yeah there’s definitely a sort of lonely coming of age story to OoT, i just wish it wasn’t annoying as hell to play. i just find that game annoying!! it makes my hands feel bad!!!
MM is a game that has fuckin themes though, and in my mind it is so additive to OoT that it kinda retroactively redeems that game. like, OoT is barely about growing up and change (it’s mostly about killing monsters and being cool as hell), but the way that MM just fucken drips sorrow and loneliness kinda makes OoT seem like it does too.
anyway i should probably replay MM at some point but i feel like the magic might be lost and i really don’t wanna do that to myself
thanks heaps that’s really useful!
the animation did also strike me as so much more expressive than its peers, and i always liked that the backgrounds are also made (almost) entirely out of the same ellispoids as everything else, which makes me think that they must have developed (or piggybacked) a more comprehensive modelling tool to arrange a shitload of ellipsoids for prerendering.
i think there are a ton of themes that can be extrapolated from Thief - particularly about the nature of wealth. it is a fantasy world but all that stuff is in there. Half-Life is pretty much a dumb action movie tho lol.
also i just think Thief is a different kind of game from those early 3D Zeldas even tho there is overlap at times.
half life is clearly about how the us government is evil and the grave risk the military industrial complex subjects the rest of us to in order to build more effective weapons…? did you play the questionable ethics chapter cuz i mean the game communicates these things visually primarily but there are like giant vivisection machines and death beam lasers that cause immense damage that you can use on like, headcrabs, it’s clearly supposed to make you be like hmm
like yeah it’s a Dumb Guy FPS I guess because everyone started making bad linear narrative shooters afterwards but one of the reasons why valve games are good is because uh, they still have thematic stuff going on like any other decent piece of art, ilike imagine seeing the extremely evocative fascist aesthetic of city 17 and going “they didn’t mean anything by this, huh!”
Allow me to use an analogy that will make sense to my fellow millennials:
Ocarina of Time is like the Protoss campaign in Brood War, in that it’s seemingly straightforward heroic narrative is tinged by wistfulness, and there are magic rocks.
Half-Life is like the Terran campaign in Brood War, because it’s an example of how even humanity’s strongest military-scientific programs can backfire.
Thief is like the Zerg campaign in Brood War, because failing at the stealth stuff and being surrounded by enemies is basically how Kerrigan ends up by the final mission.
also if you think thief isn’t about anything i really implore you to pay more attention to the games you play, sorry i got hyper fixated on half life but like what the hell lol i don’t get this site sometimes. i feel like 1998 is a real bad year to complain about pc games not having character and voice in their writing (tfw you have never played a sir tech game before) when people quote the hl1 scientists constantly to this day and think about the guards in thief calling each other taffers and shit like shogo mobile armor division came out, it’s actually probably the time where fps games, one of the least interesting PC genres, started to have a lot more character and writing to them lmfao.
while you were learning about childhood or growing up or whatever on the n64 ira in jagged alliance 2 was busy pilling me about how NATO arms reactionary death squads in third world countries to project their imperial power worldwide and the only thing that can topple this unjust status quo is high impact precision violence done by motivated cells of fighters and I think that’s just as valid of a theme. sure I suppose it’s more of a bummer but a gal’s gotta learn how the world works somewhere
everything with a narrative is “about something” i think that phrase is too broad to be helpful here lol
these games are all structured really differently and aimed at very different audiences its more of a difference in how they relate their themes. Ocarina uses really classical children’s fantasy storytelling, hang the Themes (Growing up + you cant go home again) on a familiar narrative (a zelda game. specifically link to the past)
Half-life is an action movie thrill ride of set piece levels but even if it was a dumb game (and its not) interesting, compelling themes are always capable of bubbling out of a writers id and action movie storytelling is all about bubbling id. its not about the destination (that level sucks) it’s about the kleiners and barneys you meet along the way
Thief 1 has a neat structure that i want to think about more and post about later lol
The time skip is really good. Ocarina doesn’t have anything very dense going on but the connections between simple elements are more what’s fun for me. The NPCs are basic but they all go through some kind of significant change as the world changes, whether that be in personality or location or purpose
Also I like how all of them look like caricatures. It’s one of those things you maybe only got away with at the time because the N64 graphics were so terrible and they had to compensate, but you can just look at a person in that game and know what they’re all about. Look at this guy. Look at Grog please
i guess i need to clarify that i don’t think Half Life is “dumb”, i just think a lot of the themes are very of the 90’s action movie/pop culture zeitgeist (the sort of “men in black” coverup conspiracy stuff, esp from a libertarian angle) in a way i can’t draw like particularly coherent conclusions about its themes. a lot of games of that era did the same. i think it’s a well executed game in many ways, i’m just not like particular inspired by the themes of it esp coming in the context of the time it did. i think something like Thief is a little more atypical for the era, which is why i find it more interesting from that particular angle.
Valve literally hired a fairly unknown horror novelist to script their fps in an era when fps plots were a paragraph in the manual written by a bored level designer
and it tells its story really elegantly compared to something like deus ex, which is literally 90s action movie libertarian fare where people say the most direct to video ass shit to you like “I am the superior model Denton” and it has to communicate what its about to you in lengthy scenes of exposition where a bartender explains to you what a think tank is. Not that all of that makes deus ex bad, I would not go “This game reminds me of the 1992 film Nemesis by Albert Pyun so it sucks,” that would be insane, my point is actually that like nobody would say they couldn’t coherently describe the themes of that game because it’s so of the time so I’m not really sure what makes half life different other than there’s less people talking so it’s more dumber. and either way action movies are not dumb, you may not think they are important, but that doesn’t make them stupid!
when all the soldiers in half life appeared and some scientists were like “finally we’re saved!” and then immediately got blasted, I said to myself “this isn’t about anything”
Half-Life has an immaculate first hour or so, but suffers in several different ways due to the game simply being way too long.
I am someone who rarely quits a game and it took me until my fourth or so time trying OoT to finally stick with it all the way through, the stretch around Goron City just loses me something harsh. I may have legit gotten less out of it than every other 3d Zelda, I’d describe so many of them as “some good things held back by other things done poorly” so the thought that people think some are great and others are weak always throws me off.
