The Water Temple

Whilst I’ve been playing Ocarina of Time, one particular location has loomed at the forefront of my mind for every moment I’ve spent inside the game’s world. We all know what I’m talking about, but I’m going to say it anyway.

The Water Temple.

A fabled location of such infamy, that the mere mention of its name can strike terror into the heart of a certain type of person. And whose legendarily fiendish difficulty has given it a second life as something of a gaming folk legend. So it was with no small amount of trepidation simmering in the pit of my stomach that I crossed the threshold of the Water Temple to set about conquering it.

Now, after two hours of sub-aqua adventuring, I can let you in on a secret. The Water Temple isn’t really so bad. It’s not a cakewalk by any stretch of the imagination, but neither is it so impossible that the only way through it is with a guide. I did get stuck once, on a particularly cheeky puzzle that needed the water level raising to the correct level, so that I could blow away an otherwise inaccessible wall to get at a key. But even then it was nothing that five minutes of thought couldn’t solve.

So how did The Water Temple gain its fearsome reputation? At first I thought I’d found The Water Temple so unexpectedly easy because I’d spent so long playing Zelda games this year that I’d started to think like a Zelda level designer. I quickly realised how hubristic that train of thought was and started again. With the exception of Skyward Sword, all of the Zelda games I’ve played this year have been 2D. Then I had a small epiphany.

Let us posit that the average gamer is between mid-twenties and mid-thirties. Using myself as an example, I’m thirty, which puts me at fourteen or fifteen at the original release of Ocarina of time. One’s mind is not a fully formed thing at that age, not really. Think also about the time of the release of Ocarina of Time. We were in the very early age of polygons, and the previous generation of console games were almost exclusively two dimensional.

Like Khan in Star Trek II, we were two dimensional natives thrust into a new three dimensional world where we had had little time to adjust. We had little experience with three dimensional thought. Like Khan, that inexperience would prove to be our undoing.

Puzzles in The Water Temple are about as three dimensional as they could get for the time. They require you to not only think about the effects of your actions on the floor you are on, but also the floors above and below you. Add this to our, at the time, relative inexperience with three dimensional thought and we have the perfect ingredients for a major difficulty spike. We had trouble with The Water Temple because many of us had literally never seen anything like it, so we'd never really had to think this way before.

So, at the time, The Water Temple would have been genuinely difficult. Add this to the collective internet folk memory’s remarkable ability to exaggerate and that’s how I think The Water Temple came about its reputation.

Returning to The Water Temple today after nigh on two decades of experience of 3D gaming, The Water Temple presents less of a challenge. We’re all three dimensional natives now, and we’ve seen and solved hundreds of 3D puzzles in the time since Ocarina of Time was released. Experience is key here. Two decades of thinking in three dimensions, added to the fact that we’re all much older now means that we can arrive upon a solution to a puzzle much easier than we could in the late nineties. That kind of rams home just how innovative Nintendo were with Ocarina of Time. With The Water Temple, they gave us something many of us had never seen before and encouraged us to think in a whole new way to solve the puzzles they had set. There have been others in the time since, but Nintendo got there first, and they did it so well that they managed to spawn a gaming folk legend with their creation.

The neglect, oh dear lord the neglect.

Play it again, Samael...

It’s been a long time, and it’s been so because of the relative dearth of pretty much anything interesting enough to write about as far as gaming is concerned.

“But what about Destiny?” I hear you ask.

Destiny. A bajillion dollar combination of multiplayer FPS, Diablo and marketing blitz that has, unsurprisingly, not lived up to the hype. No thanks. If you love it, then that’s totally okay and I won’t look down upon you for it. But it’s not for me. I’ve been turned off multiplayer shooting for years now, and I’ve never been taken in by loot grabbing dungeon crawlers.

