Ruling With An Iron Fist (And A Green Afro)
I’m not known for venturing out of my gaming comfort zone very often. There was that one time I became a “hardcore” gamer during the PS2/Xbox/GameCube era and tried to dabble in a multitude of genres, but for the most part I try to listen to my gut more than the media. It’s not that I don’t enjoy diversity, because I do; it’s just that I’d rather be having an enjoyable experience over one that’s culturally relevant.
That isn’t always the case though. When I first got my shiny new Super NES, it came with this poster filled with games who’s objectives defied my feeble middle school logic. Beyond Super Mario World there was a game based on aeronautical simulations (PilotWings), shmups with what seemed like infinite levels or parallax scrolling (Gradius III) and that futuristic space racer I ended up not liking (F-Zero).
And then there was Sim City.
Out of all those thrill-seeking teenage-demographed marvels of 16-bit technology advertised on that poster, who knew that something as innocuous as a world building sim would be the game to titillate me this side of Street Fighter II?
As far as ways to be introduced to Will Wright’s work, you can’t do much better than the Super NES version of Sim City. As far as being introduced to Will Wright himself, it doesn’t get much weirder than the green-haired and mustachioed consultant that became his synonymous avatar in Nintendo titles.
The genius behind it is that I never played it as a game proper. I don’t think it ever gave you a set goal that completed the game (not that I’d know from personal experience), but most people I knew set their own by way of a population marker to hit or seeing if they could survive a natural disaster and so on. I was just content with building. It sounds mundane, but there’s a satisfaction with feeling like you’re doing great as a leader by keeping your residential, industrial and commercial zones in check and not getting that pop-up stating there’s road congestion.
What’s really interesting is that, twenty years later, I still build up my burgs in the exact same fashion. The redundancy is weird, but there’s also a calm gratification in knowing my system worked. Most of my choices weren’t based on suggestions from Dr. Wright, rather things that felt like common sense. I’d always build the main zones in four block sets and always keep them separated. When it was time to focus on my mayoral digs I’d stick close to the suburbs, and the more efficient nuclear power plant was always placed far away or on a remote island in fear of a recreation of Chernobyl that likely didn’t exist. I never shifted the status quo; but that’s OK because I was never looking to do so anyways.
The comfort I got from building the same city ad naseum always leads to me getting bored of it by the time the tax coffers dry up. Even at my advanced age, I can’t get into the economic systems of Sim City. Spending money is fine; trying to refill the village funds was not. For the first year you can just ignore it altogether, but when Dr. Wright pops up and tells you that it’s your responsibility to set the budget and dole out money for things like maintenance and paying your police and fire department I kind of freeze up. I’ve tried it a few times, but the slightest hint of anger from the populace and I feel like a coup is coming and my days as mayor are soon to be up.
In other words, I don’t have a future as a politician.
Regardless, I still have fun turning empty plains and rolling hills into a palatial city state for citizens I can’t see. I can build you an awesome place to live…I just can’t rule it with the iron fist it deserves. Gah, being a nice guy is for the birds!
That Zelda Post
In all my years of playing games and writing about them, I’ve never once typed a thing about a Zelda game.
While no single game in the series gets mentioned in my top five (picking one would be like asking which of my children is my favorite), I hold Zelda close to my heart and as a whole is the reason I even play videogames in the first place. I’ve certainly thought about posting my impressions from time to time, but I always worry myself out of it in fear that I won’t do it justice.
As you can tell, after having a coming to Jesus meeting and playing an exorbitant amount of Twilight Princess in anticipation for Skyward Sword, I’m ready to give Link his due.
My reasoning behind kicking the phobia is that I think Twilight Princess is underrated; not just as a Zelda game, but in general. It came at a strange time, that transitional period between hardware cycles where Nintendo couldn’t decide which console to release it on. Their solution: put it on both. That put it in the unenviable position of being a GameCube game that people wanted to get for their Wii and a Wii game that people felt should have just stayed on the GameCube. With that in mind, nobody sees it for what it is, and instead point to it as the beginning of tacked on motion control.
I’ll be honest for a moment — those people are right; playing through it a second time didn’t assuage that complaint at all. While aiming with ranged weapons still feels great, the melee combat suffers from a clumsiness that is no thanks to the hard shaking it requires to unsheathe your blade let alone swing it. That being said, once you get over the half-assedness of that blunder and begin to soak in the realm of Hyrule and carry on with your adventure…it stops mattering so much.
