One of the earliest games I ever played was Super Mario 64. It’s a bright, colorful, inviting game for all ages, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t terrifying to play at times as a child. There was a nightmarish eel hiding in the depths of the sunken ship in Jolly Roger Bay, a possessed piano…
In recent years, fans of The Legend of Zelda can find numerous ways to explore the stories of their favorite titles beyond merely playing the games. Books like the Hyrule Historia and Zelda Encyclopedia have cataloged and codified the history of Zelda‘s ever-expanding lore, while more than half of the games in the series have…
“Playing a Zelda song makes everything seem more epic, whether it be another trip to work or running an errand to the grocery store.”
My wife always claims that I’m hard to shop for because, although I drop all kinds of not so subtle clues about things I’d like to buy, it’s hard to find something meaningful that’s not just another video game or cool trinket. The surprise isn’t there. On March 28th, 2012 though, my dear wife not…
There is something indescribable about an enticing title screen that really sets the mood for any videogame or entertainment media and The Legend of Zelda franchise is no exception. In fact, it may come to no surprise at all that my favorite title screens come from my favorite videogame series and each one is as…
The very first game I ever owned for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System — which was, in turn, my first console — was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Although I had played other games before it on friends’ machines, including the majestic Super Mario World (which I would acquire for myself…
Did you ever purposefully play a game the way it wasn’t intended? Say, you would start up a file of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess just to go to Arbiters’ Grounds to have those little bugs swarm all over you, using a bomb to blow them off of yourself, and using the sinking sand…
I didn’t want a Switch on launch day. That’s what I told myself anyways. “I can just wait until Father’s Day or Christmas. I don’t need it right now,” I said. I thought that this was true. I could wait, or at least I thought I could. As the months passed, the hype of the…
Homemade gifts are the best kind of gifts. Not only are they one-of-a-kind but knowing that someone has put the time and effort into creating something special, that is especially for you, is the best kind of feeling. It comes from the heart and brings with it a sense of cherishing that cannot easily be…
There’s nothing like a map to make a fantasy story seem more tangible. You open a massive tome and there, in the early pages before you’ve even met your characters, or even in the endpapers right within the cover, you’ve already experienced a sprawling continent or entire world of nations, city-states, mysterious regions and magical…
Originally, I was fine with the idea of getting Breath of the Wild on the Wii U, rather than going all-in with a Nintendo Switch. I usually wait a while before getting a brand new system, usually to see if any more interesting games come along before I drop another $300. This was my usual…
Within the last few years, I have been blessed to be able to share my love of the Zelda series with my daughter. Time brushing our teeth is often accompanied by theory videos by popular Zelda theorists. Bedtime stories occasionally take the form of the Zelda manga (but not the Twilight Princess one because it’s…
Obligatory questions when meeting a new Zelda fan include,”Which Zelda game was your first?” and “Which game is your favorite?” While I always find it very hard to answer the second question, I don’t always know how to answer the first one either. I know that The Wind Waker was the first Zelda game I…
We all have certain games, I’m sure, that while we officially consider them “beaten” in our personal experience, we mentally apply an asterisk to the category for one reason or another. Maybe we used cheat codes to get to the end. Maybe we’ve never made it through without a warp pipe or two. Maybe we…
I’ve mentioned a few times here that I used to take piano lessons from my mother. At a certain point, I started doing my own thing, just playing whatever I wanted by learning from ear rather than the “proper” way. Still, Mom loved that I was getting involved in music and always insisted that I…
