The Legend of Zelda in Three and a Half Hours

Having some spare time can be a good thing now and then. And despite the usual amount of chores that need to be accomplished on a daily basis in life, something inside my inner sanctum compelled me to dive into the original "Legend of Zelda" head first. For no apparent reason I just decided to play (or perhaps I thought it would look pleasantly peachy emulated on my 65 inch LCD and oh yes, it did). And play I did, at a frenzied pace! Granted I came nowhere near the thirty four minutes and four seconds record of the insane person on "Speed Demos Archive" but damn, I was proud of myself. The dude in question calls himself  "Tom 'rdrunner' Votava." Tom, all I can say is, my GOD man! Total Super Nova bro!

My experience with Zelda? I haven't really touched the game "seriously" in 20 years. Other than to test it out on various NES emulators to make sure they worked properly. That being said, what else can one say about this game? There are probably more websites and game write ups devoted to it than hairs on my legs (the hair on my legs is at least as thick as the hair on Robin Williams back, remember the Fisher King? Blind I tell you, BLIND!). So why not just talk about the feelings this game evoked from me instead? I hope that would be less boring. For writing and reading.

It made me feel young, angry, joyous, hungry, jaded, happy, hurtful, sad, insane and smarter, I think. It's a great game, honestly, it is. Even in 2013. I never finished this game all those years ago. I just, couldn't. That last dungeon got me every time. Just a maze of blurbbbbbbling ghosts and shield eating pancake stacks. Oh yeah, and those happy decapitated hopping rabbit heads. What the hell man? What WERE those things? And even with the best sword they still took like 4 or 5 hits a piece! Technically they took as many or more hits than Gannon himself. And they were so much happier...

 But let me tell you, when it comes to final dungeons with insanely difficult mazes (Revenge of Shinobi, I'm looking at you) it generally takes me 20 years to beat them. Or at least the advent of the internet with some of those leg hair websites I was talking about. You know, the ones with more insane people that screen cap entire games. But I'm glad to say I did not use a single GameFAQ for this game. The leg hair websites with the maps though... man... thank you. For all the people like me who value 25 year old games over normal things like you know, cats, your maps get us a piece of our childhood back. Minus the frustration of bombing three sides of every room and burning every bush that looks like it's a little strange, and pushing every rock that's conspicuously off by itself in the middle of a forest, and last but not least, hitting the exact SPOT with a bomb where you could have sworn that cave was 20 years ago... Dude, I swear it's right there! Oh fuck it just pull up the screen caps from Zelda Wiki already... 

What A Crysis....

I really don't know what to make of this. I'm NOT a first person shooter guy for the most part so I guess my opinions on this genre are tainted from the start. And it's hard to discern exactly what drew me to this experience. The graphics? The story? The Sci-Fi Elements? The Tropics? The Physics? Ahhhhh the physics.... and how wonderful they are! How many games are there that let you shoot palm trees into bits? And by bits I mean bits and bits and more bits. You can blast the trunk down into tiny hunks of wood and they will roll about on the ground gloriously!  I waited for 5 years to blast those hunks! Although if you shoot some other kind of tree these results generally aren't repeated... what a shame. Damn you Crytek. I want all my trees to explode into bits!

I became enamored with this game back in 2007 and knew that one day I'd be playing it on max settings and not a day sooner. So five years later I did just that. And "that" is the other thing, the technology behind this game. It still takes a hulk of a PC to run this thing on MAX settings and get any kind of decent frame rate. It still chugged on my PC (which is good of course) when things got busy, even 5 years on. Boy was it pretty though.... probably the prettiest game I've seen. But physics and pretty scenery are about the only real endearing things here.

After my initial rush of: "wow this game is freaking incredible!" I was wrought with a typical FPS story, typical characters, typical dialog, typical over the top voice acting, typical weapons, typical alien threat that no one saw coming (except you the player of course) blah blah blah. You know, just once I'd like to hear a scientist not say something along the lines of: "We must study it, don't destroy it !" While at the same time a bad-ass general guy saying something like: "We must nuke it now before it's too late!" And you wonder why when every horrible FX laden action/Sci-Fi movie comes out you see the critics comparing it to a video game. Games like this give video games a bad name when it comes to dialog and story telling! How about some real narrative for once. Is that too much to ask for? But it is a shooter... Ugh....

Where this game does shine though, is in the jungle. When you are immersed in that glory and you can almost feel the leaves rubbing your arms as you traverse this insane reality these guys have created. You feel like you are actually there. You can see the detail in every leaf, every blade of grass, every rock, it's truly wondrous. I had more fun powering up and tossing barrels 100 feet into the air just to see how they would react with the environment than actually shooting things. I can forgive a game it's asinine tendencies when it makes up for them in other good ways, like palm trees exploding. But once the trees stopped falling, I lost interest and bland, vanilla, genericism soaked the rest of my experience.

Once the glory of the jungle is over, the game switches gears and just delves into boring FPS tedium complete with mostly static environments, big action set pieces with the illusion of control, aliens that look like every other alien and a big stupid gun that you only get to use once. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy myself in this game. But by the time I was two thirds of the way through I just felt like EA came in and told Crytek to stop playing around with the physics engine and blow some shit up! Oh wait....