A big reason for my love of the Zelda series is the familiarity of how everything works. It’s the gaming equivalent of comfort food for me. I enjoy the tale of the Triforce, of the Sacred Realm and the goddesses. I love how you gain new tools for your kitbag that help you conquer not only a dungeon but the boss and how said tools open up the world to you when you see daylight again. I have fun taking in the sights, finding hidden grottoes and partaking in side quests. Hell, it’s even acceptable that Ganon’s always the one mucking about with Hyrule’s peace and prosperity. These are the things that make me happy. What puts a Zelda game over the top though is how it weaves that familiarity into a new world.
Zelda defines itself by one of two tropes: either introducing an alternate world that’s supposed to serve as a plot twist or by it’s means of locomotion. In the case of Twilight Princess, it chose the former. In this other dimension, the obligatorily named Twilight Realm, Link takes the form of a wolf. It changes up the flow of the game as being a wolf means you need to keep to the shadows, search for hidden entrances and items with a sensing ability and traverse areas you couldn’t as a human. During the early hours you have to track down tears to revive spirits and eavesdrop on conversations, then switch back to your well-worn green tunic to tackle the next temple.
Considering the prominence of this game play element, it’s surprising to realize that you only really need to be a wolf for maybe a quarter of the game. After completing the Fused Shadow segments, your wolf form is used to dig up a few hidden things, warp and not much else. Maybe it just seems weird in hind sight; perhaps it wouldn’t feel strange if the quarter of the game it was in was towards the end. Again, nothing that really impacted how much fun I had with Twilight Princess, just an observation.
Something that is prevalent throughout the entire game however is how cohesive Hyrule is. In most Zelda games all the locales feel something like a bunch of interconnected hubs. In Twilight Princess they flow seamlessly into each other making it feel like a complete world. You don’t just randomly stumble into the desert; it’s tucked away on the other side of a mountain range. The majority of the landscape are grasslands and countryside, and when things change it makes sense. Death Mountain is past a trail near a canyon and the place the Zoras call home is more a tributary and waterfall that feeds into Lake Hylia than some out of place tropical realm. Even the Ooccoo areas fit in the grand scheme of things. The wholeness makes Twilight Princess‘ version of Hyrule my favorite so far.
Even the temples, dungeons and forts fit nicely in the grand scheme of things, which is a nice change of pace because most of them don’t feel like temples, dungeons and forts. They’re more like natural spaces that have been invaded by an outside source, which I think was the intent. Death Mountain isn’t a fire castle; it’s a mine. There’s also stages based on a frost-covered manse, an occupied city, a desert prison and a ruined temple that you time travel to in order to complete. They work because of their natural context with what’s around you and what’s going on.
Beyond their unique layout, their fundamental design makes them some of the more interesting dungeons in recent memory for a Zelda game. As if I haven’t used the word fit enough, that’s how the puzzles and challenges feel in them as well. While every Zelda game charges you with finding some gear and using it in their respective hiding place, Twilight Princess integrates them into the world in a way that doesn’t make them obtuse but also doesn’t have them sticking out as a point where you have to use your new trinket. Although I have no proof, it feels like you use your kit much more than I remember, as if each area is built around it.
Which is good, because they aren’t used as much once you take them back out onto the field. Then again, that’s never been a focus. I’m not sure what my expectations were there, but apparently they were higher than what’s there. You might use them a couple times here or there, but it’s enough to make side-questing as fun as usual. There seems to be a glut of them in Twilight Princess. For whatever reason you have to get one more (for a total of five) containers to finish a heart, there’s twenty bugs you can collect and a hundred Poes that need capturing. While I can appreciate the heart containers and bugs because they get you exploring the world, the Poes weren’t worth the hassle because they were everywhere, hard to keep track of and often didn’t show up until dusk. While playing through the game I was aiming to get 100% completion, but I should have known that some doodads where hidden by random luck before trying to run a fool’s errand.
What makes Twilight Princess special to me is how the cinematic aspects of the game finally help drive home how epic these tales truly are. Things like facial expressions and body language integrate feelings better than a text box. There are moments of tension, drama, tenderness, triumph and pure, unadulterated joy that have been in every game, but they finally make you genuinely feel that way because of the way they convey it. Link still doesn’t utter a word, but if Skyward Sword goes by Twilight Princess, that shouldn’t be anyone’s worry anymore.
