I played Galaxies a lot, also Magnets, Pearl and Bridges. Nowadays I play Solo most of the time; yes I know, Sudoku how boring.
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Oh yes, I’d forgotten to include that category. I also do Wordle, plus the other word-based games on NYT: The Mini (and any bonus crosswords they offer that day), Spelling Bee, and Letterboxed.
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Never heard of this until now, but it’s installed and on today’s to-do list.
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Nice. I’ve never quite clicked with Sudoku personally, but it’s super popular for a reason. Also, huh, I never tried Pearl; I like Masyu puzzles but didn’t realize sgt-puzzles had one. Thanks!
It’s such a great collection: all sorts of logic puzzles, most of which you’ll have seen elsewhere, but they’re procedurally generated so you can play as many as you want. And (unless you choose “unfair” difficulties) guaranteed to be solvable without guessing, which I really appreciate. Like, hey, minesweeper that isn’t unfair?
My go-to daily word game lately has been Cell Tower; a grid-based word-search sort of thing, but letters are ordered left to right, top to bottom in the grid, not by the order you select them, so you often get interesting branchy or twisty shapes. And you have to perfectly partition the grid, no overlaps or blank spots. Kinda fun.
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I had the pleasure of working at Origin Systems in Texas when System Shock was in development. (It was made by Looking Glass in Boston, but Origin was handling the QA.) I remember playing some beta builds. It’s a remarkable game. I hope this remake does it justice – I like the demo.
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My friend has gotten me into Valorant (which she insists, and I agree, is more dating sim than competitive game). I’m really enjoying it; it’s a lot more intense and strategic than what I’m used to, but that just makes success more rewarding.
I’ve also been playing through all the Halo games on legendary difficulty with a friend now that the Master Chief Collection is out on PC. We completed Halo 1 in a few days and then spent about four months on Halo 2. It was outrageously difficult, but we finally completed it a few days ago, and now we’re cruising through 3.
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goodness I’d break my controller!
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Dear Zelda diary,
I have been playing too much Zelda. Fortunately, there is too much Zelda to be played, so I have not run out.
Tears of the Kingdom consists of oodles and oodles of neat little things, endlessly satisfying the short-term exploration-gratification that constitutes one of a “truly open world’s” obligations. Breath of the Wild did this, too; TotK outdoes BotW, but this is not entirely surprising.
The more unexpected and striking improvement of TotK is to engage longer-term investment, delayed grafitification, a degree of planning and strategy. There are more puzzles for which the solution is not to be found lying on the ground nearby. There are more quests where, instead of saying “hey, I can handle that, let’s do it right now,” I have to say “hmm. is there anything I can do about that?”
But that might be because I’m still very weak and not good at the game yet. Maybe when I’m incredibly powerful, I will realize that all the quests are very easy, and had been all along.
The extent to which this game is okay with me cheating is astonishing. There are so many places where the designers would have been completely justified to say “no, you can’t do it that way, because it would be stupid”—but they don’t! They let me do it the stupid way! And again, this was already true of BotW but it’s even more true here.
A decade or so ago, the Idle Thumbs podcast was talking about classic adventure games in the Tim Schafer tradition. I remember someone described these games as “cleverness engines” with puzzles that were designed to guide you into understanding the solution in a really satisfying way. In the words of the Idle Thumbs host, you say, triumphantly, “Hey, I know how smart I am! …I’m exactly as smart as the person who designed this puzzle!” Because the point of the puzzle is to guide you into understanding something in the exact same way the designer envisioned it. If you try to solve the problem a different way, the designer has to step in and say: “No, it doesn’t happen that way. That’s not the answer I’m looking for.”
In BotW and TotK, they keep taking away the rails that make sure you’re accomplishing things the right way. I frequently do not know whether I am solving a puzzle correctly. It’s possible that some alternate solutions are “intended” (people say this about flipping over the Labyrinth puzzle in BotW), but it’s impossible to tell.
