Castle Magus

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I could potentially listen to these guys swap stories about the ancient video game industry all day.

I remember back before the N64 first came out; I was watching the local news with my parents, and, out of nowhere, they did a story on Super Mario 64. I was utterly blown away by the graphics. I immediately got on the phone and called my best friend in high school (I would have been heading into my senior year in HS around this time) and raved about it, like, holy fuck, Mario running around in 3D, actually making vocal noises when he jumped and shit? It was mind-blowing at the time.

Looking back on it now... I won't say that Mario 64 looks like ass now, because it doesn't, but, still... late 90s/early 2000s 3D graphics... woof. Honestly, Mario 64 is one of the few games from that era that actually kind of still holds up today, but... again, like they were talking about, there was only 6 years between Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine. Compare, too, the only 5 years between Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker. Or, hell, 8 years between OoT and Twilight Princess.

But then, before that, even crazier than that was the difference between Super Mario 64 and Super Mario World: only five years. Six years between Ocarina of Time and A Link to the Past.

"We think The Legend of Zelda (1986) is the most influential game of it's time, if not of all time. On this episode of Cinemassare's Retail Reviews Mike, Ryan, and Kieran take a look at what made the first Zelda so groundbreaking. Zelda is an action-adventure video game developed and published by Nintendo and designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka. Set in the fantasy land of Hyrule, the plot centers on an elf-like boy named Link, who aims to collect the eight fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom in order to rescue Princess Zelda from the antagonist, Ganon. During the course of the game, the player controls Link from a top-down perspective and navigates throughout the overworld and dungeons, collecting weapons, defeating enemies and uncovering secrets along the way."

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I don't think they said anything here that was really wrong or controversial or whatever. I tried to think of any other game that might be more influential than The Legend of Zelda, and I honestly couldn't think of anything.

And yeah, I'm like that Kieran guy a lot of the time. As I've mentioned in other posts, I'll often start playing a huge game like, for example, Oblivion or Fallout New Vegas and get super far into them, maybe even right up to the point of almost finishing them, but then I'll stop playing, for whatever reason and sometimes even for no real reason, and just move on to something else. Like in Oblivion I did pretty much everything that it was possible to do in that game, except for doing the final few quests of the main storyline. Or like the one time I've played Fallout 2, I made it all the way to the start of the Enclave oil rig, and then never touched it again.

That said, however, I have finished every Zelda game that I've ever played, which is most of them. The only ones of the mainline series that I haven't played yet are the most recent ones, A Link Between Worlds and Breath of the Wild (or the new Link's Awakening remake). I don't really count those multiplayer things (Four Swords, Four Swords Adventures, Tri Force Heroes) as mainline games, and I'm definitely not talking about the spinoffs like Hyrule Warriors or the Tingle games or especially the CD-i shit or whatever else, regardless of however good or bad those may be on their own merits (or lack thereof, as the case may be).

I was watching this video and at first I honestly couldn't tell if the game really was as bad as they were saying it was, or if it was merely the case that all three of those guys were simply idiots, at least in this particular instance. The more it went on, though, the more I felt that it was the latter. It took them, like, 10-15 minutes (of the footage they showed anyway, which was edited, so it was probably even longer than that in reality) to realize that the "mysterious timer" that kept killing them was because they had been poisoned by the snake at the beginning of the game. Also, one of the first things I'd do in a situation like that, which is something they didn't do, would be to check to see if there's an inventory with an antidote or something (which there indeed is, at least according to many of the comments under the video).

On the one hand, to be fair, the fact that the game saves the poison state in such a manner and that you reload a checkpoint still poisoned (but at full life again) is indeed pretty broken and stupid, and is something that should have been caught and fixed in testing. But on the other hand, it was rather embarrassing to watch James, Mike, and Ryan flail about like that for almost 20 minutes, not having a clue as to what was going on until near the very end, and even then, still not a one of them thought to try pressing different buttons to see if it brought up an inventory with an antidote or something.

Normally, I really enjoy the James & Mike Mondays videos, yeah, but this particular one was rather painful to watch. This isn't the first video in which they've bashed a game when it was less the game's fault and more their own fault because they didn't look up the controls before starting the game. And these guys aren't the only ones who sometimes aimlessly fuck around in games and waste 20 or 30 or even 60 minutes or more of everyone's time like that without knowing what the hell they're doing (and then blame the game rather than their own ignorance), either. This is also a problem in more than a few SBFP videos and some Spoony videos (and probably in a ton of the other millions of Let's Play videos out there that I don't watch). If you're going to do a Let's Play or whatever you want to call it of a game like this, it's perfectly fine to go in blind without having played it beforehand and all. I have no problem with that. But even so, I still think that the absolute barest minimum of preparation should be to at least look at the goddamn manual to learn the basic controls or, failing that if a manual isn't available, go to GameFAQs or a wiki or somewhere to do the same. If a game is indeed broken shit in the end, that's one thing, but if a game is "unplayable" simply because you didn't take five minutes to look up a control list, then that's your problem, not the game's problem, and you're the ones who look stupid and broken, more so than the game.

People complain about games these days having tutorials that are too extensive and intrusive and pervasive and whatever else, and they bitch about how modern games do too much hand-holding and the like, but in this particular case, I think the game could have done with a bit more hand-holding, if only to inform the player that there is indeed an antidote for poison and such. If nothing else, just a huge flashing "You are poisoned, you dumbass! Use an antidote!" text on the screen would have been helpful, since the skull-and-crossbones symbol over the life indicator (which didn't appear until after they'd gotten bitten by the snake) apparently wasn't good enough. Go figure.

Disclaimer: I've never played or even heard of this N64 Indiana Jones game prior to watching this video, so no, this isn't me fanboying out because they crapped on my favoritestestest game of all time or some shit like that. If anything, I'm more sad that James Rolfe, one of the earliest and best (usually, anyway) game critics on the Internet (either as the AVGN character or as himself) of whom I am kind of a big fanboy (and for more than just the video game-related stuff he does) ended up putting out such a terribly disappointing video as this, which doesn't show him or his friends in the best of lights. Come on, guys, you can do, and indeed have done, so much better than this. Maybe you should give this game another go, once you actually figure out what the fuck you're doing, rather than just pointlessly assing around for nearly 20 minutes.

When I saw this, the thing that immediately came to mind was Legend of Zelda. (Though it's more like "avenging" than "reporting" in those cases.)

Also, only a little over a month until Skyrim is released. I never did get around to playing all the way through Oblivion beforehand, and there's almost assuredly not enough time to do that now. Oh well.

I was playing Metroid Prime the other day, and I was going through the crashed frigate, most of which is underwater. After the third or fourth trip back through this level, I was thinking something along the lines of "Man, the only thing I like about this level is the music." That's when the lightbulb for the idea of this post appeared over my head.

I'm just going to post a bunch of music from various underwater levels in games I've played. (I thought about including ice levels as well, but that would have doubled the size of this post. Besides, that means I can now do a "Ice Edition" or something later.) I know I'm leaving out a lot of stuff, and I might come back later and add more if I have a "I can't believe I forgot that!" moment. But for now, this is just whatever I thought of off the top of my head. (If you feel like posting your own "I can't believe you left out this!" comments, please do.)

( Youtube videos behind cut )

That's it. For now, at least.