So, 2015? Pretty good year. It was a pretty damn formative one for me personally. By the end of it, I was at a point where I felt confident in the general direction of my life for the next decent chunk. I got comfortable. That came to an incredibly abrupt halt with the end of a very serious live-in relationship with my girlfriend in December. It's been a rough transition for me. The good news is I am finally through with relocating all of my stuff, everybody is (mostly) getting along, and I've had a great support network around me through the whole thing. It did, however, slow down my progress on playing and beating video games. Something to do with large swaths of the last two months and change sleeping on floors and couches of friends' houses.

Still, I managed to cross off a couple games. Quick thoughts:

Undertale: As soon as this was finished, my ex-girlfriend began her own feverish relationship with it. I'll always have this and the whole damn Zelda franchise tied up with memories of her. Undertale never stopped surprising me, and found several different ways to make me laugh during my single playthrough. Those laughs ranged in scale from polite chuckles to straight up busting. Certainly a title that will continue to reverberate around in the Tumblr-verse for a long, long time.

LIMBO: A Humble Bundle pickup, one that seemed to have gone over well with some of the Giant Bomb staff in its time. I enjoyed my (brief) time with this one quite a bit, owing largely to its brooding, Scandinavian-ass aesthetics. Ranks favorably among the HIB recurring titles.

Mutant Mudds Deluxe: Picked up on sale, largely due to the recommendations of Jonathan Holmes made some time ago. Played on my 3DS and got 25 or so Water Sprites. Sampled some of the "Deluxe" content. The platforming is stiff in a very European way, like some Amiga platformer. Enjoyable graphics (little details like the protag's hair fluttering are great) and the tunes were alright. I played with checkpoints, which are optional; I could see this game being a real son of a bitch without them.

Retro Game Challenge: As mentioned above, I spent some time living with close friends in the last month or so. One of these folks was my old college roommate, and I noticed they had a copy of Retro Game Challenge sitting in a pile of DS cartridges. I have a huge soft spot for that game, so I popped it into my 3DS looking to get into Robot Ninja Haggle Man. Turns out, it was my old copy with my last save from 2010! Also, I was already on the final challenge of finishing all of the included games! After fiddling with Guadia Quest and RNHM3 on my morning commutes for a few days, I was finally able to put this one to bed after nearly six years. Absolute classic, a standout release on one of the finest consoles ever made. Ought to be on every DS essentials list.

Mario Golf: World Tour: On that very same day, looking to tool around with a game on my commute home, I beat the Mountain Course tournament. Expecting the "rest" of the game to unlock at this point, imagine my surprise when I hit a credit sequence. Now, Nintendo games in particular have a tendency of holding back large swaths of game content for post-credit play, but I have been and will continue to count a credit sequence as a completion for the purposes of getting through my backlog. I've heard MGS5 does some wicked shit with the concept of credits, and it scares me something fierce. Regardless, MGWT is no MG64 but as a game I wound up getting for free at the end of the Club Nintendo it was fine. Seems like the real legs for this thing are in one-off challenges (which are great for commuting) and online play (not so great). Will continue to peck away at this one over time, if only to unlock Star Waluigi...oh, I already did. DONE.

Presently I'm occupying myself with Majora's Mask 3D (totally sidetracked by RGC but no longer) and Gish, yet another Humble Bundle title that's been kicking around for years. Spoilers: It's no LIMBO.

What is even left to be said about this thing? While this probably the third time I've picked up Paradise since it launched, I've put a solid twenty hours into the game so far and I'm only a third of the way to my Burnout Elite license thus far. I'm exactly one trophy away from pulling off my first Platinum, and may or may not have purchased a PlayStation Eye to accomplish this. I've also had some pretty sick experiences online. The community still playing this game is insanely good, to the point where some of the people I've added to my friends list were ultimately removed as their Road Rules times were just way to goddamn good to even touch. I've now got a healthy back and forth going with one or two total strangers. If only this game were still in vogue, or perhaps if I had gotten into this rather than Test Drive Unlimited back in my undergrad days.

But what the hell am I doing playing this old shit? It's Game of the Year season! I should be trying to get myself caught up enough to put in an honest list of my ten favorite games I played (preferable to completion) that were released in 2015. To that end, I am currently playing two vidya from the last eleven months:

• Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (Wii U) - After some experimentation, I realized that a fairly early puzzle that seemed stupidly difficult was in fact easily solved with another object in the level that had slipped my mind. Beyond that trip up, the game has been fairly simple. The challenge stems primarily from hidden side objectives in a level. The game is also in keeping with a lot of current Nintendo games, gating some of the most challenging content as either end game content or a bonus mode. Here, the dedicated Challenge Mode really shines. The game's reliance on tablet controls via drawn paths to guide Kirby becomes a bit of a hindrance in more open levels, where you occasionally feel like you are guiding a drunken pink blob around via well-intentioned rails. Not so in the Challenge Mode, where absolute precision becomes mandatory as you move later into into these levels. You're given four fifteen second puzzles of a single screen to complete, and they'll often throw a wide enough range of goals to accomplish that you'll find yourself fraying by the third or fourth screen. It's rewarding to gold medal these levels, much more so than in the base game. I continue to be miffed that I can't just play this on my television, but it looks and sounds so damn good anyway.
• BOXBOY! (3DS) - Hey, another HAL joint! Call me a sucker for minimalism

  

  , but I think this game is fantastic. I'm currently chewing through World 10, and there's another seven worlds until (stop me if you've heard this one before) I hit the more challenging end game content. There have been a few head scratchers in the mix so far, mostly because I'm attempting to grab all of the crowns in a level on my first playthrough. As a taste of things to come, there are optional time and score attack modes available for purchase in the game's shop. You can also buy a few little outfits. I am wearing a cape. I'm in a weird position where I'm more likely to place this on a Top 10 list for 2015 so far, over my beloved Kirby. Is it the deepest game in the world? Of course not. What it is though, is a tight package in transit friendly sized chunks, and it's priced to move at $5. You could do a lot worse if you're looking for a bus game.