That said, whilst I wasn’t blogging, I did spend sixty-odd hours inside Dark Souls, which you might point out, is a loot grabbing dungeon crawler. And I’d be wrong to disagree with you. But it’s often so much more than that, and that’s what makes it so compelling. Most importantly for me, it’s not a ‘click on the monsters until they disappear’ dungeon crawler in the vein of Diablo.  The superb combat system, combined with the immense challenge, generally forlorn atmosphere and the fact that it’s often  genuinely beautiful means it all adds up to something so much greater than the sum of its parts. And that was what surprised me about it. I gave it a try because it was incredibly cheap and wound up finding one of my new favourite games.

So, I’ve still being gaming, but for the most part I’ve been delving into the collection rather than buying new games, and if I’ve not been gaming I’ve been spending hours with Rocksmith, and I don’t think it’s worth blogging about how bad at guitar I am.

The Year of Zelda is still a thing. I managed to finish Spirit Tracks, even though it was so endearing I didn’t want it to end. The best part about the whole game was being able to blow the whistle on the train any time I wanted. I know that’s a really juvenile thing to say, but every time I pulled on that rope in the corner of the screen, my inner seven year old did a tiny muppet flail. What struck me about the DS Zelda games was that they are Proper Zelda Games, that haven’t been dumbed down just because they’re on a portable with a generally young userbase. The same level of love and attention has gone into them as a full sized console title. Case in point, in Spirit Tracks, the overworld music is tied to the beat of the train. So the faster you go, the quicker the beat of the song. Attention to a tiny detail like that can really anchor you to a game’s world. Other devs take note…

I went straight from Spirit Tracks to my newly returned copy of Minish Cap. There was a certain amount of surprise when I found that not only did my old GBA SP still work, but that my Minish Cap save was still there from the first time I attempted to finish it. I’d expected one or the other to be dead. I was a bit shocked to find that you need to use an adapter to use headphones with an SP though, which kind of put a dampener on things. Still, Minish Cap turned out to be excellent, with an old-school world map that looped and twisted upon itself, while gradually revealing its secrets with continued play. It put me in the mind of a top down Metroid. Add that to classic Zelda gameplay and some stunning 2D art and you have a game that is more than worthy of both your time and the Zelda name.

Ocarina of Time, the big kahuna, was supposed to be next. But I discovered that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing and found myself all Zelda-ed out. So, to tide me over til the release of Trials Fusion, I moved on to Jak and Daxter, generously given to me by a friend. We all know how good a game it is, so I won’t gush too much about it here, but I will say with the exception of a sometimes dodgy camera, Jak and Daxter has aged beautifully and I don’t understand why I’d never played it sooner.

Trials Fusion loomed on the horizon just as events in Jak and Daxter came to an end, and I downloaded it as soon as funds allowed. If you know me, you will know I’m an absolute sucker for anything with the Trials name attached to it. Sadly, Fusion turned out to be a little disappointing. More Trials is undeniably a Good Thing, and Fusion is a very good game, but it doesn’t reach the heights of Trials HD and Trials Evolution. And the reason for that is that basically, it’s just too easy. The barrier to entry has been lowered, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And if it means that more people will experience one of the most satisfying games out there then I’m all for that. The problem is the difficulty curve has been massaged to such an extent that it doesn’t offer any challenge to players with experience from the other games in the series.  It took me months to get all golds in Trials Evolution. I’d achieved the same in Fusion within two weeks, with the odd platinum thrown in for good measure. I won’t say that Ubi buying Redlynx has ruined the series, because it hasn’t, but the lowering of the difficulty has pretty much stymied its replay value.  I haven’t been back to Trials Fusion anywhere near as often as I have to Evolution. Bit of a shame really.

At a loss for what to play, I stood back and looked at the collection, going down and down until I found something that jumped out. Eventually my eyes fell upon Discworld Noir. A game that I have blogged about in the past about finding, and one that for some reason had never started. Still, no time like the present, right?  After digging out an RGB scart cable and hooking up my PS2, I found myself looking for the non-existent PS button on the controller to fire it up, which was a bit embarrassing. Still, once I’d worked out how to switch the thing on, I was greeted with what, despite its great age, might be one of the best written, and thanks mostly to the immense talents of Rob Brydon, best voiced games I’ve ever played. Sure, the game itself looks endearingly rubbish, is buggy and i so low-res that you could count the pixels, but it feels like playing a lost Discworld Novel. I loved every moment of it, and if you’re a Discworld Fan, you owe it to yourself to play Discworld Noir. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

