It's the original Zelda's 36th anniversary in Japan, so I thought I'd put in a good word that was a bit too long in coming. I picked up Philip Summers' The Legend of Zelda Hand-Drawn Game Guide on video game news editor Shaun Musgrave's Twitter recommendation, back when the PDF was a cool dollar.
The creators set their sights on producing a physical edition of this as well as guides to Metroid, Ninja Gaiden, and Contra. Then Nintendo showed up with a DMCA, which took the wind out of the sails of the entire project, physical or digital. The digital incarnation of the Zelda guide now lives, like much else, on archive.org.
It is as its says on the cover: a hand-drawn guide to The Legend of Zelda (first quest only) using illustrations only - no screenshots. It looks like you picked up someone's Moleskine. The style is, quite effectively and deliberately, evocative of the iconic Nintendo Power art of Katsuya Terada.
There's so much love put into this - not only illustration-wise, but also in functionality. The clues you get in the dungeons are scribbled on the appropriate square in the dungeon diagram. It even comes with a full-size pull-out map.
Look at that Darknut! Surely worthy of a call to Vermont!
EYELASH GOHMA.
EYELASH GOHMA.
So forgive the lack of images besides this sloppily-padded one:
- With all the games it's inspired and would-be spiritual successors from Bloodstained on down, playing this proved to me that there's just no substitute for Castlevania. It feels great to be back in its take on haunted-house horror, seeing new incarnations of old favorites. It's like catching up with old friends. Frankenstein? I haven't seen you in ages! Oh, you got a rocket launcher now?? Good for you! No other franchise does humor and references as deftly, I think. (Bloodstained handles this department with particular thudding "GEDDIT, GEDDIT?!" gracelessness.)
- That said: this is one of the lesser Metroidvanias. For one, the "switch between partners" gimmick falls by the wayside as the game goes on, as it becomes less and less feasible to have an AI-controlled character eating up MP with the damage they take. Unfortunately, this means Charlotte becomes an afterthought, as she's markedly more fragile, has far fewer melee options, and requires constant menu futzing given that she can equip only one highly-situational spell at a time. Most of her spells are oddly directional in a way that's fine for a bonus attack but not for a main, making them more suited to spamming R and using them and her like an Option from Gradius than Jonathan's subweapons - and even that is less-desirable than saving your MP for Jon's better-directed arsenal in the final stages. By the end, I was using Charlotte only for morphing and poison cures, which is absolutely not what I wanted to happen.
In looking for who-knows-what on the internet recently, I stumbled across, from Hudson Valley (NY) radio station 101.5 WPDH and host Andrew Boris, a collection of vintage photos of the Poughkeepsie Galleria:
This was my mall. I so loved going there in the mid-'80s to early '90s, the great heyday of malls. Seeing this collection of photos was like revisiting one of my favorite childhood places - not even visiting what was left of the place last year could rival it. I now have to tell you about the stores in my mall.
Seaman was a perpetual "what the hell was that?" butt of jokes at Giant Bomb, but Dan Ryckert recently got the gumption actually to go through it, streaming it every day to its end. (Dan gets a lot of guff for the gaps in his education, but he has a genuine open-mindedness and curiosity about the world and his areas of interest that many of his critics lack.) You might have to skip/put up with some streaming carnival activities like eating gross jellybeans for donations and audience members playing rude SFX (some are pretty well-timed and genuinely enhance the experience, but this inspires lesser comedic efforts later on). The game, though, is genuinely off-the-wall, ahead of its time, and of its era all at once. Bonus: recognizing Jeff Kramer as the voice of Seaman before he would go on to play Francis York Morgan; he has a knack for offbeat, rambling characters. I hope Dan assembles his efforts into one supercut for historical preservation, but the VODs are as of this writing up on his Twitch channel. (A Seaman segment opens nearly every video starting with "Getting the Rust out" and ending with "I HOPE SEAMAN SHUTS UP OR ESCAPES".)
ETA: Now conveniently compiled and archived on YouTube, for the edification of us all!
I cannot make mention of Seaman without bringing up Japanese-PM assassination thriller Remote Control, where Seaman plays a crucial role in breaking up the protagonist's relationship:
“You know, I’ve been playing that game again,” she said, glancing over at the aging computer in the corner of the room. She had hauled it out of the closet not too long ago and taken to playing a game she had loved in college.
Aoyagi nodded. “Feeding that creepy fish.” The peculiar game involved nothing more than looking after a thoroughly unlovable talking fish.
“Well, the fish said something that hit the mark.”
“It doesn’t even look like a fish.”
“I know, but it said something after I fed it. It said, ‘Don’t settle for too little.’” Aoyagi couldn’t tell whether he was expected to laugh or cry. “And it hit me - it was talking about us, about you and me.”
“I’m not sure I like having my future decided by a talking fish.”
**********
Six months later, he went to a shop that dealt in secondhand computer games and on a whim bought the one with the creepy fish. Perhaps it was a form of rehabilitation, a way of testing how much of the hole he’d been able to fill.
At first, he was just going through the motions, tending the computer aquarium according to the instructions; but gradually he grew more intent on the game until, to his complete amazement, he was stopping people at work to tell them about the condition of his virtual fish. One evening at the end of the second week, the fish suddenly turned to look out at him.
“Don’t settle for too little,” it gurgled.
“You shit!” said Aoyagi, stabbing his finger at the screen. “That’s what you told her. That’s what fucked everything up.” The fish ignored him and swam calmly away through glowing blue pixels. “But you know,” Aoyagi muttered at its receding tail, “if I’d given her the smaller half [of the chocolate bar] that day, she’d have been mad about that instead.”
The fish ignored him, but finally turned back with a withering look. “Did you say something?”
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