One Down... 59,999 to Go!

How on Earth did Nintendo ever expect anyone to beat the first Zelda game without spending 99 cents a minute on the Nintendo Hotline (with your parents permission of course). On top of that... how the Hell did I ever do it?

I actually remember the first time I beat it because it was the first video game I ever "beat". It was totally awesome. I vaguely remember my mom being pissed because I stayed inside all day on a summer day to finish the last level. I was totally in awe, as if there should be some further reward for BEATING A NINTENDO GAME aside from a scrolling screen of text or two and then the words "The End". The real question though, is how the hell did I do it?

First think about this compared to most of today's games. Ummm... Lets see... what have I played recently? It's not the greatest example but it still follows most of the current game trends; I played Portal about a month ago for the first time. In that game the first few levels are there to orient you with how the game works... shoot this hole thing here, you'll go through it and end up there. From there on the whole thing is pretty linear... "No seriously shoot THAT portal HERE, then shoot the other one HERE! I SWEAR! It'll get you where you need to go! (BTW the cake is lie)" Three hours later I was done. I'll admit I did have to use GameFAQs for one puzzle, but aside from that the "hardest most mind boggling game ever" (as it had been hyped up to me) proved nothing but a fun physics toy that I was done with in one evening. Most of that was due to the fact that the whole thing is pretty damn linear and straightforward even with all the physics mind-fucks thrown in. That and I'm 23 years old. I can follow directions, even if they're subtle. A picture of a dude falling out of one portal into another to gain momentum at the start of the level means, that's what I'm gonna have'ta do to pass the damn level!

Now... Let's go back to another time called "1991 or so" where a precocious five year old was plopped down in the middle of a seemingly massive world with absolutely no directions and basically told, "figure that shit out!" That world was called Hyrule and the game was Zelda. Months and months, possibly years later... I don't remember when, but somehow I beat it before the internet existed. No internet. No directions. No Nintendo Power. No nothing... except for a tattered overworld map that may have shown entrance locations for the nine dungeons and nothing more that I remember coming with the game. I'm not sure if that actually existed or I'm making it up. Can someone confirm that for me?

To give you an idea of the sheer difficulty of this game lets take this scenario... My sister recently bought me the original Zelda for Nintendo Wii on virtual console. I'm currently blowing my way through it to reorient myself and then I will try to take on the secret second quest that I still to this day, two decades after the games release, have not beaten. Everything was going all right until I got to the seventh level and you go to a room which you can not pass and are faced only with a single Moblin (or whatever they're called) saying "grumble grumble". Oh shit! I forgot to get the meat, an item which only has one use in the whole game, you put it in front of this guy in this one dungeon to advance. For the life of me I could not remember which store it was in, and some of the stores are hidden under rocks, bushes, and bad guys that you either have to bomb, set on fire, or push to find. This item is sold in one of those stores. Well, after about ten minutes of globe trotting I remembered it's in the same store as the Blue Ring. Simple enough. I go and buy it, give it to the guy, and I'm moving right along.

Now lets think of that scenario from the perspective of the five year old who has never played this game, lives in a time when the internet does not exist, and can barely read, let alone make sense of what this monster thing means by "grumble grumble". To really blow your minds, consider the scope of this game. That item, should the dumb kid be able to figure out that the monster is indeed asking for something to eat, is sold in one of those hidden shops I mentioned earlier.

The way older games worked is that each screen was tiled and active object that could be affected were called sprites. Generally a sprite was either a character that moved, something that could be moved or acted upon in some way, or designated a border which can not be passed. In Zelda each screen of the overworld is about 20 tiles wide by 16 tiles high. This means that each screen of the game has about 320 tiles on it which could contain sprites. Of those sprite containing tiles lets say about half of them on each screen (give or take) are on a border or out in the open so that they can be pushed, blown up, or lit on fire by Link. And before I go on, here's another kicker; it wasn't until the third Zelda game that surfaces with secrets behind or under them were cracked or altered in some way to give you visual hints. These things were 100% hidden. There were no hints whatsoever to tell you "hey, bomb this wall!" So anyway, now we're down to 160 potentially active tiles per screen. But the overworld map is 24X18 screens so... now we have somewhere in the area of 69,000 tiles that maintain sprites that may or may not have secrets hidden under them that you may or may not to get to, to obtain an item that you may or may not have to feed to some monster, who then may or may not let you pass and complete the dungeon you've been stuck on for days. And the only clue, direction, hint, whatever you want to call it, that you have is "grumble grumble".