I think that's a valid category of games, by the way. It's not reflective of everybody's daily life, but I spend between ten and twelve hours of every work week on a bus. As I am afforded time to read the news at work between tasks, my options to amuse myself are leisure reading and handheld gaming. That I ere toward the latter is probably a good indication of just how far I've fallen as a card carrying college person. And it's not just that a game be portable; that it also be good in bursts is also important. Case in point, I already abandoned Radiant Historia for another day, and the cartridge copy of Shin Megami Tensei IV in my 3DS is probably wondering where the hell I've gone. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying the hell out of Stretchmo and looking at grabbing Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call to occupy my brain while the rest of me is shuttled around the Puget Sound. They're the games I'm playing, and they're capable of being of higher quality than their big console brethren. Someday I'll get around to beating Link to the Past so I can play A Link Between Worlds...

Speaking of driving a drunken blob around levels, I've also been working through the last gen hit Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. It's pretty good. It is strange to play it now in light of the seemingly codified Ubisoft mode of open world game, what with its tower-based map opening and objective icon vomit. I'm still down with the seemingly abandoned modern conspiracy plot, anachronistic though it may seem in 2015. My main knock on the game is that the part where you're actually playing the game and moving around in the world is pretty poor. Lining up tight jumps has this weird Tony Hawk Pro Skater vibe gone wrong, where you stick to rails when you would rather not, and occasionally fail to snap to one as expected. Combat is also this sort of staid thing where I spend most of my time holding R1 and waiting to counter oncoming attacks. Escort and tailing missions are here, and they suck so hard. I'd say that I'm already tired of the formula, but there's something about these games that the history dork in me still finds compelling. So much so, in fact, that I picked up AC IV for the Wii U months ago now and am pretty excited to start it at some point. I was also pushed over the edge by a Kotaku article to pick up Assassin's Creed: Rogue last week. Steve Totilo's review included a quote which really got my mind spinning:

I marveled at how confident the whole game felt and how pleasing it was to play. I was impressed with how rich the whole game was, how its modern sequences packed in jokes and references to other games, how they expanded things by seeming to start new story threads about modern assassins.

Then it all clicked.

Of course Rogue feels the way it does. It’s a late-gen game, and this is the kind of game you get when talented people don’t have to worry about technology and can instead spend their time being creative.

It got me thinking about games like Final Fantasy XII, Kirby's Dream Land 3, Comix Zone, and other late generation games that were impressive on a technical basis, if not their gameplay merits. Rogue probably doesn't belong in the same pantheon as, say, Shadow of the Colossus, but I am down to play a high quality game that is itself an iteration of a well liked entry into a series I enjoy despite its wrinkles.

Not much new to report on the video gaming front lines of Twin Peaks. I've mostly cycled through my "Now Playing" list and am now working on the following:

• Burnout Paradise (PS3) - I am experiencing some weird issues connecting to EA's servers for stuff on launch (apparently putting my PS3 in my router's DMZ and linking my PSN and Origin accounts might help?). There's also the part where there are at most three public lobbies open when I play (evenings PDT) and those are sparsely populated by some ruthless people. Still, this is everything I remembered it being when I played it in college. I was not a serious gamer in my undergrad years, and stopped reading game news around the time Jeff refused that bribe money or whatever it was he did. As such, I missed the original Giant Bomb zeitgeist around this one. It's a shame, because getting the achievement for having eight people in Wildcat Stadium is probably going to be a bitch now. Should be getting my Class A license tonight. Wanna compete with my AMAZING Road Rules times? Please add me! I'm electricviking78 on PSN.
• Rocket League (Steam) - Hey, a current game! I played my first game with a Steam buddy last night. He's quite a bit better than I am, but holy shit does playing with folks you know make this awesome thing even more awesome. Tonight we'll hopefully have three people together to screw around online, hunting for heads and wearing stupid hats. I beat a season on rookie and figure beating one on the "normal" difficulty will constitute "beating" this game, though the achievement already popped. Wanna kick my teeth in, rocket car style? electricviking78 is my Steam name.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV (3DS) - Yeah, I put down Radiant Historia. I really like that game, but there's something about the SMT mythos that gets my goat so much harder. Strange Journey might be my favorite DS game for all times, and the distant cousin Persona games will likely push me to continued bad purchase decisions for years to come. I had started SMTIV a while ago, and coming back to it was relatively easy. The plot, at least so far, is straightforward enough. The protagonist is part of a martial outfit affiliated with a totally innocent religious government organization that is certainly not up to anything untoward, no sir. He is sent on a quest to investigate the cause of some latent rebellious tendencies among the common people, who have even begun *gasp* reading! Yes, this game is punitive with the way it tends to just fucking kill you in your first encounter with bosses. I could probably play smarter or read a strategy guide (the limited first run came with a book that pretty well outline the first portion of the game for you), but I've found that viewing my first encounter with my big bad as a "feeling out process". When you die, you are given the option to resurrect with no loss of experience for either money or Play Coins. Money is in short supply early on, but I got Play Coins out the wazoo. I'm like Patrick Klepek throwing rings at a Sanic with dem Play Coins.