A stint with the utterly sublime Sly Cooper followed while I tried for some reason to put off going back to Zelda. The vintage Warner Brothers cartoon does Ocean’s Eleven styling still looks great and the game itself provided ample distraction from the fact that I should have really been playing Ocarina of Time. Thankfully, during that time, I finally got my GameCube back from my sister and with it, my proper copies of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, none of that HD remake or waggly Wii port nonsense for me. With that, there was no excuse. I had to start Ocarina of time. I hooked up the N64 using my GameCube composite lead (yes I know I should have an RGB conversion, but anything is better than a co-ax cable) and dived in.

Now I’m dreading going to the Water Temple, but loving every minute of the time I’m spending in Hyrule. Yes, the save system is Mesolithic, but while I’m surrounded by chunky 90’s polygons, muddy N64 textures and sound so lo-fi its almost cute and I find myself thinking that sometimes, this is all I need. So what if new games aren’t interesting at the moment. I have a massive back catalogue that’s full of good stuff. I don’t need a new gen console yet, and as it turns out, there are plenty of interesting games. They’re just not new ones.

Further (spoiler filled) Adventures in Hyrule

The year of Zelda continues apace, and I have found myself in a peculiar situation. I've been playing what count as chronologically the first and last stories of the series. Last week, I'd been leafing through the Legend of Zelda Wikipedia page and happened upon the official timeline of the world of Hyrule. It's interesting to say the least. Especially at the point of Ocarina of Time, where the timeline splits into three separate branches. Closer inspection revealed Skyward Sword to be the first story and Spirit Tracks as what could subjectively be called the last. Starting as I have with Skyward Sword, I've decided to compete the games in the chronological order as best I can. So that means Minish Cap will be next.

That means, of course, that I have finished Skyward Sword. And it was utterly fantastic. It's the best Zelda game I've played by quite a long margin and possibly one of the best games I've ever played full stop. First of all it's gorgeous. It really does look like a painting in full motion. The poor little Wii must have being straining as hard as it could to push those visuals down the component cable. It played beautifully too, with the 1:1 swordplay and subtly polished battle system being the highlight. I loved how the world has been cut down to four main areas, with new areas opening up with repeated visits. Story wise, Zelda games have long been the black sheep of Nintendo's line of titles, shot through as they are with an undercurrent of sadness that you don't often see in their other games. Skyward Sword is no different, in fact the line of sadness probably runs deeper in this game than any other.

The more you play, the more there is to be a touched by, from the grand tragedy of Impa's thousand year vigil, alone in the sealed grounds, likely kept alive by the power of the gate of time or the power of the goddess, only to fade away to nothing when her task is completed, to the small tragedy of Beedle living all alone on an isolated island with nothing but a beetle for company.  It's everywhere you look. I found myself looking in on Pipit's problems at home and wondering what happened to the rest of Batreux kin, or what had turned him into a monster and what he had done to deserve it. Then there was the part I had in breaking the hearts of both Cawlin and the item check girl. There was no way to let her down gently, and that's what made it worse.

The most surprisingly sad events surround the fate of the ancient robot civilisation in the desert, seemingly immortal consciousnesses trapped inside non-functional bodies, unable to act as they watch their verdant homeland turn to desert and their civilisation crumble around them. Press the A button while stood next to one in the present and they will try and talk to you. Activate a time crystal in their vicinity and they will be fully functional and pottering around as if nothing as happened. Deactivate that time crystal and you will see them shut down and deteriorate right before your eyes. In most games, this would just be detail, but in Skyward Sword, the little robots are so damned endearing that you really do feel sorry for them. I found myself hoping that after the ending, Scrapper the robot left Skyloft and returned to the Lanayru Desert to repair his kin and rebuild the lost robot Civilisation.

