Zelda Four Swords Adventures

There’s a certain trend to how things go around this blog. First, I will write about a game I have played or a game design topic I want to talk about, or so on. Next, I will think of another thing I want to write about, likely concerning a game I’m currently playing or just finished. However, when I consider writing about said subject, I will think: “Hey, I did just do a post, so I don’t have to necessarily write about this other thing this very second. I’m sure I can put it off for just a little bit, but any day now I –“

Then, at least month passes seemingly instantaneously.

Such is this case with this game. If I recall correctly, I beat The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures within a week of Zelda 2, around the same time I did my review of the latter. However, the usual cycle occurred and, though I surely didn’t intend for it, we’re now over a month out. But I’m finally writing this damn thing, so enough introductions! Now allow me to introduce this game.

Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link Review

Liking or even loving The Legend of Zelda series is not a unique claim on the internet. For those of you unaware (side note: how the hell did you end up on a blog about video games?), The Legend of Zelda series is one of the most popular and well-received game franchises of all time. On the list of best-selling game franchises it’s currently only 20^th place [source]. I know, surprised me too, but I’d guess quantity has a lot to do with it, as well as games selling more in general as time goes on. Since these games started coming out in the mid-80s, before aggregate sites like Metacritic existed (for better or worse), it’s impossible to get average review scores across the whole series. However, I would be willing to bet money that if you could take average review scores from each Zelda game and then averaged the whole series, it would be better received than any other game franchise (with at least a few entries, because averages) in history.

Put another way, I don’t think there is a single series of video games more universally beloved than The Legend of Zelda. There are series that sell more, series that get more publicity, and plenty of individual games that score as well as it. But many of the other biggest game series are divisive. Final Fantasy, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Sonic the Hedgehog...these are all series of games that have people who really like them and some who really despise them. But I’ve never really seen people hate The Legend of Zelda. Oh, such people exist, sure. No need to show me examples, I’ve been on the internet before. But at worst, people typically just seem ambivalent towards it. And at best people really, really love it.

Why am I explaining this to you? I’m telling you because I love The Legend of Zelda. It is quite possibly my favorite game series of all time. I am a person who owns and has played several hundred games, many of them regarded as fantastic masterpieces. And yet if you asked me what my favorite games of all time were, I guarantee that multiple Zelda games would be near the top of the list. But despite this, I haven’t actually talked about Zelda games much at all in my time writing for this blog. Why is that?

Was it alien tampering? I bet it was alien tampering. It’s the only rational explanation.

Burton’s Exotic Brews and Spirits

            So it's become a sort of tradition for me to supply this blog with my finished (and I use that word lightly) stories from my creative writing classes. Though there are some I'd like to keep locked up in the metaphorical Disney Vault for the time being, I have enough meek, fragile confidence in this one that I'll deign to show it to the internet at large. Besides, its been two weeks since an update and for normal people that constitutes an update drought. For me it constitutes a slight lull in the rampaging rapids of overflowing update-water, but that's besides the point. The point is, hopefully you'll enjoy this short story.

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Runescape, Part 2

            In a sleepy little village out in the countryside, a young boy yawns awake, stretching in the morning sun. He groggily dresses himself and stumbles outside to check the mail. It is at this point that he glimpses a lone figure riding in on the horizon. The boy squints, and when he recognizes the special mailman his eyes widen in surprise and his face lights up. Tripping slightly in his haste to turn around, he rushes back around the corner to his house and bursts through the door.

            “Papa!” yells the little boy. “Papa, Mama, come quick come quick!”

           

            The father of this young lad creaked open his door, looking disgruntled and rubbing his face. “Alphonse, why must you wake us so early on a holiday?” he said.

            “I saw him!” said Alphonse, bouncing on the heels of his feet. “I saw him Papa, I saw the special mailman!” 

