt Gothic': lead writer Scott Benson unpacks the art that inspired Night in the Woods (Nate Ewert-Krocker / Zam) "From Flannery O’Connor to Richard Scarry and Symphony of the Night, we talk with animator/writer/Twitterman Scott Benson about what makes everyone's favorite new indie adventure game tick."

Reviving Ocarina of Time's long-lost Ura expansion (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer) "The Legend of Zelda series has always dabbled in alternate realities - mirror worlds, sunken pasts, waking dreams, futures that might have been. This is the story of one such lost future, a dream originally dreamt by the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, kept alive by a fervent underground community of fans, modders and artists."

Lights, Camera, Distraction: The Problem with Virtual Camera Systems (Jack Yarwood / Waypoint) "The average gamer rarely notices the camera, and when they do it's usually to complain about what's wrong with it. This is in spite of the camera being the most important tool for communicating a chosen situation to the player. Done well, its presence can be almost imperceptible, framing the action perfectly. Done poorly, it can ruin the experience, causing frustration and disorientation."

Meet the Man Behind the Most Acclaimed Board Game in Years (Steve T. Wright / Glixel) "Now, with the second "season" of Pandemic Legacy just around the corner, Glixel spoke with [Rob] Daviau to chat about the cardboard life, his former corporate overlords, and the travails of self-employment."

In the Land of 'Dying' MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot (Robert Zak / Kotaku) "My second time-warp into venerable MMOs takes me to the cross-mythological lands of Camelot, where, after 16 years, a sizeable number of players remain embroiled in a never-ending war."

The importance of cultural fashion in games (Matt Sayer / RockPaperShotgun) "Virginia’s career in cultural fashion began out of a desire for self-expression. After spending her childhood immersed in African culture, she couldn’t ignore the severe lack of traditional African fashion in The Sims’ wardrobe. With nobody else attempting to rectify the issue, Virginia was left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands."

Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" (Talks From Google / YouTube) "Veteran game designer Ron Gilbert has been making games since the 1980s, most notably as writer, programmer, and designer for LucasFilm Games / LucasArts, producing classics like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Today he is putting the finishing touches on his crowdfunded pixel-art puzzle adventure Thimbleweed Park."

Pixelated popstars: Japan’s dance dance revolution (Jack Needham / Dazed) "Rhythm-based video games dominate Japan’s arcades, and their popularity has influenced everyone from major pop stars to underground electronic producers."

A Video Game Immerses You in an Opera Composed by Dogs (Katie Rose Pipkin / Hyperallergic) "In David Kanaga’s latest game, Oiκοςpiel, an immortal Donkey Koch (of the Koch brothers) commissions a group of dogs to produce a digital opera for an arts festival scheduled for 2100. [SIMON'S NOTE: this game won the IGF Nuovo (art) prize, and you may be able to work out why! Full interview text here.]"

Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian) "Shortly after completing Maniac Mansion, his first classic graphic adventure, Ron Gilbert started sketching ideas for his next game. “I wanted to do something that felt like fantasy and might kind of tap into what was interesting about fantasy,” he remembers, “but that wasn’t fantasy.” "

Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics (Danny Day / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day (Desktop Dungeons) explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game."

Reverse-Engineering The Industry (Ernie Smith / Tedium) "Third-party developers weren’t always quite so revered in the video game industry, but a pair of legal decisions helped them earn their place at the table."

Art of the Impossible (Joel Goodwin / Electron Dance) "I played an amazing looking game this week, Fragments of Euclid by Antoine Zanuttini, a short first-person puzzler that appears to be set inside the art of M. C. Escher. For me, however, it's more like a dry run for William Chyr's Manifold Garden, a game I've been looking forward to for a while now."

The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please."

Frustration Can Improve Video Games, Designer Found (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "In video games, frustration is often viewed as a dirty word. If you’re feeling frustrated—like you’ve hit a wall and can’t find a way over, under, or around—the designers must have made a mistake. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, game makers try to make you feel irritated, or even livid."

Why I love Peggle and hate Peggle: Blast (Henrique Antero / Medium) "Peggle is divine. Peggle: Blast is an aberration. This is a story on how a videogame first touched perfection and then became a vessel for evil. It could be compared to The Fall of the Abrahamic religions, when humankind was collectively expelled from Paradise— if the Demiurge was perverse enough to have invented microtransactions along the way."

