Cruise Elroy

I started No More Heroes over the weekend. There’s not much to add to the excellent critiques from Leigh Alexander, Michael Abbott, and Steve Gaynor — among others — but I thought I’d offer up my first impressions anyway. In a word, it’s hilarious. The essays I linked above all talk about how No More (…)

[Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four | Part five | Part six] This post, the last in the current series, comes in two parts. First, some trends I’ve found while analyzing the twelve ocarina songs, along with a few miscellaneous observations that didn’t fit in anywhere else: Seven of the (…)

[Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four | Part five | Part six] All right, back into the fray! It’s time to finish off the analysis of the twelve ocarina songs. We’re down to the last six. As fans of the game will remember, adult Link learns six “warp songs” from (…)

[Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four | Part five | Part six] This post continues analyzing the songs in Ocarina of Time and theorizing about Koji Kondo’s intentions with them. Before reading, I encourage you to check out the comments on my last post. Hopefully the discussion between Ben Abraham (…)

[Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four | Part five | Part six] Koji Kondo on his experience writing the music for Ocarina of Time: I had to create all of those memorable tunes with only five tones of the classic do-re-mi scale. Specifically: re, fa, la, and ti (and the (…)

By any objective standard Twilight Princess seems head and shoulders above Ocarina of Time. The dungeon design has improved, the battles require more strategy, the world is bigger, the plot is deeper…I could go on, but I suspect many of you have played or read about it by now. Suffice it to say that Twilight (…)

On my earlier Brawl post, commenter “Misha from Mefi” says she’s been having trouble buying Wii games: We based our choices on game ratings, but it seems we lack the shared experiences of the Nintendo crowd and so, for example, Super Mario Galaxy has been a huge disappointment. We cannot fathom why in the world (…)

Inspired by Michael Abbott’s post on music in the Legend of Zeldacite series, I’ve been working up harmonic analyses for the songs Link learns to play in Ocarina of Time. I’ll post the whole thing when it’s ready, but in the meantime I wanted to share something interesting I noticed about Koji Kondo’s harmonic palette. (…)

The first link in yesterday’s big post went to a press release, “Super Smash Bros. Brawl Smashes Nintendo Sales Records.” Toward the bottom, Nintendo talked about their future plans: Mario Kart Wii launches April 27 with the Wii Wheel™, which lets players drive their speedy karts with the intuitive feel of a wireless steering wheel. (…)

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is not about the gameplay. If we were unlocking original music instead of nostalgic theme songs, collecting Xbox-style achievements instead of character trophies, and playing with a generic roster instead of with Nintendo’s characters, Brawl wouldn’t be getting half the praise that it is. It’s fun, but that’s not what’s driving (…)