Bliterations
Thoughts/Gaming

My Summer Conundrum
25
Jul

We are now officially done with one-third of our summer, and I couldn’t be feeling more pressure with regards to the videogames that I’m currently playing. It’s not like the old days: Summer slammed into our soft impressionable minds like a freight train of liberation, and the possible configurations of doing everything but anything stretched on for subjective eternities. Videogames were a part of my everyday playscape, as it was for a lot of people, and while the leisure-ness of games also lent itself a little guilt during the school year, summer meant we were free to spent hours and hours—days if some of us wanted to—tackling a game (or two, or twenty) without fear of any harsh parental scoldings other than the occasional “go outside” mantra and, frankly, I was totally fine with that. It all fused together into a tapestry of seasonal freedom and I could shift activity gears seamlessly. The games would always be there, after all, and time was simply a measure of sunlight, not scheduled events.

It’s different now. This is something every gamer realizes when they reach their 20s: our calendars condense closer and closer together (”the circle is closing in,” I think the old saying goes) and free time becomes a commodity as precious as a gemstone. Nothing will bring those carefree days of childhood back. Coincidentally, the gaming industry seems aware of this as much as we do, and exploits our nostalgia to nefarious ends: “Retro” releases tantalize with the possibility of re-living our pre-pubescent periods, and franchise reboots claim to strip a game down to its core appeal, to its “roots,” brewing the feelings we once felt when we first laid eyes on them. The industry didn’t simply abandon our demographic when we aged out; it followed us because we are STILL the demographic, and are doing everything imaginable to persuade us to purchase new merchandise by disguising it as the old. And, for the most part, it’s working.

Yet old habits die hard, and I have a particular summer gaming tradition that I’m currently agonizing over, which is to play a Zelda game from front to back. I’ve been doing it on and off for the better part of twelve years, and while last season was Zelda barren as I tried to settle into a new full time job, this year I plan to ritualistically dive in head first, which is exactly where my conundrum lies. But first things first: why this particular tradition?

Zelda games, to me, exclusively have the summer vibe going on more than any other. One can indirectly channel the feelings that creator Shigeru Miyamoto must have experienced as a youth during his own adventures in the forests and caves around his hometown of Kyoto, the inspiration for the Hyrule universe. The essence of Zelda has remained resolutely intact all of these years, and no matter how ridiculous and off-center the series may spin (for example, Link shredding on a cog), one aspect of gameplay is delightfully ever-present: environmental exploration, the timeless techniques of turning over every rock, bombing every crack and poking through every bush while searching for all manner of hidden treasure, finding your way around more by memory and natural landmarks than by map. Of course, Zelda games do have maps—considering some of the trickier 3-D temples, it would be ridiculous if they didn’t—but do you honestly use them more than sight alone?

Another important and quintessentially summer-like staple of Zelda games is that more than half of Link’s time in Hyrule is spent outdoors, dwarfed by his natural surroundings and forcing the player to simply take a moment and assess their rightful place within that world. Every time you enter a town or dungeon or acreage of land that hasn’t been revealed before, a short panoramic cinema offers a quick geographic survey that both invites and overwhelms, a travelogue of epic proportions, the ultimate vacation. The inevitable warping takes much of the tedium out of travel, but at the start of these games, all that legwork is actually useful in getting a sense of the scope of the Zelda universe, a scope that, with the later 3-D iterations, spans time as well as space. The sheer pleasure of living in Hyrule for dozens of hours isn’t just from Link’s satisfying workout on that gentle Nintendo treadmill—starting as frail and all but written-off forest waif and ultimately arriving at nearly indestructible master swordsman—but from taking part in a narrative that encompasses an entire ecosystem, in which a reward can stem from merely watching that Hyrulian sun rise and set many, many times, a constant in a game constructed around a remarkable transformation. Link’s adventures encompass summer, to be sure, and not just any summer, but ones that we always remember as occurring long ago: fresh, exciting, and endless.

What’s vexing me isn’t the issue of whether or not to play through a Zelda game: considering the unusually cool and damp June that the East Coast has gone through, it’s high time for some sun and adrenaline. The question, rather, is WHICH game to play? I held off on finishing Twilight Princess because I purchased it with my Wii in January ‘07 and, snowboarding section or not, it just didn’t feel right to be playing it in the winter. I wouldn’t mind revisiting Wind Waker again, and Majora’s Mask recently made its way onto Virtual Console (never mind that the game is a masterpiece of dread; that’s a topic for another article). Oh, and the handheld games! I can actually play those outside, in the open air, maybe sitting on a park bench or walking The Ramble. What a Mobius strip that would be! I have been meaning to play through Link’s Awakening again after being swaddled in fuzzy Game Boy memories this year. Or maybe Ocarina of Time? Or A Link to the Past? Or The Adventure of Link? Argh!

