Talking About Talking About Video Games

Hello everyone!

I am a bit behind this week and don't have my crap together. I've got a post on the Zelda series I started but I don't know if I'm going to finish it. I might, I just don't know!

Much like last week I let this week slip by without thinking of anything interesting to write about. So I'm going to riff free hand with some random thoughts on talking about video games.


As much as I like those Zelda games, or at least the ones I've played, talking about them just doesn't interest me that much at the moment. I don't have the passion for it, you might say. Really, as I was typing out the first page or so I realized I just wasn't being entertained.

And if I'm not being entertained then what am I doing? Zelda is kind of stagnant anyway. Each game, while slightly different here or there, is largely the same. Find the lock then find the item that acts as the key to that lock, move on, rinse, repeat. In most of them if you pick up, say, a rupee the game stops everything to tell you that you just picked up a rupee.

I know it's a rupee! I've known it's a rupee for the last 20 years you can stop telling me now, okay game!

I will say however that last night I had a dream that I or someone else had developed a program in which you could create your own Zelda quests and dungeons and such and play them in first person with custom first person graphics that looked like the old Zelda games.

It was pretty cool!

Then I was thinking maybe this blog should just be about first person games, to kind of narrow things down a little, but then I realized I didn't want to limit myself to only talking about a certain kind of game when I like to play all sorts.

AND THEN I had a thought about what would it look like if every game had a first person mode? Wouldn't that be weird? First person Tetris, anyone?

So I don't know. I heard that the upcoming current gen version of Grand Theft Auto V was going to have a legit first person mode, finally, but then I worried that it might only be available to people using the Occulus Rift. GTA is one of my favorite games to play in first person. Here's a video I made a few years ago of me running around in GTA IV with the first person mod installed.

So yeah, first person modes are awesome in my book regardless of the game.

Talking about video game discourse, the current state of which is kind meh lately! People are doing interesting things and there's all sorts of crazy weird games coming out from all sorts of people but no one's talking about it! Or if they are they're doing it in some corner of the internet that I don't frequent so maybe I am just getting old and out of the loop.

I used to like to think that I had my finger on the pulse for this sort of thing but maybe I never really did. Triple As are all the same as they ever were, not really a whole lot new you can say there. Indies are exploding but there's so damn many of them it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Mobile devices are mobile devices, which by the way if you haven't you should play Helix! It's a really good twitch action game by Michael Brough with music and sound by Andrew Toups! It's tough as nails but to score points all you have to do is encircle the enemies. Simple to pick up but difficult to master, probably the perfect kind of game for a phone.

I might be short on my weekly quotas this month because I'm moving. Not very far, mind you, just to a neighboring town but I have to pack and move all my furniture. It might take a while so I might be scarce the last week of November/first week of December.

Also I am going to do that National Novel Writing Month challenge this month where you write a short novel in a month. I did it once in 2005 but I'm doing it again because my sister wanted to do it and she's never done it before so I'm going to help keep her motivated. If you want to follow those adventures you can do so here.

Anyway I guess you can consider this post to be the first in my series on video game criticism and commentary called Talking About Talking About Video Games.

I'm a riot!

Thanks for reading.