Then there were the unanswered questions. Where are the rest of the Gorons. What was the lost civilisation that created the Goddess Sword like? There are stories everywhere in the gameworld that sound like a relatively primitive civilisation trying to make sense of technology so advanced that it is indistinguishable from magic. Take Fi for instance. She is obviously some sort of powerful artificial intelligence. I'd love to see Nintendo go further back into Hyrule's past and explore the first civilisation.

Finally, and most tragic of all is the tearful goodbye between Zelda and Link as she seals herself away to keep the bonds of The Imprisoned intact. Link and Zelda have a real relationship in this game. She's not just a princess to be saved. It meant that Link actually had a valid motive to go after her and gave every interaction between them genuine warmth then made their eventual reunion all the more powerful when it finally happened.

Skyward Sword is a masterclass from beginning to end. The game that finally justifies the Wiimote. The swordplay is just fantastic. It's amazing how Nintendo have managed to make the way Link wields the titular sword look so natural. It could easily have made Link look like a puppet. The game has one of the series best antagonists and an ending that ties every game before it into one recurring Narrative and shifted the way I perceived the series as a whole. They are not just individual stories tied together by common threads anymore. Just as in Bioshock, wherein there is always a Man and a Lighthouse, in The Legend of Zelda there is always a Boy, a Princess and the ancient evil that follows them.

Long may the cycle continue.

The Year of Zelda

I got a Wii for Christmas.

Yes, I'm a bit late to this particular party, but then when it comes to Nintendo home consoles I always have been. I'm not much of a Nintendo fan by any stretch of the imagination. Those who know me or have read the blog know of my complete ambivalence to anything with the name of a certain mustachioed plumber attached to it. However, that doesn't stop me enjoying the rest of what their consoles can offer. I have an N64 and a Gamecube, and I've also owned a version of every Nintendo portable since the Game Boy Colour.

My Nintendo consoles add flavour to the more mainstream portions of my gaming diet, like a delicious chocolatey desert compared to the meat and veg of Sony or Microsoft. I may not be bothered by much in the way of Mario, but that still leaves delectable treats like Zelda, Metroid, Smash Bros, F-Zero, Star Fox and Wave Race to dance upon my palette.

I asked for a Wii to replace the Gamecube pinched by my sister and specifically to allow me to play two games. Metroid Prime 3 and Zelda: Skyward Sword. Sure there are other games worth playing on the Wii, and I have a list of titles to find, but it's those two that sold the system to me, and prices have dropped to such a level that I can justify buying a console for two games now. If I'm honest, I wanted the Wii just for Zelda. It's by far the best thing Nintendo have in their arsenal.

I came to Zelda late. Dad bought a Nintendo 64 and Goldeneye for reasons that still aren't quite clear. I liked Goldeneye. It was fun, but it was a loan of Ocarina of Time that really pulled me in. I wound up buying it, and Majora's Mask and I still have them. They started a late blooming gaming love affair that I'm always happy to go back to. I bought my missing GameCube to play Wind Waker and hunted down a proper copy of Twilight Princess as well. None of that waggly right handed Link nonsense for me. Outside of my two big-boy consoles, my portables have provided Link's Awakening, Minish Cap and most recently Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks.

The times I actually play the games are pretty few and far between, and I always get them way after release, but I always enjoy them even if it takes actually playing a Zelda game to remind me of that. The most recent entry to do this has been Phantom Hourglass. Up until last week, I hadn't played a Zelda game since the year Twilight Princess dropped. Hourglass really got its claws into me and reminded me why I love this series so much. It also had me reminiscing, and it dawned on me that although I own a lot of them, I've actually only finished two Zelda games - the GameCube ones.

Clearly this is Sacrilege of the highest order, so I've decided to take inspiration from Nintendo's Year of Luigi to have my own year of Zelda. I'm going to play and complete as many Zelda games I possibly can. And if I can, I'm going to do it on the original hardware. There won't really be any order of play, but as a Gamer, I feel like this is something I owe to myself to do. So, once Phantom Hourglass is done, Skyward Sword will follow and after that, who knows? It's going to be a great opportunity to break out old consoles and right past wrongs.