Now that there are only a little less than two months left, time is running out for my Summer Zelda playthrough, and I’m a little panicky. Maybe the only way to settle this is through a marathon series session. Hmmm. What do you think? And more importantly, what were your summer gaming traditions, and do you still observe them today?

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on July 25th, 2009 :: Posts :: Tags : , , , , , , , ,
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Remembrance of Things Boy
23
Apr

The 20th anniversary of the Game Boy was a few days ago, as I’m sure you all know, and there’s been some fine retrospectives, personal reflections and historiography on the plucky little machine that moved so much product for Nintendo it kept them high above water even as its popularity with gamers waned. Seek and ye shall be rewarded, wanderer of the aether!

I’m sitting here trying to think of a way to articulate exactly what I want to say about the first and, in a way, only portable gaming console that I owned. Sure, I was one of the few lucky kids to have an older brother who instinctively wanted everything that his younger sibling didn’t (which is also a roundabout way of saying that we had a Game Gear in our household at the same time since he wanted a portable console that was “not Game Boy”), and I did later buy the successor to Nintendo’s savior, the Game Boy Advance. Heck, I’m currently playing Rhythm Heaven right now on my DS Lite, so it’s not like it was the ONLY portable system in my possession.

But, yes, in a way it was. My memories of Game Boy mostly consist of it being the first palpable object that I always took with me on long car trips and into doctors’ offices (save for my trusty yellow Sports Walkman). Most of my experiences with my DS have actually been indoors, on my sofa or at my day job on a slow day, and these play-sessions almost always have a tinge of boredom attached to them; its just a way to pass the time that also involves videogames. This wasn’t so with my Game Boy. There was an omnipresent THRILL in being able to play a videogame away from a television, with the screen and your hands so close together it almost felt as if you were symbiotically bonding with the machine, with all of your actions somehow becoming more immediate and empowering. This was the system that gave us Donkey Kong (1994), our first taste of the way our modern Mario games would control in a 3-D environment. The funny thing is, looking back, debuting Mario’s new move-set on Game Boy was the best method possible, as that instant and visceral feel of interacting with a screen so close within your personal space made the jump to 3-D realism pretty intuitive. It was a personal extension of character control on two different levels, but the results were one and the same.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on Link’s Awakening (1993). This game is championed by many, and I can certainly echo those sentiments. In fact, quite by accident, I made the overworld map of Koholint my desktop background at work a week before I realized that the Game Boy’s anniversary was approaching, but even before I decided to sit down and try to hash out my feelings on it, I was admiring the thought and care that went into the overworld design (click to view fullscreen):

Looking at this map as a cohesive whole, one can see how an area blends into the next in a natural geographic way. There aren’t really any jarring transitions from one environment to another, yet all of the standard Zelda ecosystems–graveyards, deserts, mountains, towns–are still intact. It actually seems like a living, breathing world, clearly evolved and alive well before you even turn your Game Boy on (which is all the more ironic and heartbreaking considering the story’s ultimate outcome). What’s even more brilliant about the layout of Koholint is that it begs to be explored: there are dense pockets of marshy swamps and shorelines and bushy fields that are TOO enticing for an explorer to simply scuttle through. The developers employed the perfect way to encourage this kind of exploration as well: an overhead map broken down into a grid of blacked out squares that are “filled-in” one by one, as you move from screen to screen. The temptation to “reveal” the entire map ensured that you would travel to every nook and cranny, leaving no stone unturned or rock wall un-bombed.

Well, I said I didn’t want to get started but I did anyway. Suffice it to say, I obviously have a very soft spot for Link’s Awakening since I’m gushing about the MAP. The game kept my eyes glued to that small green screen for hours. I remember taking a family trip to Napa during that time, but to be honest, I couldn’t even tell you what the landscape looked like. I can’t describe a single vine. I do, however, know every square inch of Koholint from memory.

So far, no other portable system has lived and traveled with me in quite that same way, and I don’t know if another one ever will. There are many great games for DS, and I certainly have the hope that maybe I’ll find another Link’s Awakening or Donkey Kong (or Picross or Metroid II or Super Mario Land 2 or Tetris), something that will grab and beckon me to take it out, to have its narrative meld with the one I have to follow every time I step outside of the escapist glow in my electronic sanctuary. In the meantime, Dear Game Boy, I have my memories…and frankly, isn’t that part of the fuel that sustains our passion for this medium anyway?

Koholint map courtesy of VGMaps.

Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 23rd, 2009 :: Posts :: Tags : , , , , , ,
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