What do you mean, am I still playing Yoshi's Island? Of course I am. I'm doing that right now. Yes, I am being diligent and finishing what I start. Yep, sure am. Fuck you.

I continue to play video games, and occasionally they get finished. Who knew?

Metal Gear Solid was a game I had always appreciated a distance. I knew it had a crazy plot involving eccentric military personnel, giant death robots, and something about plugging the controller into the second port. My first experience with the series was actually borrowing a copy of Snake Eater from a classmate in sophomore year of high school. I was coming to the series cold, and at that age my console gaming was confined primarily to playing the balls off of Vice City. The pace, clunky feeling controls, and impenetrable reference-laded plot did nothing for me, and that guy got his game back real quick. I always assumed the series was just not going to be a thing I could actually enjoy based on that initial impression.

Fast forward about a decade, and this badass Jonathan Holmes manages to sell me on the MGS series by likening the core gameplay to Pac-Man. I was sitting at the Ms. Pac-Man cocktail machine at my favorite coffee shop/grad study spot as this was said (one whose operation I probably funded for the next few years), and I found myself suddenly quite taken with the idea of giving the series another crack. Listening to the Giant Bomb crew draw comparisons to MGS source material and Akira pushed me right over the damn edge. I bought a copy of the Legacy Collection in July, and completed the first game in the Solid series last week.

It's not all smooth sailing. I maintain the part where you use a controller device to input commands into the game that is Metal Gear Solid is pretty rotten. Control fidelity expectations weren't what they are now in 1998, but I played a good amount of N64 games from this era that didn't feel like the experience was being held back at times by control issues. The curve is high, and eventually I managed to work through most of these issues, but damn if I didn't feel like my execution issues during the Metal Gear Rex fight didn't boil down to the controls not doing what I needed.

Virtually everything else is fucking sublime. From the initial impressive (for their time) underwater opening cinematic, to the cliffhanger bullshit ending, the game is full of moments I cannot get out of my head. It was strange playing a game with such a strong message about nuclear issues, having studied the topic at a graduate student level for a few years. Hell, the last thing I did of note in grad school was attend a Department of Energy sponsored conference on spent nuclear fuel management. Even when this game tried to get esoteric on me, it was speaking my language. Distilled down to a series of boss fights, MGS would stand up to the test of time. Give those bosses personalities, insane intros and dialog sequences, and you've got something very special. Some of the events that transpire are now at the bedrock of gaming culture, such that they were spoiled for me in the same way that the Battle of Thermopylae was also spoiled. In spite of this, my late interest in the series as a whole left me fairly open to be genuinely surprised several times. Trust me, I'm now at the point of stuffing cotton into my ears until I get around the playing Sons of Liberty. I know the Raiden bait and switch gimmick, but my understanding is that game goes places.

If you spoil MGS2 for me I will end you I swear to god

I shouldn't have to recommend this game to anybody by now. It is the pinnacle of games on the PlayStation, making Final Fantasy VII look like a sad joke. It's practically part of our shared heritage, our lexicon. I just wanted to share how damn delightful it was. That Kojima fellow as really onto something, right?

Speaking of role playing games with heptanal suffixes, I completed a game for the IBM compatible Personal Computer platform. Breath of Death VII: The Beginning is a game made to trigger dopamine bumps in my skull. I mean, look at this thing!

I had a baby sitter forget a game at my house when I was maybe six or seven years old. It was a complete copy of Phantasy Star II, one which unfortunately disappeared in one of the half a dozen moves my family made in the ensuing years. I played the first few hours of PSII dozens of times. It blew my mind that a game could just keep going like that. Mario levels were fun, but eventually you hit a flag and that was that. PSII had an entire freaking world to explore, and cool space people to inhabit it. The monsters, music, and even the menu font of that game are etched into me at a BIOS level. Trying to complete it for a Community Endurance Run a year ago was a fun, if occasionally unfun, experience. ahem maybe I'll finish it someday ahem

What I'm saying is as much as I do enjoy Final Fantasy games and other JRPG experiences I've had, Phantasy Star games for the Genesis do something for me that nothing else will ever do. Zeboyd Games understands that, and made two games laser targeted at my demographic. BoDVII and its follow up, Cthulhu Saves the World, are independently developed and published RPGs that owe more to Sega than Square. I bought them both in a bundle some time ago and had started Breath of Death several times, but finally finished it in three sessions this week.

The game is exactly as long as it needed to be, and has a grip of smart "quality of life" features. Random battles are present, but there's a cap on the number which can occur in a given area. What's more, there's a menu option to trigger a battle on the spot. It is a viable strategy to find a save point, grind, and hit the point again cheese your MP back to full. I actually wound up playing this game "straight", but still appreciated seeing the battle counter hit zero so I could safely explore the increasingly labyrinthine dungeons at the tail end of the game. They don't get quite as bad as PSII's bullshit stair and teleport maze horse shit, but they do indulge in some of the "see the exit but require a giant loop to get there" school of dungeon design philosophy. Comes with the territory, I suppose. The battles are also mercifully straightforward, oriented towards fast and brutal fighting instead of slogging away at giant hit point boxes. There's depth there for those who want it, with buff abilities and a combo chain which can be depleted to trigger some proper heavy ammunition. You can also get by a lot of this game by hitting the A button repeatedly. Something for everybody!