Genericide Holiday Special 2: Yuletide Boogaloo

            In some austere study, in an ancient armchair silhouetted by the moonlight, there sits a man. Or rather, what was once a man.  The ghastly figure that now lingered in this place had clearly left its humanity behind long ago. The figure had a horrible, scarred and stretched visage, complimented by inhumanly pale blue skin, which wavered and flickered in the light with a slight translucence. He – for it had indeed been a he, ages past – was clothed in warped and disfigured rags whose original design was all but lost due not just to their state of disrepair but also due to the chains. The man was covered in giant, rust-ridden chains that crossed this way and that all around his body in incalculable numbers. They rattled constantly, their grim, hellish tones a constant and unceasing reminder of the twisted afterlife this simultaneously terrifying and pitiable creature had unwillingly bought for himself.

            He was currently struggling with the phone.

            “Yes, you heard me correctly” he intoned in an echoing bass. “Yes, it still hasn’t arrived...a large pepperoni...no...it should be under Ghost...yes, full name Herbert C. Ghost...yes...yes, stands for Christmas...yes I’m serious...okay...okay. But I’ll call back again if it isn’t soon...yes, goodbye.”

Principles of Persuasion Mini-Paper

So as has sometimes happened in the past, I was suffering writer's block for a paper I didn't want to write, and in an attempt to alleviate this wrote a fake paper instead. It didn't do much to help my productivity, but it was pretty fun to write. It can be found below, unedited.

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Neopets Part 2: Neoquest Boogaloo

Aha! Bet you thought you wouldn’t see this series again? Probably thought it would go the way of that Christmas “series” I was going to do, or that series of rambles I’ve put on indefinite hold, or Professor Horus’ Puzzling Adventues. Well it’s NOT, so there! As for those other series...uh...

So in the last installment of this technically-a-series-now, I introduced you to Neopets. Apart from embarrassing breakdowns in the face of inert sacks, there wasn’t really much interesting about it. That would be because the one feature I left out before was the games! There are many little flash games on that particular website, and previously I planned to give this whole shpiel on some of the good ones and the bad ones and a much more detailed description. I...don’t really feel like doing that now, and in fact I don’t even feel like logging back into the website. The last time I visited that website, it broke my spirit completely and utterly.

I also MAY have forgotten my login info.

The Heist

So I'm taking another creative writing course this semester at college. Within this course I recently completed a nice little self contained short story in an exercise. It's fairly brief (the page limitations were strict), and I'm not coming back to revise it, but I thought some people might enjoy it. So the rest of this post in its entirety will be the aforementioned story completely unedited. Enjoy.

Earthbound Review

Have you ever played a game that frustrated you to no end? A game where there are dozens of enemies but they’re mostly identical? A game where irritating status ailments are plentiful and what little enjoyment you get out of the combat is sucked dry by the persistent hassle? A game where you enjoy yourself more using a walkthrough because every single step is littered with obtuse bullshit triggers, so that you can only proceed when you think of things in the way the game designers did, as opposed to rationally in-universe? A game where, when you get down to it, everything is a broken mess that’s “old-school” in all the wrong ways? There’s a game like that...and it’s called Earthbound.

Have you ever played a game that defied your expectations? A game where, for better or worse, you can never really predict what’s going to happen next? A game where it’s in some strange middle-ground between absurdist parody and innocent, heartfelt story-telling? A game where there are strange but oddly compelling visuals and sounds, where you want to keep playing just to see where it’ll take you next? A game that can make you laugh, creep you out, and above all has an unusual earnestness to it that embodies the phrase ‘weird but wonderful’? There’s a game like that....and it’s called Earthbound.

Neopets. No really.

So it has been a long time since an update as usual but I don’t want to dwell on that because there are only so many self-deprecating jokes I can make in that vein* and you’ll have so many better reasons to make fun of me by the end of this article. I oft wonder what I want to write when posting to this blog. A large part of the sporadic update rate is due to my writing subjects being “whatever I want (so usually video games)”; as this means I only update around “whenever inspiration strikes me, I feel like putting in the work, and I have absolutely nothing else I need to do”. It just so how happens that in the brief lull before the end of my most recent college semester, all three of these requirements have been fulfilled in the form of an idea that is stupid and silly. Fortunately for you viewers, concepts being stupid or silly have absolutely no bearing at all on whether I write about them! Hell, some would say they’re a sign of encouragement. So today I’m gonna’ talk to you about...Neopets.

