Posts by Lace Sabatons

For me it's all about the title theme:

I played it pretty much the same way when I was a kid. Wandering around, getting in battles, occasionally the fights were too tough and I died, and eventually I'd get bored. It wasn't until I was an adult that I actually made any kind of progress at all in the game.

I think the best part of the game is actually the dungeons. You really have to make your own maps to be successful at them, and the layout of the game was so blocky that you could easily use graph paper to make your maps by filling in the squares with walls in them.

Making your own maps is the kind of thing that we don't really get to do in video games anymore. And DW made it so easy that it actually ended up being really fun.

I've always been obsessive about saving everything.

Unfortunately I have so many things saved, that it's sometimes difficult to find a specific thing that I'm looking for. Also, it has become harder to save things as more online activity becomes browser-based.

But yeah. I've got tons of voice clips from back then.

Cool beans, I'm interested to see what you come up with.

I still have the "This is Kaynil, annoying you again!" .WAV file that you made back in ~2002.

Nice to meet you.

@LinkSkywalker

Though I've generally decided that Twitter isn't really useful for me. I spend most of my social media time on google+. I'm +Beloch Shrike there.

I would add, to my previous comment, that if there's a "Winner," that means someone has to pick the winner.

Whoever picks the winner can't really pick themselves. If they do, it looks like / makes them feel like they're being unfair to the others.

Which means that whoever ends up being pegged as the Judge will be less motivated to contribute to the contest. Which is bad, because in a small community like this, we want as many people as possible to be motivated to participate in any group projects.

Quote from Sardonic Pickle

:'( *grabs his N64 and runs away into the neighbouring field*

Don't get me wrong. I like the N64. I have no personal problem with the controller. But the controller was poorly designed. When people look at any other controller, they can instantly see exactly how it works. When people look at an N64 controller for the first time, they're just confused.

Perhaps the controller's design might have been justified if you ever actually needed to use the left handle. But aside from a handful of games no one cared about, that didn't really happen.

Yesterday I watched Caligula for the first time. Damn.

I expected this movie to be a hidden gem, but I didn't expect it to be as good as it is. It's beautiful, from start to finish. The sets were amazing, the narrative was surprisingly faithful to the historical accounts. Studying Roman history is a bit of a passion of mine, particularly the period of the late republic, through the crisis of the 3rd century. There was a lot of historical tidbits present in the movie, but left largely unexplained. (Particularly the auger of the raven in Caligula's bed). It felt good to be rewarded for my knowledge by having a movie present the events without a lot of extra explanatory text. Also, god damned Malcom McDowell. I think I prefer his performance here to the one in A Clockwork Orange.

Is it weird that young Malcom McDowell did two movies where he played the most utterly despicable human being imaginable, then forces the audience to sympathize with him? That seems like a really specific niche to get typecast in.

I'm surprised to say that my one complaint is that there was too much sex. It's some of the most well-shot sex I've ever seen, but a few of those scenes were gratuitous. In particular the scene where Julia Drusilla is conceived. Up until that point, Drusilla and Caesonia hate each other. Then they start making out with each other. Then it cuts to a pair of lesbians who are spying on the royal family and having sex with each other.

What?

Apparently this scene was inserted after the fact by Penthouse, who pushed the movie into a more pornographic direction. To the point where the director took his name off of the production, which is too bad. A debauched conception scene would be appropriate, but that scene was weird to me.

Also, the whole scene where Caligula sneaks into the women-only gathering of the priestesses of Isis. Why do the priestesses of Isis have an orgy when they meet? It felt like a locker room or slumber party sex fantasy, rather than a coherent part of the narrative. Having the Isis ceremony be more austere would have served as a good counterpoint to the depravity of the rest of the movie. I don't know if this scene was also against the wishes of the director, but I don't think so.

The highlight of the movie by far is Drusilla's death scene. It stands out to me as the single most heart-wrenching loss of human life I've ever seen depicted in a film. The fact that the person the viewer experiences their grief through is Caligula himself is a testament to how well the scene was arranged. I was god damned head-in-hands weeping for his loss.