The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer) "We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims. Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright)."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Zelda's Switch inspirations, the modding scene of Cities: Skylines, & lots more.

As for other things going on this week - still relaxing after the end of GDC, & have been playing some Night In The Woods, which is charming & totally my speed of game, as well as Chime Sharp, which is still one of my favorite puzzle games, despite a slightly basic PS4 conversion.

No luck getting a Switch yet (since I only decided I wanted one after playing it at GDC after its release, haha), but there's plenty of stuff to keep us all going on PS4, PC, iPad & elsewhere, right? Talking of that final option, keep an eye on the Apple indie game celebration, which looks like it has some kickass timed iOS game releases like Mushroom 11, Beglitched & maybe Kingdom: New Lands. And onward to the links...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta provide an in-depth look at how some of the convention-breaking mechanics were implemented in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. [SIMON'S NOTE: Yep, this is pretty much unmissable.]"

Horizon: Zero Dawn and the evolution of the video game heroine (Jonathan Ore / CBC News) "Horizon: Zero Dawn, a massive open-world game set in a lush, post-apocalyptic jungle inhabited by robot dinosaurs, is one of the most anticipated games of 2017. Players take the role of Aloy, a young hunter in a far-flung future, well after most of human society has disappeared in a long-forgotten disaster."

Game Design Deep Dive: Decisions that matter in Orwell (Daniel Marx / Gamasutra) "On a basic level, Orwell is a mostly text-based narrative game that constantly confronts players with choices of varying moral weight. Unlike a typical interactive novel Orwell does not present players with an explicit decision between a set of juxtaposed options (multiple choice) on how to continue the story or which action to take next."

Is Halo Broken? (Nathan Ditum / Glixel) "Today, the series is overseen by 343 Industries, a Microsoft internal studio created specifically for the job. Most recently it helped Creative Assembly to release the in-universe strategy game Halo Wars 2, which is both quite good and unlikely to stop the series’ slow slide to the margins. So what can 343 do to fix Halo? Is it already too late?"

Balancing Metas (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "Meta games and balancing are always interesting to me so I thought it'd be fun to go over how these things can work in different contexts and what forces meta games to evolve."

How two Cities: Skylines modders turned hobbyist work into life-changing careers (Joe Donnelly / PC Gamer) "Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC."

Hookshots, Wii U Maps, And Other Things Nintendo Cut From Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "To make a game as massive and astounding as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the developers at Nintendo needed to take a lot of experiments. As a result, they left a lot of ideas on Hyrule’s floor."

The 'Card-ification' of Competitive Gaming (Steven Strom / Red Bull eSports) "Increasingly, though, developers are codifying the benefits of progression behind something new: virtual, collectible cards. From Clash Royale and Hearthstone on iOS, to Halo Wars 2, Paragon, Paladins, Battlerite and a helluva lot more on PC and consoles, digital cards are becoming the de facto method of displaying player skills."

'Rust Belt Gothic': lead writer Scott Benson unpacks the art that inspired Night in the Woods (Nate Ewert-Krocker / Zam) "From Flannery O’Connor to Richard Scarry and Symphony of the Night, we talk with animator/writer/Twitterman Scott Benson about what makes everyone's favorite new indie adventure game tick."

Reviving Ocarina of Time's long-lost Ura expansion (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer) "The Legend of Zelda series has always dabbled in alternate realities - mirror worlds, sunken pasts, waking dreams, futures that might have been. This is the story of one such lost future, a dream originally dreamt by the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, kept alive by a fervent underground community of fans, modders and artists."

Lights, Camera, Distraction: The Problem with Virtual Camera Systems (Jack Yarwood / Waypoint) "The average gamer rarely notices the camera, and when they do it's usually to complain about what's wrong with it. This is in spite of the camera being the most important tool for communicating a chosen situation to the player. Done well, its presence can be almost imperceptible, framing the action perfectly. Done poorly, it can ruin the experience, causing frustration and disorientation."