*Note: This is a lie, I can make self-deprecating jokes on my update rate until hell freezes over. Or better yet, until I actually update again.

Genericide Update: New Staff

Well it’s certainly been a while, hasn’t it? Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll fabricate I mean uh, fabricate something completely unrelated to an explanation of my absence in the usual format, explaining why my extremely overdue attempts at a holiday special were waylaid. But that’s not important right now. What’s important right now is that I tell you of exciting new ground that Genericide Inc. Enterprises LLC Ventures is going to cover! You see, we (me) here at the headquarters (dorm room) were checking the latest statistical information on the blog from down at the lab (I don’t have one of those), and we (still me) discovered a fascinating fact.

This blog doesn’t update very often!

Genericide Holiday Special, Part 1

It was the night before Christmas,

And all through the house,

Not a creature was stirring,

Except for myself.

Well, and probably some bugs or something,

Like there might be spiders around in the basement maybe?

I guess there always are, in like…the walls and stuff.

Man, that’s gross to think about.

Wait, that’s way off meter,

Why am I even typing this

Shit do over DO OVER

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An Unrestrained Ramble on the Inconvenience of Icicles

…this was probably a bad idea.

These were the thoughts of our stalwart hero, me, as I stared directly into a pit of razor-sharp, pointed icicle stalagmites (stalagmicicles, if you will). I was suspended upside down on a thin cord of rope, whose two ends were attached to opposing walls of a very tall, icy chamber. I could tell you immediately and promptly whether or not I made it across the deadly pit to the ledge that was sticking out of one side. In fact, if you stop munching on narrative tension long enough to take a refreshing sip of common sense, you can probably deduce the answer right now. But it would probably be more satisfying if I put off that impending tension for a bit while I dodder off back to how this all began, right? Shut up, it so would. So let’s go back in time a bit…

An Unrestrained Ramble On the Unreliability of Doctors

It all started a single couple of few months ago.

I was hanging around in my room, relaxing after a recent bounty hunter job wherein I slew a horde of a thousand furious gargoyles. But enough about my boring personal life. The point is I was doing not much at all but hanging around, basking in the midday sunshine streaming in through my window. I was also thinking about how I would probably update my blog soon because I am clearly (but for a few rare exceptions), incredibly punctual and not at all lazy about these things.

It was at this point that I felt a strange sensation in my upper chest. As I wondered if my diet of snack food and chocolate might actually be causing what it logically should all the time, the sensation worked its way up my throat. There was a very brief pressure in my mouth and…

*ZAWUMPH*

Rogue Legacy Review

Two months.

Two full months it’s been since I’ve delivered my irrelevant opinions to you via the medium of a winding online diatribe. It’s not been for lack of video game related happenings in my life, either. Things have kept happening. They never stop keep happening no matter how much I will them to do otherwise. It’s just that for whatever reason in the midst of all these happenings I haven’t acquired sufficient motivation to write about any of them. But now I have.

So while I will probably have an “explanation” for my absence before long as per my typical operating procedure, in the meantime let’s talk about Rogue Legacy.

You return to this title screen every time you die. So a lot. (Don’t worry, there’s a catch).

Some Top Songs from Games I’ve Never Played

What I’m actually doing with my free time and what I post about on the blog, even when I’m playing plenty of games, is not necessarily always related. A lot of games I play aren’t worth posting about on the blog, not because they’re bad but just because I don’t have much to say about them. Alternatively, I might have things to say about something but I was busy at the time while it still held my interest, or I have so much I could say that the task seems daunting, or perhaps I simply don’t have a ton of free time and/or manage it poorly. The point is, this blog tends to run on a VG Cats rate of updating of whenever the hell I feel like it, and a similar content system of whatever the hell I feel like writing about.

