Gaming Memories: Adventures of Link and July 17th, 2014

Gaming Memories 02: Adventures of Link?

(original post HERE at my gaming blog)

VIP Video was the kind of small business rental place that I hear so many people talk about when giving game memories.  It was the local "we're cheaper than Blockbuster" store and was the first place I was ever able to rent a game from.  When we were handed the membership card, the first thing I did was make a line to the video game section and look at what they had.  In the early days, I was restricted to what I got on Christmas, and what my cousins owned.  So getting to see the "new" games on the wall was really exciting.  The first to catch my eye was:

When I got home... holy crap what was this?  The game was like a map without monsters... wait, so you go into the thing and suddenly we're... Mario style?  No, more like NES Rambo style.  Well maybe it is still good.  I was hopeful for my first rental, so I tried.  Wow.  Wow.  This game was bad.  This game was so bad, I started inspecting things like the cartridge.  Sure it was gold, but I think it was an off color gold, not exactly like Zelda was, right?  Since when did Link have a magic meter?  And where the hell are the heart containers for the health?  Why was the art style suddenly trying to be realistically proportioned?

I came to the conclusion that the game was a bootleg.  Not a true sequel by the people that made the original  I know it is hard today to understand how I could think that, but back in the late 80's and early 90's, we could still get the shady junk from the far east.  You can now go and download roms of things like Sonic the Hedgehog, hacked into another game and sold as a real Sonic game for the NES.  They come on real cartridges.  There was also the Tengen games that were not licensed to be sold on the NES and were real sketchy games as well.  So that's what I concluded, must be a bootleg.  I know its almost silly now to think that something with a huge name like Zelda could have a bootleg, it would be like someone making a Halo 2 without Microsoft's permission, but that kind of stuff happened in Japanese imports with Manga, Anime, and video games all the time back then.


July 17th, 2014

So in Final Fantasy 6 there were 3 gods that descended to the world to have a war among themselves.  Mortals were recruited by the gods and given special powers to perform duties that the gods dictated.  They became unwilling, yet powerful, servants to these gods.  That is how "magic" and "espers" were born.  That sounds a little familiar to me... oh, yea, it sounds a lot like the relationship of the Fal'Cie and I'Cie in Final Fantasy 13.  I did not realize this while playing through 13, but its pretty cool that they give a call back to one of the earlier pre-7 games.  It is said that the gods grew weary and released the Espers from their bonds and gave them free will again, and then they turned themselves into stone.  Its only a small jump to see that as crystal instead of stone.  Its a neat little connection.

Legend of the Legendary Heroes.  Go ahead, giggle, its the real title of the anime I watched.  Still looking for good stuff, and you know... you could do worse than Legend of the Legendary Heroes.  The show is a bit goofy, situated somewhere in the same neighborhood of silly as Trigun.  It is a fantasy Anime with wizards, knights, priests, etc, and the Legendary Heroes are a set of proto-gods that brought order to the chaos at the start of time.  The show is, so far, about a couple of royal guards that are searching for relics of these Legendary Heroes.  One is a womanizing pretty boy mage, and the other is a smart ass sword wielding samurai-like warrior.  The animation is good quality, I would compare it to Full Metal Alchemist in quality, and the effects they use for magic is really cool too.  I'm definitely putting it on my list of "could watch".

Microsoft dropped their Xbox Originals media division yesterday after only 3 months of existence.  A lot of the stuff in development is cancelled, and for the most part I do not think we lost anything of value.  They seemed pre-occupied with reality TV.  The guy that ruined GAME_JAM and made headlines is also the guy behind all the Mountain Dew placement and programming in Xbox "bro-gamer" culture for the past decade, so the fact that the high ups at Xbox love the shit out of reality TV ideas doesn't surprise me.  The one bad thing coming out of this news is that probably the "Deadlands" show development was cancelled too.  Deadlands is a steampunk/weird west sort of setting about the supernatural taking over the world in the late 1800's.  It had potential, and it would have given more exposure to Savage Worlds as a game platform.  A lot of "almosts" when it comes to Savage Worlds these days, as I think Wil Wheaton has backtracked on using Savage Worlds for his RPG side project with TableTop.  Still, Shane and company might have dodged a bullet instead of lost an opportunity.