Recent Posts

Super Mario Bros. 35 is now available to Nintendo Switch Online members. It will be playable until March 31, 2021. (Why?)



I'm looking forward to giving this a try!

Next Smash fighter will be revealed tomorrow:










I'm guessing the message from Sakurai will be something about a delay.

Vs. Tennis and Soccer are announced for the next batch of Arcade Archives. I feel like they're scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point.

The final DLC pack, Symphony of the Mask, is now available.

I haven't finished it yet, but it's a little more substantial than I expected. It has a bunch of new Zelda enemies added, new rooms and puzzles, new music, and it's a bit harder, as well. The overworld is smaller than the main game (only 6x8), but all the areas are re-skinned. Skull Kid's masks seem to boil down to being different weapons + abilities, but you can change between them on the fly.

I'm wondering if the new enemies and such will also appear in modes with other characters (like maybe in Dungeon Mode). It seems like it'd be a waste if they were only exclusive to Skull Kid.

I wanted to put this here to archive it, because it's actually a bit hard to find resources on the history of Falcom... And now I know why.

Falcom's music is credited to "Sound Team jdk." But who exactly are they? Here is a project that aims to identify exactly who these individuals are, as well as exactly what music tracks they composed.

Why the secrecy? Well, if you look at the History tab, it includes some history of Falcom, itself, including an infamous mass staff exodus from 1989. This was the result of Falcom's founder and former president, Masayuki Kato, insisting that an in-development side-scrolling action-RPG be re-branded as an Ys game (Ys III: Wanderers from Ys) strictly for brand recognition purposes. This upset much of the staff so much that all but a few of them quit the company. It was a very public fiasco that led to Kato instating a company policy that staff would no longer be individually credited so as to prevent talented members from being recognized over the company name, itself. That practice continues at Falcom, to this day.

Obviously, this was not unusual among Japanese game developers in the '80s and '90s, with staff at companies like Capcom, Konami, SNK, Sega, etc. (even Nintendo) often being credited with pseudonyms. In fact, even Atari had a similar policy in its early days that programmers were not to take credit for the games they created. (This is what led to members of its own staff leaving and founding Activision.)

Still, I find it off-putting. This isn't something that should be happening in modern game development.

I don't have time to answer this all at once, but I'll start with the first series to come to mind:

The Legend of Zelda

I first played the original Legend of Zelda probably around 1987 at a neighbor's apartment (the same place I first played an NES and Super Mario Bros., for that matter). At the time, I didn't understand what kind of game it was, and I approached it as if it was an arcade-style game. After being told to go into the cave to get my sword, I assumed that what I was supposed to do was go to the three adjacent screens from the starting screen and defeat all of the enemies to open the exit to the next level. So I did that, and... nothing happened. I didn't know what to do at that point, so I got bored and moved on to another game. It never once occurred to me that I could just keep going beyond those first screens, and that there was a whole world to freely explore.

I got my own NES in 1988, and it came with the Official Nintendo Player's Guide, and it was then that I realized what type of game The Legend of Zelda was supposed to be. I bought my own copy soon after (it was the first game I ever saved up for and bought with my own money). I enjoyed it, but I was still more of a Mario fan at the time.

There wasn't a single game that made me fall in love with the series, though. It was something that happened gradually over many years. I bought A Link to the Past for the SNES, and it was the first time I had decided to finish a game on my own without using a strategy guide. By the end of the '90s, I was drifting away from Nintendo. I bought a Dreamcast, and for the short life of that system, I had committed to becoming a Sega fan. But the one N64 game I bought during that era was Majora's Mask. After Sega left the hardware business, I was at a gaming crossroads. Do I go back to Nintendo, or get a PlayStation 2 and explore a new gaming landscape? What I then realized was that I would always regret it if I didn't play the next Zelda game, so I chose the GameCube for The Wind Waker. I think it was from that point on that I realized how much the Legend of Zelda series meant to me.

Even if I don't buy every single game, I still consider it my favorite gaming series.