Meet the Man Behind the Most Acclaimed Board Game in Years (Steve T. Wright / Glixel) "Now, with the second "season" of Pandemic Legacy just around the corner, Glixel spoke with [Rob] Daviau to chat about the cardboard life, his former corporate overlords, and the travails of self-employment."

In the Land of 'Dying' MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot (Robert Zak / Kotaku) "My second time-warp into venerable MMOs takes me to the cross-mythological lands of Camelot, where, after 16 years, a sizeable number of players remain embroiled in a never-ending war."

The importance of cultural fashion in games (Matt Sayer / RockPaperShotgun) "Virginia’s career in cultural fashion began out of a desire for self-expression. After spending her childhood immersed in African culture, she couldn’t ignore the severe lack of traditional African fashion in The Sims’ wardrobe. With nobody else attempting to rectify the issue, Virginia was left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands."

Ron Gilbert: "From Maniac Mansion to Thimbleweed Park" (Talks From Google / YouTube) "Veteran game designer Ron Gilbert has been making games since the 1980s, most notably as writer, programmer, and designer for LucasFilm Games / LucasArts, producing classics like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Today he is putting the finishing touches on his crowdfunded pixel-art puzzle adventure Thimbleweed Park."

Pixelated popstars: Japan’s dance dance revolution (Jack Needham / Dazed) "Rhythm-based video games dominate Japan’s arcades, and their popularity has influenced everyone from major pop stars to underground electronic producers."

A Video Game Immerses You in an Opera Composed by Dogs (Katie Rose Pipkin / Hyperallergic) "In David Kanaga’s latest game, Oiκοςpiel, an immortal Donkey Koch (of the Koch brothers) commissions a group of dogs to produce a digital opera for an arts festival scheduled for 2100. [SIMON'S NOTE: this game won the IGF Nuovo (art) prize, and you may be able to work out why! Full interview text here.]"

Monkey Island (or, How Ron Gilbert Made an Adventure Game That Didn’t Suck) (Jimmy Maher / Digital Antiquarian) "Shortly after completing Maniac Mansion, his first classic graphic adventure, Ron Gilbert started sketching ideas for his next game. “I wanted to do something that felt like fantasy and might kind of tap into what was interesting about fantasy,” he remembers, “but that wasn’t fantasy.” "

Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics (Danny Day / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2016 GDC Talk, QCF Design's Danny Day (Desktop Dungeons) explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game."

Reverse-Engineering The Industry (Ernie Smith / Tedium) "Third-party developers weren’t always quite so revered in the video game industry, but a pair of legal decisions helped them earn their place at the table."

Art of the Impossible (Joel Goodwin / Electron Dance) "I played an amazing looking game this week, Fragments of Euclid by Antoine Zanuttini, a short first-person puzzler that appears to be set inside the art of M. C. Escher. For me, however, it's more like a dry run for William Chyr's Manifold Garden, a game I've been looking forward to for a while now."

The Dazzling Reinvention of Zelda (Simon Parkin / New Yorker) "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which launched last Friday, represents the first true reimagining of the series. Gone are the typical corridors and blockages intended to funnel every player along the same worn narrative lines. In this Hyrule, a wilderness of hills and lakes and mountain peaks, you are free to go wherever you please."

Frustration Can Improve Video Games, Designer Found (Nathan Grayson / Kotaku) "In video games, frustration is often viewed as a dirty word. If you’re feeling frustrated—like you’ve hit a wall and can’t find a way over, under, or around—the designers must have made a mistake. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes, game makers try to make you feel irritated, or even livid."

Why I love Peggle and hate Peggle: Blast (Henrique Antero / Medium) "Peggle is divine. Peggle: Blast is an aberration. This is a story on how a videogame first touched perfection and then became a vessel for evil. It could be compared to The Fall of the Abrahamic religions, when humankind was collectively expelled from Paradise— if the Demiurge was perverse enough to have invented microtransactions along the way."

The designers of Dishonored, Bioshock 2 and Deus Ex swap stories about making PC's most complex games (Wes Fenlon / PC Gamer) "We put together a roundtable of familiar faces, all of whom have had a major hand in exploring or creating immersive sims. Our guests: Warren Spector (Otherside Entertainment), Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare (Arkane Studios), Tom Francis (Suspicious Developments) and Steve Gaynor (Fullbright)."

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