Also very good is the final scene. From Caligula getting stabbed, his daughter being bashed against the marble stairs, the baffled Claudius, and the washing away of their blood. Dayum.

A Link to the Past entered my life twice, both of which are memorable for me.

The first time was shortly after the game was released. When I was in elementary school, I met a kid named Jake Gott with whom I got along with exceptionally well. Most of the things I was into at the time were not very popular among my peers, but Jake was just as passionate about Star Wars and computers as I was. We spent a lot of time together, and one of the many things we shared was our first encounter with A Link to the Past when his parents bought it for him. He and I had spent hours playing on his SNES together, but that game stood out as different from the rest. It was on a whole different level from Contra III and Secrets of Mana.

When I was a young teenager, Ocarina of Time came out, but my parents decided the game was occultic, so I wasn't allowed to get it. But the release of OoT got me thinking about LttP again. All the fond memories I had of playing it, and how good a game it was. I decided to save up money to buy an SNES and ALttP. Once I had the money, I bought a refurbished SNES from a second hand games store. But it took weeks of calling pawn shops and game stores until I found one that had a copy of LttP.

Saving up, searching for, and finally playing through that game as a teenager is a delightful memory for me.

I don't think I can separate my nostalgia from my critical thinking on this one. The North American version is better in every way, to my eyes.

I never did, but I did write a walkthrough for it.

The early 2000s were a weird time for the Internet.

Ninja Gaiden 2 was always my favorite as a kid, though I was rarely able to beat the spider boss at the end of the third level. And I don't think I ever got very far at all in the fourth level. Fuck that shit.

Dragon Warrior was also a favorite of mine. The art on the cartridge was so evocative, and the open world exploration of the game was so new and exciting at the time. I've played DW all the way through twice as an adult (once on an emulator, and once on the cartridge when I got it.) It really is a dull, boring game. But I have a fond place in my heart for it.

Oh, and the original Castlevania is still the only Castlevania game that I like very much at all.

This might be a good place to ask, who is the woman?

She's a prominent character in the animation, so I assume she's shown up in a Zelda game at some point. But I'm long out of the Zelda loop.

It does stray a little far from the formula. But the Zelda games have worked themselves into such a weird, stagnant corner. I'd love to see a game really upend the conventions of the series.

And not the dumb, poorly-concieved kind of upending we got in Skyward Sword.

Not to mention the Timeline weirdly recontextualizes A Link to the Past's story.

Supposedly it takes place in a time when Gannon killed Link, and ran amok.

So...why does Hyrule have a normal ruling family in LttP? Why is Gannon only now causing trouble, supposedly long after he won the battle for control of Hyrule?

That shit makes no sense.

I haven't played Twilight Princess, and I don't really like most of what I've heard about it. But I'd have to agree that it probably has the best Zelda design. They took the great design from OoT and gave Zelda an edge.
Certainly there was an element of "Oh, you didn't like Wind Waker's cartoon style? Well then you must want us to be SUPER DARK AND GRITTY AND SERIOUS." which, yeah, was dumb. But Zelda herself looks a little less naive in the TP design. She seems to have more focus and agency, which I appreciate.

Low-effort creative work collaborations could be fun.

A 1-page fanfic, a 10-minute pencil sketch. These are the kinds of things that adults can fit into their busy lives.

I'm not very interested, personally, in the idea of a contest. Contests have winners and losers. If someone thinks they're going to lose no matter what, because they don't know how to write or how to draw, then they're going to be less motivated to participate. If we did, for example, a 1-page fanfic collaboration. I'd be more interested in seeing a pdf with all the contributions, than I would in seeing a single entry raised above the others for no real reason.

That's just my two cents, of course.

A Link to the Past is also my favorite!

Tell us some things about yourself. How did you get into the zelda series? What are some other hobbies or pursuits of yours, aside from playing Zelda games?