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zwolanerd

“I guess I just like liking things”

January 8, 2015 Operation All The Zeldas!: Oracle of Ages

Okay, so I went MIA. I’ve been stuck on this stupid Oracle of Ages game for the better part of two months, and today I decided that I’d move on. I’d already decided that when I wasn’t able to complete Majora’s Mask, that I would try to finish every other game in the series.
So I’ve been stuck on a dancing mini-game for the better part of two months, and today I decided that it was either giving up or throwing my 3DS into the lake.

oracleofages

Oracle of Ages is the second of the Capcom Zelda games for the Game Boy Color. It does have a different story than Oracle of Seasons, this time Link is trying to rescue Nayru, who is the eponymous Oracle. She is kidnapped by Veran who goes back in time and kills the Maku tree. Not the same Maku tree as Oracle of Seasons, but another one.

There is enough reused between these two games, that you have to wonder why they didn’t just make a single larger title. This game is a lot less action oriented than its predecessor, all of the dungeons involve a puzzle or sequence that you need to follow. However, the boss battles are all fairly generic. If you had combined these titles, you would have gotten one proper Zelda game, rather than two half Zelda games.

That may be why the true ending to the game was hidden in the password system that integrates the two titles together. If you enter the password from your Seasons game, you’ll get a more detailed opening to the game. You’ll also find people throughout who give you passwords and secrets to enter in Seasons. This was an interesting idea, but something that probably was a bit ahead of its time. The passwords are all unwieldy, and they require you to jump back and forth between the games. This might have been better executed in a bigger single game. (This is likely why a third installment in this series was cancelled.)

I think that I am going to keep this on my 3DS to go back and try to finish the stupid Goron dancing at some point, but I’m done trying to power my way through it. These two games were flawed, but they show the growing pains of the industry at the time. There’s a lot of ambition, but the technology limits the execution.

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January 7, 2015 Lyn Plays Crystal Caves

Hello. Happy New Year to you. This week I have dusted off a game I used to load from a floppy and play for hours. Crystal Caves was a pretty solid little game back in the day, and it sort of hasn’t aged much.

Basically, your character wants to raise the cash to start a twibble farm and in order to do that he needs to collect all the gems in random mines on a random planet. Obviously, the creatures that inhabit these mines are not so keen on just giving up the gems so you have to shoot them, or avoid them, or – if you’re me, die horribly at their hands (claws?)

Like many games in the glorious 1990s (New Kids on the Block notwithstanding), The Trouble With Twibbles was part one of a trilogy.  Like many games in the glorious 1990s, I only ever played the freebie first episode because it was too much effort to send US funds anywhere.  I’m unsure on the abandonware status of the series, but the first episode is obviously free. I nabbed mine from The Internet Archive. Enjoy! (Don’t shoot the air units)

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January 6, 2015 Tuesday 10: My Movie Years

I’ll warn you right off the bat: this entry won’t interest anyone but me. I like to sometimes break down the numbers on things I enjoy. Sometimes it reveals interesting patterns. Sometimes it’s just fun.

I don’t know what prompted me to start, but I’ve been keeping movie journals since 2005. I do remember keeping a written list one summer during high school ( I think my number was around 50), but I don’t know where that list ended up. It’s much easier to keep digital lists in the cloud.

My life has changed in many ways over the last ten years, and looking at the lists reminds me where I was and who I was with. Not all of those memories are good, but as a nostalgia-driven fellow I enjoy remembering regardless.

The list is presented in order from least amount of movies watched to most, with a few notes here and there.

10. 2007 (107) – Lowest recorded year, but also the first year I started keeping track of who I watched the movies with. I didn’t watch any movies at all in the month of January (as some sort of challenge to myself, as I recall) and I dated a girl this year that wasn’t a movie buff in the slightest.

  • First movie of the year: Batman (1989)
  • Last movie of the year: Robocop
  • Movies I watched by myself: 26
  • Movies I watched at the theater: 28

9. 2010 (120) – I got married in June of this year.

