Windfish's Slumber

Hoot hoot,

Tonight's topic is a little old original Game Boy title called The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. I thought about deferring this to Pkadden, as he has more experience with it than I do, but LA was my first game and nostalgia drives me onward. Besides, there is nothing saying he can't post about it too.

My nostalgia for Link's Awakening knows no bounds, so forgive me if I'm not totally objective, but the game rocks face. It is probably my favorite portable title of all time (except maybe Aria of Sorrow) and my second favorite Zelda game.

The game is huge, a full adventure with eight complete dungeons and an over world that rivals A Link to the Past in size. There are plenty of interesting, wacky characters to meet and help, from Crazy Tracy to Bow-wow. The puzzles are perfectly balanced and a lot of fun to figure out, while maintaining a difficulty that is actually higher than recent titles. The story, while simple, is pretty great and the ending is fairly courageous for a game. Every nook and cranny of the island is memorable and entertaining. The graphics are surprisingly detailed for a Game Boy game and the music is consistently awesome (Tal Tal Heights anyone?). Really, I can't think of anything negative about it; the fact that I wish it was even longer is a testament to its quality.

What impresses me the most is how much is packed into that small cartridge. A lot of love went into making every part of the experience and it shows. They don't make them like they used to, but then again I am highly biased. Someone playing LA for the first time today is not likely to be nearly as blown away by it, but such is the curse of ever improving technology.

If at all possible, play it on a portable system; that was what it was designed for and it is more suited for such a machine. One of my all-time favorites, I very highly recommend Link's Awakening.

Can you give me some vittles?,
THIEF

A Puzzling Development

Riddle me this,

Defining things has never been easy for me. In English class a couple years ago, we had to write a paper on "Art" and "Life", so I set about attempting to answer a question humanity has been struggling with since the first cave paintings. What I came up with was simultaneously too broad and too complicated to be taken seriously; hell, I didn't even know what I was talking about at points. With that in mind, please bear with me as I attempt to address the point raised in the previous post.

As it stands in the industry today, a puzzle is an obstacle that impedes the player's progress but poses no danger from AI-controlled enemies. I am not talking about cave-ins or anything else a developer uses to funnel user's progress that may be overcome through glitches and tricks. They usually fall outside of the normal range of action; for instance, in RE4 no puzzles really involved blasting Zombies. They were either "find the artifact for this door" or fairly simple mini-games in low stress situations, like Ashley's tiles. This seeming inability to integrate the action mechanics with more mentally taxing activities is unfortunately common.

It is this separation that I believe truly define puzzles. In a Zelda game, first you clear all the enemies in a room, then you go about figuring out what needs to be done to proceed. The same goes for God of War, or Metroid Prime, or just about any adventure game. In the commentary for Half-Life 2: Episode One, Valve talks about using them to break up the action, to avoid "combat fatigue". The situations are generally not threatening and let the player use something other than their reflexes for a bit.

Another common feature is the relative ease with which more can be solved. Sure, there may be a time-limit imposed, but no developer is insane enough to make puzzles terribly difficult. A lot of people play games for mindless, instant gratification; if they get frustrated and give up, chances are they won't buy the sequel. Thus, appeasing the lowest common denominator becomes the business model and games become dumber.

This is not to say that there aren't aspects of games require some thought. I love finding opponents that I can't just hack to death, but rather require some mental activity. However, stunning an electric jelly in Link's Awakening before stabbing it does not qualify as a puzzle. Nor does learning Dullahan's attack pattern in Portrait of Ruin, or grabbing a grenade out of a Zombine's hand with the Gravity Gun in HL2: Episode One.

Some genres, like racing games, SHMUPs and fighters, are devoid of puzzles. They have no need for such contrivances because they offer a pure experience. The core gameplay is what attracts fans and anything else just gets in the way.

On the other end of the spectrum are, of course, puzzle games. The way I see it, a puzzle game is about establishing patterns or reaching a goal. Your objective and tools are clearly defined from the beginning and do not change throughout. The challenge usually comes from an omnipresent time constraint and increasing complexity. This encompasses everything from Monkey Ball to Lumines to Minesweeper.

It is difficult to generalize about the state of puzzles in gaming and will only become more so with time. There are plenty of examples of inventive puzzles to be found throughout the medium's history, don't get me wrong. Hopefully, as technology progresses, developers will be able to integrate action and brain-teasers more thoroughly than ever before.

But I'm not holding my breath.

I'm not sure how thorough I have been or if I can back up what I wrote, but I'm too tired to continue musing. Comments are welcome. Criticism is scorned. You know how we roll.

Good, or Don't Be,
The Cruel Angel's Thesis

Can't stop the blog

Welcome, world-weary travelers,

I want one. That takes some serious dedication, but judging from the amount of coverage, he'll fetch a pretty penny for it.

Did you know blog is short for web log? WERE YOU EVEN AWARE OF IT!?!?

While I'm linking stuff, I might as well mention this, as it is pretty cool. Nintendo gets publicity, Penny Arcade gets a big discount and sick kids get games. As cool as Child's Play is though, I kinda wish some of the money would go towards actually fighting whatever afflictions these kids may have. I mean, look at the response in the gamer community. Obviously, there is huge support for the program; hell, I went to a Magic tournament and they were taking donations for it. Keeping the kids' spirits up with books, toys and games is very important, but it seems like more can be done.

Don't get me wrong, I love what Mike and Jerry (Gabe and Tycho) are doing and I support it 100%, but let's see how much further we as gamers can go. And yes, we are on a first name basis.

I punched a baby once...in anger. But in my defense, the baby was being kind of a dick,
Gabe out