What the fuck?!

Before I go on... for those of you who have lived under a rock for the past twenty-two years and never played this game, here's the map I'm talking about:

Legend of Zelda Overworld Map

Now, the Angry Video Game Nerd recently had a gripe about a simillar issue with the game "Milon's Secret Castle" (yup, here comes another link... no embedable video for this one):

AVGN takes on Milon's Secret Castle

So in my honest opinion, the odds of finding what you need in Zelda seem way more stacked against you then they are in Milon's... however, I must admit that I didn't make it past those first two door's he mentions in that video in MSC at about the same age when I somehow plowed all the way through the original Zelda... it's a mystery I've yet to figure out.

So all this ranting and the original question still remains... How in the hell did I ever beat this game?!

All I really know is that the Zelda series is either the best or worst game series ever created. There's no grey area there... but I'll continue giving them my money because the bastards have had me mesmerized for damn near my entire life.

Apparently Mr. Mann Isn't Grading This... Who Knew!?

I am slacking so bad on this thing! So much for New Years Resolutions! Amirite guyz?! I finally got back around to updating because my friend Megan told me I needed to get back to work on it...

Oh also, before we go on, I need to mention that I have an adorable girlfriend named Jen and a pretty bad ass roommate named Kyle. We're all buds.

Okay. Hopefully that will cut down on some serious bar ridicule!

Back to what I was saying. I've been putting off updating because every time I go, "oh yeah! That's what I want to ramble about today." I then go, " Oh man... I have to go through all this hassle to cite my sources to prove my point and find fun videos and pictures to keep it interesting. Then I need to pull quotes from the videos or articles and talk about them..." What a minute that all sounds very familliar...

Megan pointed out to me what I've really been treating my blog as, a high school research paper!! A high school research paper that I can say "fuck" in all I want... but a high school research paper none the less!! No wonder I procrastinate on this thing like it's my job! Like last week, I had the misfortune of being sick on the day of and the day after those dumb as Tax Day Tea parties... Wow, what a frustratingly comedic sham that was! But the point is, the more I watched the train wreck of what all the networks claimed to be "coverage" the more reference materials I had that I would have to go back and dig up to refer to and cite and pick apart line by line. That's just way too exhausting to put together a couple pages worth of poignant laughs that only a few people will read and in all cases will just be preaching to the choir.

Now that we've identified the problem here how do we solve it? The obvious solution, I figure, is just stop doing research. I could just talk out of my ass and pass my opinions as facts like every other "news source" on the internet... on cable... on broadcast... and in print for that matter. It seems like that's fair game these days. Sorry Ed Murrow, but I think I'm just as lazy as everyone else. I think I'm just going to rant like the rest of them from now on.

With that in mind, here's my opinion of what happened last week on tax day...

A bunch of wealthy white people and idiots who just like to protest their own well being got in their cars and drove on roads maintained by their public works department and hung out in publicly funded parks and spaces to claim that they were bitching and moaning about paying taxes that all go to "the multinational banks and corporations". What they were actually doing is venting their frustration over the fact that THEY LOST and they are now the MINORITY.

One certain cable news station spent a lot of time and money conning these people into attending and convincing them that they're actually the majority and that their voices are ignored (elections don't count). This network used a number of key phrases and talking points to convince a few idiot viewers that the events they were sponsoring were non-partisan and truly of the people and by the people any time they were questioned about why they had these protests now instead of a few months ago when another dude was president. They were lying. They did it because they are mad that THEY LOST and they are now the MINORITY... that and Rupert Murdoch sent them memos telling them what buzz words, phrases, and stories to focus on just like he does any other day.

There's just too much frustrating absurdity to address in this whole situation that I'm going to give my self an aneurysm if I continue, so I'm just going to leave it with a quote from Jon Stewart to the Tea Party goers and their proponents...