  • First movie of the year: Star Trek Insurrection (My roommate at the time and I were watching through the whole Trek series.)
  • Last movie of the year: The Expendables
  • Movies I watched by myself: 37
  • Movies I watched at the theater: 27

8. 2011 (142)

  • First movie of the year: Law Abiding Citizen
  • Last movie of the year: Tucker & Dale vs. Evil
  • Movies I watched by myself: 52
  • Movies I watched at the theater: 19

7. 2014 (171)

  • First movie of the year: The Avengers
  • Last movie of the year: Maleficent
  • Movies I watched by myself: 88
  • Movies I watched at the theater: 31
  • Movies I saw for the first time: 82

6. 2012 (172)

  • First movie of the year: Batman Begins
  • Last movie of the year: All Star Superman
  • Movies I watched by myself: 99
  • Movies I watched at the theater: 27

5. 2013 (184) – I can’t believe it took me this long, but this was the first year I started keeping track of what movies I was seeing for the first time. It was also the first year I started keeping track of ratings.

  • First movie of the year: The House of the Flying Daggers
  • Last movie of the year: The Shawshank Redemption (My wife’s first time ever seeing this movie)
  • Movies I watched by myself: 77
  • Movies I watched at the theater: 38
  • Movies I saw for the first time: 93

4. 2009 (221) – I was in a long-distance relationship for the first part of this year, and we watched a few movies “together” by starting them at the same time and IMing during them.

  • First movie of the year: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
  • Last movie of the year: Alien
  • Movies I watched by myself: 111
  • Movies I watched at the theater: 36

3. 2008 (241) – This was the first year I held a Movie Marathon. We watched Star Wars, a marathon we are repeating a week from Saturday.

  • First movie of the year: Resident Evil: Extinction
  • Last movie of the year: A Murder of Crows
  • Movies I watched by myself: 161
  • Movies I watched at the theater: 28

2. 2005 (263) – The inaugural year of keeping track. All I recorded was Date, Title, and if it was in the theater.

  • First movie of the year: Garden State
  • Last movie of the year: Alien 3
  • Movies I watched by myself: Impossible to say, but I bet it was 85% or more.
  • Movies I watched at the theater: 38

1. 2006 (371) – Many of these movies were watched while I played World of Warcraft. I always felt like if I was wasting time in two different ways at the same time it was a more efficient use of time. I also remember specifically watching six more movies the last week of the year so I could break the “one movie per day” average.

  • First movie of the year: Alien Resurrection (finishing up a run through the series)
  • Last movie of the year: Little Miss Sunshine
  • Movies I watched by myself: I did not record this statistic, but I’d guess it was 80% or higher.
  • Movies I watched at the theater: 31

Total Movies Watched: 1,992
Total Movies Watched in the Theater: 303

 

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January 5, 2015 We Now Return You To Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

Our last post was over two weeks ago?! What in the world is going on??

Oh, that’s right:

onabreak

While I realize this is a cheap way to return (what with it not being an actual post or anything), I did want to let you know we’re back at it and there’s already one scheduled post for Thursday.

We hope you’ve had a wonderful holiday season!

 

December 19, 2014 tGIF: End of the Year Edition

This here’s the last post for 2014, folks. I’ve never had much luck trying to get things written over the holidays, so I’ve decided to embrace it and give you all a couple weeks off. We’ll be back in January, and if you want to know exactly when, it’s probably best you follow us on Twitter or add us to your RSS feed.

I thought about ending the week with a “Favorite TV Shows of 2014” list, but I think you’d rather have a couple of GIFs. We here at zwolanerd hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday season and wish you all the best in the coming new year.

I can't think of a witty caption that makes sense to anyone but me, so just enjoy the look on his face after he dunks.

I can’t think of a witty caption that makes sense to anyone but me, so just enjoy the look on his face after he dunks.

 

Q*bert on hard mode

Q*bert on hard mode

 

I like to imagine this cat feels about yogurt the way readers feel about zwolanerd. LET ME DREAM

I like to imagine this cat feels about yogurt the way readers feel about zwolanerd. LET ME DREAM

I had a GIF of this next one, but it was way too large, so I’m just going to embed the video. Imagine it’s some sort of magical GIF that has sound!