Breath of Death VII is solid. I don't know if I'm going to rush to Cthulhu next, but I do know that I've been quietly losing my goddamn mind over what Cosmic Star Heroine could be if Zeboyd keeps up the level of quality exhibited here. Hope that game gets a damn release date some day.

Yoshi's Island is upstairs. I have to go all the way up one entire flight of stairs good christ to play more Yoshi's Island. Think I'll take a three mile walk instead. I'm actively trying not to start anything else before that one gets put to bed. Likewise, I struggle daily with wanting to buy both Dropsy and Undertale. Just had my JRPG jimmies rustled, so erring toward the former. That, and I had a nice exchange with Jay Tholen on Twitter yesterday. We both like Brian Eno!

Do you remember your first few hours with Elder Scrolls games? Of course you do! Even you, liar! So much well thought out stuff happens at the outset of those games. Tarhiel the wizard falls from the sky just north of Seyda Neen, leaving behind those ridiculous jumping scrolls. Patrick Stewart shows up in a video game and gets shivved. A dragon appears! Excitement! There's also the part where you're finally unshackled from the little introductory sequence the good people at Bethesda have assembled, and you're allowed to wander in any given direction. The world has a simply maddening amount of locations full of different characters, design aesthetics, natural environments, even unique flora and fauna. I still enjoy booting up Skyrim, loading my original character, and walking in a given direction for a while to uncover some new mine or dungeon. Who knows what's in that unexplored forest? Let's find out!

You know what's in the unexplored areas of Far Cry 2? I'll tell you.

1. Impassable terrain which makes a twenty second walk in a straight line take several minutes, where you are vulnerable to attack by;
2. Nameless mooks, who all want to kill you and attempt to do so at range; in an attempt impede your progress to;
3. More nameless mooks, with the same modus operandi.

I hate, hate, HATE getting around in this game for the same reason I wound up dreading Phantasy Star II's dungeon design. There's no straight line! Every goal or objective winds up being in some shitty spot that takes way too long to arrive at, and along the way there's not a fucking thing unique. When you first leave Pala and make your way to the first guard post, you're likely going to be confronted by roving mooks in a truck. When you arrive at the guard post, there will be more mooks. They have no apparent alignment, no defining traits, and no relation to you except their need to put you in the ground. What I have just described is the bulk of Far Cry 2, the game play loop that will be with you until the end. You can try to stealth your way around this loop, or Rambo your way through it, but the loop remains the same. The most exciting thing on offer is, occasionally, you will find a brief case with money that you will likely no longer need by the second half of the game.

Also, at a certain point the secondary objectives on missions stop giving out useful rewards and are no longer worth pursuing. Ditto the side quests, which provide either a) money you no longer need, or b) reputation, a meta-currency of sorts which provides your enemies with better armaments over the course of the game. In other words, the side content potentially makes this slog of a game even more tedious. I'm now dealing with distant, nameless, unaffiliated grunts who can nail me with rockets at considerable distance while I attempt to move from one side of the map to another to complete another samey mission.

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Hello!

Last week I wrote the longest post-academic career piece I've done to date, marking up Episode 18 of the r/civ Battle Royale Mk.II. It clocked in at just south of 8000 words, and I had quite a bit of fun doing it. It might have woken up my dormant desire to write about stuff on the Internet. That was a very focused piece, however, and I would like to stray into more open ended writing.

I've a few projects on my mind. Perhaps most daunting of them, I'd like to do some writing about each of the games I've beaten over the years. I've spent some time trying to exhaustively catalog this list, which I've replicated here and on Backloggery dot com. I'd also like to do more writing about my game of the year candidates of this year and of year's past, something like a top ten games I actually played this year. I seldom wind up playing ten games in the year they were released, and a lot of my votes wind up being for games that sure do look like they are my favorite games of the year but have yet to be played by yours truly. Due to the frankly disgusting amount of games I've accumulated (in meat space and being aged in digital lockers), that will likely not change for a while. Especially considering I'm transitioning into grownup spending habits and lifestyle decisions, focusing on things like life insurance and retirement savings over buying every single Humble Indie Bundle.

Speaking of which, have those things just gotten increasingly stale as time has worn on? I pitched in a hefty amount for the recent Total War Bundle to support the charities involved, and out of admiration for the hundreds if not thousands of hours I have poured into the series over the years. Beyond that, however, I haven't gotten excited about a bundle in a very long time. That storefront is pretty slick, though.