"You lost. It's supposed to taste like a shit taco."

Sometimes a bit of vulgarity is just so satisfying...

Maybe if I tried making this blog more about stuff that I like it'd be easier. So let me just end this with, I saw the Slackers last night and Vic is still one of my top personal heroes and an inspiration. Man I love that band.

This Tired Old Argument...

So my friend Leyla and I have this habit of starting stupid arguments over pointless crap. The latest is what I view as the trend of being nostalgic about crappy TV shows that stopped running not long after you were born. The origins of this latest tiff are way too nerdy, but if you search hard enough on Facebook you'll find it. But I'll get you up to speed quick...

[Insert Leyla talking about a bunch of 80s cartoons here]

Me: ....you are not nostalgic about 80s cartoons. You were two.

Okay. Okay. That's kind of a dick thing to say, and I did overlook the part where she admitted most of them were shitty and I meant to put it more jokingly... anyway. Yeah. I am a dick and sorry about that, but I still think I have a legitimate point to make here.

There's a difference between legitimately remembering the mundane things you did as a child, like what shows you watched and whether or not they were good, and researching them later in life and then forming an opinion on it. Thanks to the monstrosity that is the "I Love the [Insert decade here]" series on VH1, my generation (people born in the late 80s) has decided that they are the authority on all things pop culture that happened when we were two or three years old. There's science that says "No" to being an authority on that subject by "memory" like so many of us love to claim. Until you're at least three or four at the very least you're brain is too busy learning things like motor skills and the language that all the people around you are spewing to vividly store things in your long term memory like mundane details about what crappy TV show our parents sat us in front of to make us shut up.

But all of a sudden you sit some celebrity in front of a camera who's younger than I am talking about this stuff and you get an entire generation of "Nostalga-ists". Just because you sit someone like Hillary Duff in front of the camera and have her say, "That whole Iran-Contra thing that happened when I was like six months old was crazy as hell. People were like totally freaking out!" Doesn't mean you're an authority on the subject by memory. That's not to say you can't do later research on it and form an opinion or in the case of TV see it in syndication and then form an opinion, but the trendy attitude that it represents our childhood is absolutely silly. The first TV shows I can vividly draw from my own long term memory are Animaniacs, X-Men, Spider Man, and Mega Man. All of those are from about 1993 at the earliest. I was a solid seven or eight years old. I had a long term memory that could store the fact that I would come home from school and those shows were on FOX from 3 PM till 5 PM. That is nostalgia.

But to defend Leyla's comments from earlier, there is also reinforced memory that can be indoctrinated into us by the people around us. For example, I only remember specifics about Pee-Wee's Playhouse and Pee-Wee's Big Adventure because the show returned to syndication on Adult Swim a few years back and I continued to watch the movie until I was seven or eight and then recently watched it again a few years ago. But I have an understanding that I have a "memory" of those things because my parents and older sisters would constantly tell people while I was growing up about how much I loved Pee-Wee Herman when I was two or three years old because it's funny to tell your friends about how your son loved the show with the guy who later got caught jerking off in a porno theater. After hearing that I liked those things so many times I sort of decided I remember it... but I can't honestly remember a specific instance about how scary I thought Large Marge was from before I was six or seven years old. I don't remember it the same way I remember waking up to watch Mega Man on Saturday morning at 7:00 AM because I was such a nerd that I loved to see anything Nintendo related come to life.

And it's based on THAT argument that I apologize to Leyla for my earlier comments. You may indeed know that you were in fact sat down in front of the Thundercats before you had any concpet of memories because of family stories or an action figure left over from a sibling or something and that I understand. That's fair. But to compromise, I'm just saying it's not the same as something you may legitimately be nostalgic about like, I dunno, Power Rangers. That came out when you were like eight or so right? Were you into that? I wasn't. It sucked... just like almost every other children's show that isn't Sesame Street.

...but those Spider Man and X-Men series' are still pretty awesome.

And to any fan of those stupid VH1 shows... there's a difference between thinking some joke a comedian makes about a crappy show that first ran when you were an infant is funny and "nostalgia".