Tag Archives: Video Games

Start Your (Game) Engines!

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The cover of Elements of Game Design by Robert Zubek

It’s March, and VPL’s first GameJam is well underway. Tommy already made a post explaining what it’s all about. Still, I thought I’d do a bit of advertising for it here and encourage people who maybe aren’t ready to make a game from scratch to get in on some game creation. Fair warning: these won’t be accepted as GameJam entries, so this post is entirely for fun from that perspective. This is likely a moot point, though, as I’m guessing my audience is likely too old to be entering the game jam anyway, but shout-outs to any grade 2-8 students reading my posts. I’ll be focusing on a suite of games that allow players to make games within them in addition to playing user-created levels.

The box art of Super Mario Maker

I’ll start with something that’s been popping up in my newsfeed lately: the original Super Mario Maker for the WiiU. If you want to borrow this one and play other people’s levels, jump on it quickly. WiiU servers are getting shut down in April, taking all of the user-created levels with them. You’ll still be able to build and play through your own levels, but that’s about it. Borrow it soon, though, and you can help Team 0% ensure that every level ever uploaded gets beaten by someone other than the original creator before that inevitable shutdown. At the time of writing this (March 18th, 2024), there’s only a single level left: Trimming the Herbs. This clear video is from the creator, who had to beat it to upload it to the servers, so don’t go thinking someone’s pulled it off just yet. Though… if even seasoned Mario veterans are having trouble with this one, then maybe getting that final clear is a little out of reach for most people.

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Cross-Platform: Games to Film

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The box art of The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom

Augh! I make a post about The Legend of Zelda in different media, and now a film gets announced. And, of course, there are already countless articles from various media outlets expressing their opinions on what the film should and shouldn’t be. I could have gotten in on that! But instead, I squandered my chance to write a whole article about it by jumping the gun. I mean, I can still say my wife wants Dylan O’Brien from The Maze Runner movies to play Link, which I can see happening as LoZ director Wess Ball also directed The Maze Runner. My thoughts are that whoever plays Link better be short and preferably left-handed. The tone of the movie should be a decent approximation of the games, which are serious, but also… not? The games always ends with a battle against a world-ending villain, but Link still finds time to play minigames, get attacked by cuccos1, and torture tree-people2. So for tone… maybe somewhere between The Lord of the Rings and the original Indiana Jones trilogy? Feel free to tell me why this is a terrible take in the comments. Oh! And by the way, we have a bunch of The Legend of Zelda games in the catalogue. If you’ve missed some of them or want to try one for the first time, place a hold and give them a playthrough. Or maybe watch a let’s play3 and see what they’re all about.

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A Link Between Media

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The case of The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom

So the Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom has been out for just over three months now, and at the time of writing this, I still haven’t beaten the thing. It’s a game of Gleeok1-sized proportions with so much to do and/or faff about with. I’m enjoying the heck out of it, and so is my fiancée, who doesn’t get that into games very often. I shouldn’t be surprised about that, though; we both got really into the game’s predecessor, Breath of the Wild. And I’ve been playing Zelda games since Ocarina of Time3, only skipping Spirit Tracks for mainline releases4. So, while I don’t know if I count as a super fan of the series, I’m at least at least a long-time player.

The cover of The Legend of Zelda Four Swords manga Part 2 by Akira Himekawa

But this post is only partly about the games. What I want to discuss here is other media surrounding the series, which means I’m starting with a collection of manga. These mangas take the admittedly fairly basic stories of the Zelda games and imbue them and their characters with more personality, expand the lore behind the game, and, perhaps most importantly, give silent protagonist Link a personality and voice. So naturally, I’m going to start out of order and talk about The Four Swords, wherein Link gets split into four versions of himself by the titular sword, each with a different personality. This manga makes the story of one of the most remote Zelda games, Four Swords Adventures, accessible to more players. This game required every player to have their own Game Boy Advance and a link cable to connect it to the Gamecube, making the cost of entry pretty high, but it was an absolute blast if you had a group that met the requirements. It’s co-op but with a competitive aspect of who could collect the most force gems5. This aspect is explored in the manga, where Link’s clones aren’t necessarily always helpful in the quest to rescue Princess Zelda from the Sorcerer Vaati6. The villain alone makes this one worth checking out, as Vaati has only appeared in three Zelda games, and two of them required friends to play with7 while the other has only recently been released from Game Boy Advance prison to the Switch online expansion pass. Sadly, we can’t help you play the game, but we do have a good selection of games for newer consoles than the GBA.

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