Considering how large this post got, it’s safe to say that not only was I able to tackle the 800 pound gorilla in the room, I also got the ten count on him as well. Considering as I write this it’s still the 25th anniversary of the Legend of Zelda series, I figured I’d celebrate not only by playing all the games again (of which I’ve made a significant dent in) but by finally putting my thoughts down as well. Fair warning: this is probably the first of many. It’s crazy that it’s taken me this long to give a Zelda game a proper post; but not as crazy as realizing that they’ve been making me as happy as they have for twenty-five years.
Here’s to twenty-five more!
The Librarian of Whiterun
Although I love role-playing games, I myself am not a role-player.
Part of the problem stems from the fact that the term didn’t come to me by the traditional way of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons; rather from the very loosely based JRPG, which took care of the character creation portion for the sake of story and left me with fiddling with statistics. I’ve used plenty of imagination creating fantastical characters when outside playing with my brothers and cousin as a kid, but in the sense of a videogame I strictly inject what little of myself I can into whatever spiky-haired amnesiac I was told to cypher.
Then I played Skyrim.
Although I’m sure I did the same thing in Oblivion, it’s only now that I realize, given the freedom that the Elder Scrolls series provides, that I’ve been subconsciously role-playing this whole time without me even realizing it.
For the most part, I still just simply inject myself into whatever character I’ve built; but as I continue to cross the vast countryside of northern Tamriel, I’ve started subliminally adding foibles. Also: just through experiences and my reactions to them, the more interesting story here is the one happening around me and not the one that the quest log says should be a big deal.
Right from the get-go I was creating lore. I decided to play as an Argonian (lizard-man) again and as such I immediately thought to myself that my avatar, George, would not just be Dragonborn, but a descendant to the hero of Cyrodiil, Slappy. Which was the Argonian I played in Oblivion. Not even five minutes in and I was already blatantly disregarding my super-deformed/statistician sensibilities.
As I made my escape from an unjust execution, I came to the conclusion that George would not be a barbarian like his predecessor. Instead, he would be a mastermind at magic using, wantonly flicking his wrists in any direction to mete out death with fireballs and bolts of electricity. But then I realized I’d really like to sink axes into the skulls of mine enemies, especially when you get a slow motion fatality for a well-placed blow. And thus George became the type of hero who would light his foes on fire before quickly dispensing of them with his battle hatchet.
As I further explored the areas surrounding Whiterun, I came to realize that, unless provoked, I wasn’t the bloody magic-wielding savage I set out to be. I was kind of adverse to conflict in general, so I changed up my strategy again. Suddenly George became a sneak who sunk ancient Nord arrows into people than asked questions later. If my opponent wasn’t felled by my well-placed missile, then I’d run in and light them on fire and cut them down.
More so than my combat style, George was fleshed out through my actions in just about every situation I’ve come across. I am always inherently playing a good guy; not because I think about doing so, but because that’s who I am. I’m one who will assess things, ponder for a bit on who is right and who is wrong, then give my verdict. Sometimes things don’t pan out the way I hope they would; but rather than reload a save and try again, I live with my decisions and let the consequences of my action give weight to the world.
But the most definitive bit of gaming I did in Skyrim was the quest I gave myself.
Much like Oblivion, I couldn’t help but pick up just about every book I found and read it. Most people find a tome hoping to upgrade a skill or trait, then quickly toss it aside and continue plundering whatever fort/cave/wayside attraction they’re at. I thumb through them for different riches: a deeper appreciation for the lore. It’s fun to find books that retell your adventures from Oblivion and Morrowind, or rediscover stories that have survived the hundreds of years between Skyrim and those games. Folk tales, instructive literature, riddles and moral stories all interest me. But instead of putting a book back that no bandit would likely ever pick up again, I began to amass the collected works of Tamriel’s authors.
Obsessively.
I bought a house in Whiterun and quickly furnished it. A fire pit, an alchemy lab, a room for my housecarl (whatever that may be) and of course, shelves to be lined with books. As I ventured forth, I started a list on my smart phone so that I could be sure if I needed to pick up a book or not. Reading books within a videogame!? As Harold Burnett pointed out, that makes me double the nerd I already am.
But it’s a hell of a lot of fun, and the only thing the developers furnished me were the means to read and store a library I created on a whim. What’s nice is it’s the kind of thing I can do while I go about the business of slaying every dragon, making my mark on Skyrim and yelling “BOOSH!” in dining rooms and watching every piece of flatware and food fly everywhere.
Who says videogames don’t use your imagination?