One puzzle in TotK is a Jenga game. The orb you need is on top of the tower. If you pull out the wrong piece and the orb falls into the pit below, the whole thing resets. It’s clear that you’re intended to carefully pull pieces out (and glue pieces together) to keep the tower from falling, because with the pieces you pull out you can activate a moving platform that will carry you to the top of the tower, where you can grab the orb.
My solution was to make the tower topple just slowly enough that I could grab the orb out of the air as it fell.
I guess they must have foreseen that approach; they could have put a fence in the way or something to stop me, and they decided not to. But every time I hold down a switch in a weird way, or climb the scenery to avoid an obstacle, or build my own scaffolding to avoid climbing something less convenient, there exists an undeniable possibility that I am, however briefly, being smarter than the designers and getting away with it.
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I’m thrown off by TotK because Zelda games historically don’t do sequels in the traditional sense. Sometimes they dabble with allusions to earlier games; significant landmarks like “the Lost Woods” or “the Temple of Time” or “Hyrule Castle” reappear all the time. With TotK, though, we get to see the landscape transformed on a human level: how do individual communities respond to the arrival of an era of peaceful prosperity, which is then cut short by a new catastrophe? Given a large cast of characters that you’re ostensibly already familiar with, how do they all respond to these developments? These aren’t questions I would have expected the Zelda franchise to try to answer, but they’ve embraced this new perspective for the moment.
Because this is such a novel approach for the series, I’ve spent most of my time trying to revisit my favorite areas from Breath of the Wild. I have been surprised and pleased with what I’ve found in those locations. I think this might be a good video game.
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I’m loving this Zelda talk! I’m jumping in as soon as I finish my post-festival content for RTE. Soon! Very soon.
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On the flipside, I’ve been trying to avoid certain alternate solutions because it feels like they take the fun out of the game. It seems I can get past basically any obstacle by Ultrahanding a platform along the path I want to follow, standing on it, then Recalling it, but when that same solution applies to so many problems, it doesn’t feel like I’m really solving anything any more.
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The only Zelda game I have played in any amount is the original for NES, and, while I’ve restarted it many times, I have never finished it. As I always figure I should finish that one before moving on to another, I haven’t played any other Zelda games. Unless you count Smash Bros, which I do not.
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The poll is missing the “I don’t own a Switch” option.
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While Nintendo (rather unwisely) tried to unify the games in 2018, not many games directly link (heh) with other games. The assumption used to be that the triforce bearers (Link, Zelda, Ganondorf) were archetypical characters that echo across worldlines or history (I prefer worldlines). That’s still my headcanon. It’s not like resident evil franchise, where there is a clearer sense of continuity.
I thought about that, but it would often be redundant to other options. For instance, one might not own a switch presently, yet plan to buy one soon for Tears of the Kingdom. Or play it after they buy a switch at a more distant time (one of these days). I think the only option not otherwise accounted for would be “I want to play it, but I will never buy a Switch,” which is probably a small enough group to handle with “it’s complicated.”
meanwhile
I finally got a chance to play Tears of the Kingdom. I really love the new abilities. I think they’re cooler than those in BOTW. Finished the sky island, dove off. Ran the wrong way, then ran away. Did a shrine. This is the stuff! Rewind seems especially cool
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I’d go so far as to say that most Zelda games take care to make sure you can have a great time with them no matter what other games in the series you have or haven’t played—I mean, they have to. They’re trying to sell millions of copies; they can’t afford to make it impenetrable to the uninitiated. (Even with Tears of the Kingdom, probably the most direct Zelda sequel they’ve ever made, you don’t need to know any specific information from Breath of the Wild to get going.)
I think you’re robbing yourself of several good times by forcing yourself to finish the original Legend of Zelda first. It’s a fantastic game for what it is, but it’s very hard. It’s unfriendly to play! It doesn’t benefit from the wisdom of experience that its successors have. And frankly it doesn’t give you anything that will improve your experience of the other games. Gameplay-wise, those other games will tell you everything you need to know. Lore-wise, it’s so vague that I’m not sure whether it takes place before or after any other given Zelda game and it really doesn’t matter.
