i made a little guy

Art Fight attack for @charmanderxerneas! Woah! This was a gift character on my part!

Character creation

Character visualization from 64-bit to 2-bit Personally my favorite on is the 32 bit

Left page of an October 1995 Atari Jaguar magazine ad for their latest price drop

- Image from Atari 50 on PS4

(Note several alignment errors on panel border.)

Game play session: https://youtu.be/gNNyrccnbSE?t=1817

I think what particularly annoys me with the "zelda was always gameplay before story" is that... it's not true? At least I don't think it's true in the way people mean it.

Zelda games were always kind of integrating story based on the standards of the time. When game stories were in game pamphlets, Zelda's stories was in the pamphlets. ALTTP tried to tell a pretty complicated stories with the limitations of the time. OoT was actively trying to tell an epic, cinematic tale packed with ambiance and expand what 3D could offer that 2D games struggled with. Majora's Mask is deeply character-driven in many, many ways. Wind Waker and Twilight Princess are both pretty concerned about their stories, down to the point that some people were bored by TP's cutscenes in particular. Skyward Sword, from what little I have played it, is very very invested in its characters and their journey (and 2D Zeldas have Link's Awakening, Minish Cap... None of them are visual novels, but they are concerned with emotional journeys, character arcs, mysteries about their own world...)

What is true is that the narrative wraps around the mechanics, and not the other way around. The mechanics drive themes, aesthetics, emotional beats and character journeys; and that's great. The world is a puzzle, and the world is delightfully absurd when it needs to be, full of heart when it calls for it, dark and oppressive when it suits the player experience.

That does not mean the games aren't invested in their stories. Even BotW has a pretty complicated story to tell about an entire world rather than one specific tale or legend --all of it at the service of the gameplay, which is exploration and mastery of your environment.

So. Yes, none of the Zelda games are million-words long visual novels that care deeply about consistency and nuance; but stories don't need consistency or deep lore to be meaningful and serve an emotional journey. Again: gameplay is story. The two cannot be so easily parsed from each other.

And Zelda as a franchise obviously care deeply about story, characters and setting (and still does right now --otherwise there wouldn't be a movie), even if it doesn't try to imitate prestige narrative-driven games, which is great and part of why I love this series so much. Doesn't mean it couldn't have done better in the past, it obviously could have, but I feel like pretending that nobody ever cared about story or character is just... false? It's a huge disservice to the devs too. Some of them obviously cared immensely.

The "gameplay above story", at least in the extent to which it is paraded today to defend TotK, mostly, is a really recent development. And I think it's one that deserves to receive some pushback.

thinking about ariadne calling the minotaur her brother

was nostalgic for harvest moon a while back. i played a shit ton of hm64 until it started glitching so badly!!! i'm still sad over that!!! it was my childhood hm game!!!

sharing a Lumina & grandma drawing from 2018 i think ? wasn't super big on this piece. for the Back to the Beginning zine hosted by catstealers

Wizard of Wor, 1981 flyer for the 1980 Midway arcade game, later ported to Atari, Commodore 64, and Bally Astrocade (the latter as The Incredible Wizard)

But seriously to all creators, if your clothing file has a normal map that looks like this:

It's completely redundant. Your piece will look just the same with or without it.

But what it does do, since it's still a texture, it takes space. And while that ~4KB for each might not seem like much, it accumulates. I've literally deleted hundreds of these, and that's not not much anymore.

If you've experienced weird issues from deleting them, it's because you'll also need to delete all the stdMatNormalMapTexture lines from material definitions. It's these 4 lines:

Deleting the junk already before making recolor files is a time-saving habit.

Grr! How DARE Nintendo not force Charles Martinet to continue performing Mario’s voice until he drops dead! How DARE his successor not sound exactly like him, down to every last tonal nuance! HOW DARE A FORTY-YEAR-OLD SERIES UNDERGO CHANGE 😤😤😤

Hearing "Mistress and Maid" next to "Eleanor Rigby," "For No One" and "Yesterday," I realized that McCartney's public image as an eternal optimist is not supported by his work. It was something I'd been circling around since I heard Steve Earle's new version of "I'm Lookin Through You," as bitter a put-down song as ever got softened in the studio. McCartney has certainly written lots of positive songs, but from "Hey Jude" and "Let It Be" to "That Day is Done" and "Put It There," his optimism is always in the face of a shadow. There is always some awful thing that has to be overcome. If there's a defining subtext in McCartney's music it's probably "Take these broken wings and learn to fly."

"Yeah, well," McCartney said quietly, "that's me I suppose. I think that the danger is if you just get into the happy songs then it can be a little bit music hall. It can get a little bit light. So I like to always have a little bit of edge, or else a little bit of tongue-in-cheek. You know, 'When I'm 64' isn't really a song about growing old, although on the surface it is. It's a joke song, but it has serious concerns in it, a little melancholy.

'Yesterday'--she went away and all that shit. 'Suddenly I'm not half the man I used to be.' But if you think about it, I was writing those in my early 20s! Talking about not half the man I used to be when I was barely a man!" I said, if you'd been half that man you'd have been eleven.

"They have more poignancy now," McCartney said, "just because of the water that's been under all our bridges. So we all now relate to those lyrics a little bit more seriously. Perhaps." He changed gears and said, "But you know, my composing has always been made up, it's a fantasy. I remember George Harrison saying to me when I did 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,' 'How'd you do that? You don't know anyone named Desmond or Molly, you don't know any of these people.'

I said, 'I just like making up a story.' A short story writer doesn't necessarily know the pit and the pendulum, he hasn't necessarily been to Dracula's castle. But he makes it up as an escape in a way. I think a lot of my songwriting always was, and still is, an escape."

From?

"From the harsh realities of the world. If I'm in a bad mood, I always find that a good time to write a song. Go off on your own and put the feelings in a song rather than in someone's face. The fact that it's a musical vehicle seems to defuse it a bit. Rather than just shouting at someone or wagging a finger, you can get those emotions out.”

Paul McCartney in Musician Magazine, August 1st 1995.