In the process, I'll have to find another copy of Minish Cap, since mine was 'borrowed' by my sister, and work out how I'm going to play The Legend of Zelda, Adventure of Link and Link to the Past without paying through the nose for them. I've never owned a NES or a SNES so I've never played Link's first three games. In fact, I don't even think I've ever seen those game's carts. I get the feeling that going back to those games might be something akin to digital paleontology. It's going to be very interesting.

This is a proposition of epic proportions, and there's every possibility that I might be doomed to failure. Still those who don't try don't win, do they?

So to quote Celebrity Deathmatch, let's get it on!

It's the end of the world as we know it.

It's Grim out there. With a capital G. Britain is flooding, sirens are sounding the breach of Chesil Beach, and on the other side of the Atlantic, North America and Canada are gripped by a blast of arctic air that will freeze your breath in the air as soon as it leaves your face. If I were a Viking, I'd be saying Ragnarok is upon us.

Of course, the world isn't ending, but we are in January. Grimmest of all the months. We're all broke because we spent all our money on Christmas. We go to work in the dark and come home in the dark. The only sun we see is through the workplace window, if we're even lucky enough for that. It's cold, it's wet and we're all miserable because we're starving ourselves on post Christmas diets.

January is rubbish, and the moods it inspires in some people seem to have permeated the games I've been playing of late. Truth be told, this started before January, but I'm in the middle of a run of some of the bleakest, saddest games I've ever played. It started with Tomb Raider, where Lara gets beaten senseless by her surroundings as she tries to escape a weather beaten island somewhere near Japan. There's a complete absence of hope for a lot of the first half of the game. Lara is a lamb thrown to Yamatai's wolves. Playing it is draining.

In a bid to brighten things up after Tomb Raider was finished, I got Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. The demo was bright and breezy and thoroughly enjoyable, but it concealed the full game's dark heart. I covered this in my last post, but it bears repeating. Brothers may be my game of 2013, but good lord is it sad. Every moment of levity is brought crashing down around you by some kind of  tragedy just minutes later. The game eventually builds to the saddest thing I've seen on screen since the first fifteen minutes of Pixar's seminal Up. After that, I just decided that games didn't want to make me happy at the moment and got stuck into the next.

The next game wound up being Deadlight, which I downloaded in trial form upon release and forgot about. It popped up for under two quid in a post Christmas sale on XBLA with Flashback and I Am Alive, so I decided to get the full version. Deadlight turned out to be a sort of cross between Limbo and The Walking Dead set in the 80s. While the story was a bit generic Zombie Apocalypse, it was well told and looked fantastic. The mood was consistently downbeat though, and while I enjoyed it, there wasn't a lot to smile about while playing it. Once the tragic ending had played out and the credits rolled I dived straight into I Am Alive, a sort of Assassins Creed meets The Road kind of game. It's the greyest thing I've ever played and I put it down after getting to the protagonist's flat. All the end of the world was getting too much.

Still, I'm a sucker for punishment, so Metro: Last Light is in the disc tray at the moment. I'm a fan of the first game, and a fan of the concept and the fiction in general. I don't think a post apocalyptic civilisation has ever been better portrayed in anything than in Metro. It's such a coherent universe, and pretty unique in western gaming. It's developed by Ukrainian team 4A and based on a Russian sci-fi novel of the same name. Metro is so convincing, and I think it's because of its Ukrainian origin. As anyone who's heard about Chernobyl knows, the Ukraine has first hand experience of what it's like to be on the receiving end of a nuclear disaster, and if you look at any photos of Chernobyl you can see how the place has influenced the aesthetic of the post Armageddon Moscow surface. Most of the game takes place in the populated tunnels of the Moscow Metro, and it's uniquely creepy. The best worst moment so far has been the flashback to ground zero on the day the warheads fell from the perspective of the crew of a flight back from Majorca. If you've never played it, click the link and watch it. You need to see it. Metro: Last Light is proving to be fantastic at the moment, and is a definite improvement on the previous game, but it's still pretty grim and I've been needing to something brighten up the winter darkness.