It barely matters for any of the games except on a few small points: To get the most out of Majora’s Mask, you should play Ocarina of Time first. To get the most out of Tears of the Kingdom, you should play Breath of the Wild first. To get the most out of Twilight Princess, I think you should play Ocarina of Time first, but I haven’t played Twilight Princess, so I’m basing this on secondhand knowledge.
Maybe it would make more sense to make a list of the games that I think would work well as someone’s first Zelda game, with asterisks next to my faves:
- A Link to the Past
- Link’s Awakening*
- Ocarina of Time*
- The Wind Waker*
- The Minish Cap
- Skyward Sword (probably; I haven’t played it)
- A Link Between Worlds*
- Breath of the Wild*
I would not put the original on this list.
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Here are some Zelda podcasts I have recorded with my friend Zach (and later with someone you might know from these forums???)
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This has not been a month for intense gaming, so I’ve gone back to the PC gaming equivalent of comfort food – Heroes of Might and Magic 3! I played a ton of this back in the day, and (checks) 25 years on, I still remember exactly how the interface works, and which towns are good at which things, and which hero skills are completely overpowered, so playing it feels like snuggling into a comfy old blanket. The fact that there’s so much of it also helps with that cozy feeling; GOG has both Heroes 3 Complete – consisting of the main game and its two meaty expansions – and the Heroes Chronicles, which was a set of 8 linked campaigns that were originally offered as incredibly overpriced DLC but are actually pretty fun, especially now that you can get it for like 4 bucks when it’s on sale.
I’ve made it through the full set of Chronicles, which I never played back in the day (fun, very easy) and am just about done with the campaigns in the base game; I’ve heard the difficulty of some of the expansion campaigns is quite high, though, which as I said is not my jam right now so we’ll see how far I get.
(Oh, and re Zelda – don’t have a Switch and given my limited console gaming time these days, I doubt I’ll be getting one anytime soon. Zelda I and Link to the Past were probably my favorite games of their respective console generations, though, and I played through Wind Waker on a friend’s Gamecube and adored it, so hopefully one day I’ll be able to get back to the franchise).
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oh, yeah. that’s the stuff. That was back when I was a PC gamer exclusively. Loved heroes. Loved the mainline M&M stuff, too
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Oh, HoMM3. My friend and I spent weeks playing this at his place back in 2000, but we never got very far. Something about the combination of randomized heroes and upgrades you could acquire meant that playing this felt almost like a roguelike in how quickly a game session could turn for the better or the worse. I should revisit that some day.
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Me too! They’re very beer-and-pretzels compared to the simulation- and narrative-focused Ultimas, or the chilly git-gud difficulty of the Wizardries, but at this late date I think they hold up the best of the classic RPG series – I’ve certainly had just as much fun going back and replaying them as I did back in the day (admittedly, while I’ve gotten through most of the series, I’ve never touched 9, which by all accounts is just awful and more or less killed the franchise. The legacy revival, 10, was actually pretty well done though!)
Yeah, this can certainly be the case, especially if you’re playing single scenarios or a random map instead of the more-scripted campaigns (which is perfectly valid, I know lots of people prefer that approach to things!) But you can easily get a starting hero with an awful initial skill, and some of the towns are straight-up better than others, which can be super frustrating if you get deep into a game without realizing that a run of bad luck means the whole scenario’s going to be a slog.
Happily, it doesn’t take too much esoteric knowledge to avoid that sort of thing, and I think the game is worth the revisiting if you’ve still got interest in it – definitely get the HD mod so it plays nicely with modern interfaces, though. And balance-wise, the castle and necromancer towns are probably the easiest ones to start with, while heroes who are good at diplomacy, earth magic, and logistics generally have the easiest time.
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