This is how, despite having tons of games I could be talking about, I ended up formulating another list article on oddly specific game music. I was downloading a video game track from a game I’d never actually played the other day, and whilst listening considered that this was actually something I did fairly often. I view a lot of stuff on the internet about video games, and thus find out a lot about games that I’ve never personally played. Sometimes games have particular note made of their soundtracks, of these a smaller portion I will actually one day look up on YouTube, and of these an even smaller portion I will choose to download for re-listening later, despite never having played the game in question.

Spoiler Alert: Sometimes there’s a good reason for that.

An Unrestrained Ramble On The Slaying of Sand Beasts

“…well fuck, this will really screw up my updating schedule on the blog.”

This was one of the primary thoughts on my mind as I lay trapped in a steel container buried below the desert miles away from civilization, as I could feel the vibrations of a hundred hungry sand beasts burrowing towards my iron coffin. The other main musings on my mind concerned ways to escape a steel container buried in a desert of hungry sand beasts, the amount of oxygen a vaguely human shaped steel container contained, and related matters. I mean, granted, that wasn’t all that was going on up there. I was also considering whether or not I’d had left the lights on at home. In the back of my mind I was also remembering that one song, y’know, that one that goes “dah nah daah duh nah daah nuh, dah nah daah duh nah daah nuh, daah nuuh dah”, or something along those lines. And I think I was also absentmindedly noting how I kind of had to pee at the time and…

…I feel I’ve gotten off track somewhat. What was I talking about again?

Oh right, the desert! And the steel box. And the giant robot. No wait, that last one was a different time.

Generiversary

I normally am against shorter updates to this blog, but today I’m going to make an exception. No not because I’m being lazy, because it’s the one-year anniversary of the blog being made! That’s completely different! Anyway, to celebrate this event, I’m going to briefly go over what I’ve actually managed to accomplish in that time, because I’m sure all of you love reading self-congratulatory statistics about a strangers writing accomplishments on the internet.

“…what? Oh…yeah. We’re, uh, all so interested in that. Please go on, we’re on the edge of our seats.”

On Old-School Difficulty in Games

Hero Man has had a difficult journey. His home village was burned down leaving no one but his plucky childhood love interest and himself left alive. He uncovered the ancient Sword of Stabbin’ Shit in a tomb filled with unruly undead. He recovered the Seven Seals of Seriously Significant Sorcery from all across the world. He’s performed hundreds of inane tasks in between, from rescuing kittens to killing rats to dealing with more fetch quests than any mortal man should ever have to see. He’s fought snakes and skeletons and sirens, demons and dragons and doppelgangers, Cyclops and cultists and centaurs, mummies and minotaurs and manticores and much much more. He’s been through hell and back, possibly literally, and is finally about to finish his epic quest. Atop of Mount Merciless, in the upper spire of the Castle of Catastrophe, our hero is finally about to put a stop to the evil sorcerer and save the entire world from his wrath, once and ffffffffffffffff-

-FFFUCK! I missed the jump again!

Depending on what type of game this is there are multiple possible outcomes as to what happens next. But if it’s an old-school game, I can sure as hell tell which outcome is most likely. And that’s that you won’t be getting to the conclusion of your quest without throwing at least half an hour of your life out the window. And if it’s me in this situation, then that half an hour won’t come until I muddle through a few minutes of muffled profanity, or alternatively just up and quit. Maybe I’ll come back, but maybe I won’t.

I don’t want to point any fingers, but the first half of this sentence is a bold-faced lie.

Genericide Update: Another Update about Updates

So it’s been a while since we’ve last laid eyes upon each other, internet. I thought about coming back from my over month-long absence in my…usual manner but upon reflection I realized that this would probably take a lot longer to write and would keep you waiting even longer, so in the interest of time I’ve decided to keep the update shorter for the present. I’ve been busy finishing up my most recent semester of college but celebrations are to be had because said semester is now over. I have a huge backlog of juicy, game-related updates to bring to all the good little girls and boys of the internet or failing that, I guess you guys. This combined with my new influx of free time should lead to a veritable flood of updates within the coming weeks and months.

…or at least, it will soon.

Now wait a second, I can explain, please put down the pitchforks…