I heart Zelda 4-eva

Yes, life is good inside the Musgrave estate. I’ve got fresh-ground coffee, I’ve got gigs of stolen music, and I’ve got a girl I’m crazy for home from Europe.

And to say nothing further about the above for the time being, I’ve got a copy of The Legend of Zelda for the NES and a gamepad to play it with. Playing through the game for about the thirtieth time, but for the first time in about 3 years, I slipped without effort back into Hyrule without really understanding how. Those familiar with the game know that many secrets in the overworld can be discovered by bombing rock faces or burning bushes, and after all this time I still remembered exactly which bushes and sections of wall to destroy through an almost unconscious intuition. It would just seem that a series of rock sprites looked too smooth, or that a certain shrub arrangement was just a little dense; I’d apply the proper tool and hear the secret melody, every time. These obscurities have been burned into my brain by years and years of repetition. If this paragraph doesn’t make any sense to you, then I honestly feel sorry for you and suggest that you play the game in question immediately. Zelda was an important part of my upbringing. My loyalty lies first with Link, then with the rest of you, and that is my final word on the subject.

Needless to say, I am excited almost to the point of incontinence by the Nintendo Revolution trailer. I honestly believe that Nintendo is led by brilliant visionary geniuses. There’s an interesting column about how they create genres, lead 90% of the industry’s innovation, and manage to make money while being pummeled in sales. As Tycho from Penny Arcade notes:

The counterexample I keep hearing about the peripheral has to do with third parties, and how scary the controller is, but for a couple generations now their systems have been (at least, outside of Japan) a kind of dedicated shrine to their own games, games that shame the rest of the industry with their polish, their palette, and their playability. They forge unique deals with companies like Capcom and SquareEnix to bring sometimes extraordinary exclusive content. I can live with that.

Having a finite amount of time to play videogames, I tend to only play the best ones. To call me a Nintendo fanboy might be accurate, but that only obscures the fact that my fandom is created by the sort of innovation Nintendo has always been known for, innovation which creates games that are fun to play in the absence of ultra-polished graphics or 60+ hours of content. When they do make the graphics spectacular, as is clearly going to be the case in the next one… sorry, I passed out for a second in awe there. I’m better now.