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.