Enter Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass. It may be a game about sailing over the sea that's flooded a long dead civilisation and therefore in keeping with the Grim January theme, but it's so happy about it that it's not something you think about when the gulls are wheeling above your bows while you hunt for treasure. I'm pretty late to the DS Zelda games, but in a month like January, I'm happy that I have them. Say what you like about Nintendo, you can always count on them to brighten up a cloudy winter afternoon, no matter what your gaming tastes.

Here's to you Link!

It's the New Year, and the Blog is Back!

The blog is back! A house move, a month long internet drought, a complete dearth of any new games and the loss of my writing mojo added up to my terrible neglect. So, what bought me back?

New games of course. I'd finally got some cash together, and fortuitously, found a lot of great games at extremely good prices. After leaving the 360 in a corner until mid December, I spotted Call of Juarez: Gunslinger going cheap on XBLA. Purchase made. Tomb Raider and Metro: Last Light followed soon after when I snuck them into the trolley during the Christmas food shop. Gunslinger turned out to be fantastic, especially since I only downloaded it because it was cheap. With a great narrator, and some clever narrative tricks of its own, it felt like playing a cross between Bastion and top quality Sergio Leone movie.

Tomb Raider followed shortly afterwards and it was truly excellent. Rhianna Pratchett and Crystal Dynamics have somehow achieved the impossible. Firstly, they've turned Lara Croft into a normal human being who gets thrust into an incredible situation and is forced into some incredible actions. Secondly, they have made a game that can do the ancient tombs and spectacle that Uncharted does so well, without it feeling like an Uncharted clone. It did put me through the wringer though, and I decided I needed something whimsical and nice before I plunged into the famously grim Metro: Last Light. So, on the 30th of December I paid for Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. By the 31st of December, it was my game of the year.

Brothers came across in the demo as mixture of Ico, Journey and Fable, a sort of co-operative single player game set in a pre-industrial fairytale village. It felt light and whimsical, and it was beguilingly beautiful, exactly what I needed after the emotional gauntlet of Tomb Raider. I got one over on the local bully, I played catch, helped a rabbit win some friends and met a helpful troll who threw me over a crevasse. The demo ended and I decided that I needed to own this game. Funds were tight though and I had to put off buying. Then it showed up on XBLA after Christmas for a pittance. Decision made.

After purchase, Brothers quickly revealed something else, the whimsy that I loved was tempered by a Limbo-esque dark heart. The game begins with a traumatic flashback and opens for real with one of the titular brothers knelt at a gravestone. From there, the tone stays dark, with you wheeling the brother's father to a doctor in a cart. According to the doctor, the only way to save him is with water from the tree of life. Cue an epic Journey across a vast and diverse world. The brothers visit a mine, traverse an ice filled river, cross a forest with only a flaming torch for defence, visit a vast castle, cross a very special battlefield, and work their way through an arctic village. You have to work the story out yourself. The language of the game is entirely fictional a-la Ico but in a clever twist, is not subtitled. Thankfully the stellar characterisations help making sense of the story simple, and many of the events would be universally understandable whether there was language or not.

There are betrayals, rescues and romance. There is levity, wonder and grief. Every vista is beautiful. There is spectacle everywhere in this game, but it's nothing like the bombast of something like Tomb Raider. Brothers wants to show you beautiful things. It wants to make you gasp and smile. It wants you to experience childlike wonder with every discovery. However, every moment of joy is hard won and often tempered by a crashing comedown. There is tragedy in this world, some of it directly connected to the Brothers, some of it around them. It all adds up to one of the most beautiful, affecting and genuinely sad games I've ever played. Like The Walking Dead, Brothers is a rollercoaster of emotions and it will stay with me for a very long time. The ending was especially poignant, and marks the first time ever that I've welled up at a game. It wasn't a full blown cry, but the eyes definitely weren't dry.

If you like any of the games I've compared Brothers to, you owe it to yourself to play this game. If you like indie games, you owe it to yourself to play this. Same if you do the games are art thing or if you like a good old cry. Actually, you should just play this. You can't afford to miss it. It's really that good.

Game of the year 2013.