Anyway, what's going on these days? I've settled into a groove of working on about four games at a time, allowing them to rise to the surface as the mood strikes me. I have a corner in my girlfriend's craft room dedicated to old consoles which I think of as a discrete space for the war against the backlog. With that conceit, I am hacking away at these titles:

• Metal Gear Solid (PSN Download): I used to be firmly on the side of Final Fantasy (insert number or word "Tactics" here, depending on the day) here as the best PlayStation game. MGS eclipses them, then kicks them in the dick and laughs at them while they lay collectively on the floor. Except for Tactics, anyway. I'm at the final boss sequence with the Metal Gear itself, and so far my biggest gripes with the game have remained consistent throughout: the loads are a bummer, and the controls are obtuse. Most of my difficulties in taking down Rex stem from my inability to use suite of weapons at my disposal to maximal effect. Practice has gotten me to the point where I can get through the first form losing only one ration. Progress! I think I can polish this off tonight.
• Far Cry 2 (Steam): This was a game I purchased in December 2008, maybe the tenth thing to be added to my Steam account. 250 some odd games later, it occurred to me I should probably try to play and beat a few of them. So here I sit, slogging through a game whose combat's strengths are buried beneath a navigation system I have come to hate. A conceit of the game is that your character is vulnerable, relying on the help of an Underground resistance and a handful of other mercenaries who have set up shop in the fictitious central African nation in which it is set. Forcing the player to get around manually, or via the profoundly limiting quick travel bus system, exposes them further to the host of hostile forces arrayed against them. This leads to "fun" scenarios where a mission, received at the middle of the map, will have branching objectives at the far northeast corner, then take place in the southwest, and conclude with a shootout on a soft timer elsewhere. If you're lucky, a bus will stop near one of these places. Add fast travel and this game becomes half as long. I'm two-thirds through it, and plan to finish. NO plans to revisit it, ever.
• Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (SNES): It's a very pretty game, and I'm playing it on original hardware and a CRT over S-video so I'm seeing it in the best possible light. Too bad Yoshi is front and center. His little noises were already bad here, and they are insufferable now. Yoshi's Woolly World is sort of on my radar, would be more so if I hadn't just picked up Kirby and the Rainbow Curse. Currently at 4-7, just need to sit down and hack away for a few more sessions to put this one to bed.
• Radiant Historia (DS): An Atlus joint, and a damn good one. I made the mistake of putting it down for a bit once, and now I might have done it again. Still fresh enough in my head to come back to it. Currently living in my 3DS. Something like 65 nodes deep, which will only be a meaningful metric to people who have played it.

I'd like very much to play through Rainbow Curse before the end of the year. I don't like it NEARLY as much as Kirby's Epic Yarn, the best Wii game, but on its own terms it is an enjoyable game and I'm looking forward to convincing my girlfriend to man the Kirby so I can play the game with a controller and, you know, look at it on my nice television. I'd also like to play Galak-Z, Dropsy, and Box Boy! at the very least before the year is out. Likely, I'll manage one of them. I like Dropsy's odds. The only point and click games I've beaten thus far have been Gabriel Knight and The Shivah, and it would be cool to see one of these types of games done with the...well, the fucking lunatic looking style of Dropsy. Plus the creator of the game was on Sup Holmes a few months ago, and seems like a stand up guy. Listen to Sup Holmes! It's good!

I've been playing Zelda video games on and off for a decade now. Between Minish Cap, Wind Waker, Ocarina of Time, the NES original, A Link to the Past, Majora's Mask, and Skyward Sword, I have had countless hours of fun and enjoyment out the franchise. I enjoy the fantasy trappings of the series, being prone to bouts of Dungeons & Dragons, and damned if you can't count on each entry to present you with some impressive visuals and music. The relative merits of individual entries into the franchise will be debated until we forget how to debate as a species, and the lovely Zelda titles for the CDi are a blight on this planet's history, but you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who could flatly deny the impact of the series on gaming culture. Hell, the case could be made that Zelda (well, Link specifically) is on a short list of characters that people outside of gaming could recognize in a lineup, alongside Pac-Mac and Mario.

That said, in listening to Jonathan Holmes talk a big recently and coupled with criticisms leveled by Giant Bomb sfaff, I've been reflecting on where the series has been going since Ocarina of Time. That's a good game, maybe one of the best ever, but there's such a hushed reverence for it at present that Nintendo seems terrified of poking the formula too much. Rightly so, maybe; every 3D Zelda since OoT has inevitably had a fair number of critics upset with what largely amount to changes in the Ocarina formula either structurally (Majora's Mask), tonally (Twilight Princess), or visually (Wind Waker). The tock to that collective tick was the reaction to Skyward Sword, in my view the most Ocarina-esque console entry in the series after 1998. That game winds up being too formulaic and linear for most, and did so in a manner that often left players feeling patronized and cheated out of actual discoveries. I'm sure somebody complained about the game's presentation as well, but they're out of their mind.

What I'm getting at is hearing Nintendo's top minds being aware that the series could use a shakeup is very encouraging. New ideas and new people on a beloved franchise can be a magical thing. Think of the team that produced Super Mario 3D Land and how young they are. However, I'm convinced that there are plenty of good ideas to be rediscovered within Zelda canon, ideas that could profoundly shake up the Ocarina template and lay the groundwork for a game that will surprise fans and critics.

1. Do something unprecedented with the visuals.

A decade hence, my understanding is that original detractors have come to see Wind Waker for the beautiful piece of art that it is. Eiji Aonuma took a huge stylistic leap from the N64 titles, opting for a bright color palette and chibi modelling for characters. It worked, and the fact that you can play the original today and still be impressed is a testament to the idea that good art direction will always endure over graphical prowess (I hate how that makes me sound like a luddite that didn't build his own PC). Whether or not the fan reaction alone pushed the Zelda franchise into a far more conservative visual direction is an interesting topic, but the result is the same regardless. Twilight Princess is some fantasy-ass fantasy, with a dose of Mesoamerican cyber-eldtric weirdness sprinkled in for flair. The visuals are solid, sure, but the style is probably the least risky of any post-Ocarina release. Skyward Sword is, if anything, a very good blending of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess tendencies. Painterly visuals make the whole game look a bit like a Van Gogh work, and at 480p it was nothing to shake a stick at.

What I would like to see is something I cannot imagine in my head as being the style of a Zelda game, again. I want Nintendo, a company in a concerning sales position at present, to take a huge risk on the next Zelda like the did with The Wind Waker. The way I see it, they're really screwed no matter what they do if all they will do after an announcement is listen to Twitter: people demanding hyper-realism will be upset at anything, people demanding strong art will nitpick individual color choices, and most people will just complain about how any change has "ruined" Zelda for them. In all likelihood, the reaction to the style of the game will be the loudest at the outset. With just that in mind, I am most interested to see this. Everything else below could be drip fed over months.

2. Allow for dungeons to be tackled in a less linear order.

Here's a very old idea. I've been replaying the original Legend of Zelda on the Virtual Console lately. It's game where a man in a cave hands you a sword, tells you that it's dangerous to go outside alone, and then you proceed to do just that. Where are you going? You don't know! When you find something, how do you interact with it. Can you interact with it? The game literally throws you to the wolves (or moblins, or octoroks) with only the instruction to find Triforce pieces (unless you skipped the introduction, which is entirely possible!) and an old man in a cave. And when you come upon a dungeon or a shop in the overworld, is it where you are "supposed" to go? The way to find out is to enter and see if you can handle all of the challenges presented with the tools you have. If yes, maybe.

Rather than being led by the nose from one location to the next, The Legend of Zelda was a fantastic early example of emergent gameplay. You set yourself a goal (go north and east today), and went after it. Discoveries were made, often daisychaining into new abilities and the discoveries those allowed, and eventually you were able to put together all eight pieces of the Triforce. Whether you did things in some predetermined right order (which may or may not exist; I honestly don't know) was beside the point if you enjoyed the adventure. Granted that the story expectations of gaming in general have gone up considerably since 1987, in no small part due to this very franchise, I would love a game where a major element was the sort of "stranger in a strange land" narrative where you've got to leave a familiar setting to a new destination and do it alone. Maybe have a discreet set of visuals for your starting point and the world in which you will explore. But most importantly, let me get out there and mix it up without having to go through a checklist of Forest Dungeon/Fire Dungeon/Water Dungeon/Desert Dungeon/Plot-relevant element Dungeon in my head.

3. Get rid of the Navi analogs.

Skyward Sword is a good game, a beautiful game that Wii owners should strongly consider purchasing. The copy with the included soundtrack specifically is a wonderful 25th anniversary present to Zelda fans. It just sucks that the only part of the game I really hated is one that is present throughout, the disembodied spirit named Fi. She acts as Navi does in Ocarina, only with the added disc space for extra dialog and smugness. Again, think back to the original entry into the series. Remember discovering how you could burn bushes? Wasn't that incredible? Suddenly the entire world became that much more interesting because the potential for new discoveries on each map screen went up exponentially. It was a great moment. Now imagine if, upon picking up the candles, a patronizing blue woman appeared and told you that 92 percent of things around you might be flammable. This is Fi's character and role throughout Skyward Sword. She has her moments, and it ends on a good note, but at times you'll wish you could just turn the damn thing off in an options menu.

Nintendo had already come up with a better solution in the past. Remember The King of Red Lions in Wind Waker? There was a helper character who had clearly defined limits. You could come to him for some tips on how to proceed, but you needed to be at your ship to do so. This worked out nicely most of the time, because confusion came mostly from not knowing where to sail next. You'd arrive at your destination, leave the ship, and voila! The training wheels are off! Nobody asking you to listen every twelve seconds. Nobody pointing out arbitrary probabilities. Nobody doing...whatever Midna does in Twilight Princess. That's a great compromise as you have the best of both worlds. It's also worth pointing out that Navi was originally a targeting contrivance for a new control scheme, provided with a (crap) character as what probably amounts to an afterthought. Prior to the franchise entering the third dimension, the game was about your own problem solving. You could talk to NPCs for hints, or call the Nintendo Helpline, but otherwise it was an adventure into the unknown where you learned the rules of the world as you proceeded through it.

I guess that's really what I want again. I want a world that is new and confusing, but which follows a set of logic that can be used to explore and eventually uncover its secrets. I want to think on my feet again, not be told the answers to problems I will never have because I have a brain capable of basic problem solving skills. I want a game that finally steps out of the long shadow cast by Ocarina of Time and proves to anyone in doubt that The Legend of Zelda's best days are not behind it, a horrible presupposition which has infected almost every Zelda game since.

Also, I could go for an eight piece Triforce again. How awesome would that be?

I started a project to watch fifty films this year. All of them were nominated for Best Picture but failed to win. I'm going to work my way back in time to 1962 over the next year, and blog about each film. The gig is called Almost Oscars, and you can catch it all right here. The first entry is on Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, a movie that good Screened seemed to enjoy a bit. Maybe somebody will enjoy this as much as I am.

I love computers. They have actively enriched my life by keeping me in contact with friends after repeated moves across the country, and their need for continuous preventative maintenance has kept me gainfully employed since 2008. Some of my strongest memories of elementary school are playing Math Blaster on what was probably an Apple II. My family’s first computer was a Packard Bell PC pre-bundled with Windows 95, and I remember my best friend’s older brother showing me how to find that Weezer video and get Hover! running. There was also the traumatic day when my mother flipped out on me for moving the entire taskbar to the left side of the screen and locking it there. When my eight-year-old self showed her how to unlock the thing and move it around, I had my first taste of something like hidden knowledge. I had skills that some people did not have, and would not bother to learn (often for good reason; I know former diplomats who struggle with overhead projectors, to say nothing of differing between POP3 and IMAP email protocols).

The wrinkle in all of this was I was a Windows purist. My sixteenth birthday present, a Sony PC with an ATI Radeon x700 and 2GB RAM (baller) was an XP machine that lasted me from high school through my first year of undergrad. That was about the time I got a job doing IT for the university, which had managed to sequester Vista to maybe ten out of maybe fifteen hundred systems, so by the end I had some basic knowledge of the Windows Registry, Active Directory, driver compatibility issues, and other enterprise IT nonsense to compliment my own desire to have a PC that could run the newest Total War games reliably (which eventually led to me grabbing a sick x1300 card). My first laptop was a desktop replacement-ish Toshiba with a 17” display, and it ran Vista well enough. Then came the day when I hit some manner of recurring BSOD scenario and I had thrown my recovery media into a fire (it was a Vista disk). What was I to do?

“Why don’t you just try Linux?” asked one of my comp sci friends.

“Hmm,” said I.

Thus began my steady evolution into “that guy.” That guy who complains about GUIs and is looking at working on compiling his own kernel. That guy who is beginning to look down upon Steam after their latest EULA as having become a little too nakedly a DRM scheme. That guy whose problems with Windows 8 (and his Windows Phone 7) are not with the interface, but with the closed source philosophical stances they would represent. That guy who, during his annual reimaging process for his own PC (Core i5 2500K, 3.3GHz, 8GB DDR3 RAM, AMD RadeonHD x5770), left a 200GB partition to run the next LTS Ubuntu distro when it dropped.

I am trying to be a Linux gamer. This is a thing that is now more easily done than Linus Torvalds could have dared to dream back when “linux” was a humble ftp file name. Between open source recreations of classics like UFO: Enemy Unknown and Quake III: Arena, Desura, the Humble Indie Bundles, and recent announcements by Valve that Steam itself will soon be coming to my favorite operating system, the options have grown significantly from fast-and-loose Java versions of Minesweeper. I will openly admit that I still boot into Windows 7 to play games that in all likelihood will never come to Linux (Skyrim, XCOM, and the last chapter of Space Marine come immediately to mind). But lately I’ve been drawn to different experiences. Specifically, I’ve found the process of being ground to dust by a game, and having to surmount actual challenges, to be as rewarding (if not more so) than the hundreds and hundreds of hours I’ve spent playing Elder Scrolls games. The three punch combo of Super Meat Boy, FTL, and Jamestown, my needs are pretty much covered. Hell, add Dungeons of Dredmor from Desura and you’ve got an incredible amount of gameplay there for a handful of change (assuming you’ve got access to gold dollars).

What the hell is the point of all of this? I want to write reviews here that reflect my experience with playing the games available to Linux users. I would like to do an Extra Life stream where I play nothing but games that run in Linux. I want to communicate that just because I have elected to use a free, open source operating system does not mean I intend to pirate and steal well-made games whose creators deserve a buck. Don’t take my word for it; look at every Humble Indie Bundle to date and you will see Linux users willing to pay roughly twice as much as Windows users, on average, for the same bundle of games. Linux gamers are a very real demographic, one that developers like Valve are wisely beginning to notice. Others would be wise to do the same, as we won’t be going anywhere (though some of us will maintain a blasphemous dual-boot scenario indefinitely).

My friend and associate Kevin Knodell just published a piece on the closure of Comic Book Inc. in Tacoma. I will confess to never having gone to the shop in question, mostly from my lack of interest in comic books. However, I look at the closing of any independent business with a pain in my gut.

At one point during my time in Parkland, I went out shopping with a new group of Dungeons & Dragons players to my favorite local business, The Game Matrix in Lakewood. It’s a one-stop shop for everything from Warhammer miniatures pants and LARPing supplies, to family board games and copies of The Dead Gentlemen’s hit film The Gamers II: Dorkness Rising. Their selection is astounding, and they’re willing to order anything they don’t have. I’ve not once had a bad customer experience there, and the folks who come in to play war games and run D&D sessions are polite and informative. They’ve even got a soda machine that sells cans of Mountain Dew for fifty cents. Regardless, one of these new players was looking for a fairly specific miniature, pre-painted if possible. They had a pewter, unpainted version of a tiefling druid-ish mini, but they wanted something like a reasonable price for it. The player’s response to the clerk was, “Well, that’s a little expensive. I think I’ll just order this on Amazon instead.”

This was the moment, friends, where I started to think very seriously about Amazon. It also made me wonder about my friendship with the person in question, but that’s for my therapist.

For starters, I can think of no worse of an insult to a person than to say, in effect, that your livelihood is not worthy enough of a thing for me to spend money in your shop. This is not far removed from wishing them deprivation and hunger, for it is the suggestion that their shop is not a worthwhile place. Without their shop, they’ve lost their job. Granted, one person’s business on a ten dollar item might not be enough to bring down an institution. It would take a spectacular amount of lost sales, by a competitor who could compete at such a volume that they could undercut the meager margins on a ten dollar miniature to make that sale. It would also take a generation or two to become more or less indoctrinated and addicted to the experience provided by this competition, to the point where they begin to base most of their purchasing patterns around the outlet. And that, friends, is why Amazon is terrifying to me.

Buying the Pathfinder Core Rulebook is a $50 proposition, plus sales tax. It’s not a cheap book, but then again it is the only book you’d really need to play the game (past a Monster Manual for the DM; and no YOU DON’T NEED THOSE SPLATBOOKS AAAHHHH). That $50 purchase is a commitment to some, perhaps even more to a cash-strapped high school or college student, but its purchase should be seen as something of a rite of passage. The new gamer is taken to their local Mecca, the gaming shop, walked through the halls of endless supplements and Salvatore novels, and handed their new tome. They learn the shopkeeper’s name, and check the nearby corkboard of index cards for any games starting in the area. It can be this great experience, interacting with people and interfacing with tactile items.

Amazon.com cheapens the experience, literally, by offering the same book for $31.50. They’ll go a step further and ship it to your door in two days if you’re a college student. Imagine the convenience of never having to deal with another human being while you get into a hobby whose main conceit is that you must deal with other human beings. Think of the time you could save not being exposed to other games that you might be more inclined to pick up. Add that to the gas you’ll save when your book shows up in an over-large cardboard box, wrapped in plastic bubble wrap or filled with styrofoam, and you’ve got one hell of a deal.

The gloves are off. I see Amazon as one of the most damaging forces arrayed against small, independently owned business. One could counter-claim that the recession is the real killer of businesses, but I would propose that it only fuels the fire beneath them. When I was in college and my income was significantly less, I would look at a $20 savings as the simplest of choices. And that was for admittedly frivolous things; for absolute needs like my textbooks, the choice was even more obvious. Why spend money that I need not spend, I would reason. Me first, I would reason. These guys would give me free deliveries, occasionally next day, on the same item I would pay significantly more for at the local bookstore. I was not the only undergraduate student of modest means in 2008. I feel I can safely say that there are millions of people who look at the value proposition of Amazon (and other online retailers) versus their neighbors, and shrift their neighbors.

The real exception I made to the standing Amazon policy was in used books, which I pursued voraciously at a few fine local shops (Tacoma Book Center and Park Avenue Books mostly, with some trips to Half Price Books after I learned of its existence). I applied the same spendthrift logic to these used shop excursions, but there was also the notion that local businesses were worth the effort to sustain. Over time, I fell deeply in love with the Tacoma Book Center in particular. Their selection is astounding, and they will hunt down and order materials that they don’t have in stock. I would bring in stacks of old books, willing to accept that I would be able to trade them all for maybe one or two “new” titles, and accepted this on the notion that this is a business that lives on selling books for more than what they spent to buy them. I, in turn, clear their inventory space for new books and more sales. It all started to feel very organic, like I was cleaning the teeth of a whale or something. Symbiotic relationships and whathaveyou. Furthermore, I could actually find better deals there than I could from private sellers through Amazon. I wasn’t having to cut my own throat to keep them in business, which was fine by me.

When I think about CBI closing, I think about my own local comic book store, The Dreaming. I chose the apartment I did based in part on the fact that I can basically crawl to The Dreaming in under a minute. It’s an extension of my apartment to me, a library full of Lovecraft statues and New World of Darkness core books (plus those mysterious comic book things). They host tabletop gaming sessions several nights a week, and are now doing Magic twice a week (borrowing space from the Scum of the Earth Church next door). On Free Comic Book Day, the owners placed out a dozen boxes full of used comics (most in plastic) for anybody to grab. They’re providing an outlet and a creative space for a host of nerd folk like myself, and to keep that space in existence I make a conscious decision to purchase what I can from them. When they didn’t have a copy of The Killing Joke, I ordered it through them. Did it take longer than three days? Yes. Did I spend more money than if I had ordered it on Amazon? Yes. Did I help put food in the mouth of the awesome owner? Yes. To me, that will forevermore be the difference.

I’ve had the argument thrown at me that Seattle residents should not be so concerned with giving money to Amazon, as it is in fact a local business. That’s right, jerkoff. It’s a local corporation with branch offices, warehouses in multiple states, and international outlets. Buying your Janet Evanovich novel of the month from them is the moral equivalent of buying it from a human being with a name and a family, who runs a shop a few blocks from where you work. Amazon needs the money, you see. The economy’s in a bad way, and Amazon’s not quite sure how it’s going to pay its medical bills next month. It would love to have enough financial stability to someday take the whole Amazon family on a vacation to Vancouver, but right now it is having enough trouble paying off its student loans and providing for its kids, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.cn. It wouldn’t be having such a hard time if those smug, caviar-drinking small business owners weren’t cutting into their profit margins. #occupymainstreet

Stop buying things from Amazon. Find a local business that will sell you the same item, pay a little extra, and form a relationship with another person. Keep your local storefronts occupied, and keep your neighbors fed. Live in a world where a person can own a small business and make a living, and not be ground into poverty by an impossibly big competitor. If nothing else about this article struck you at all, I would hope this does: be aware of the relationship between your spending habits and their effect on your neighborhood.