Fun Fact: Doctors developed heroin as a treatment for people addicted to morphine. And much in the way of attacking a post-op bulbasaur with a shivering, emaciated charmander who sold his tail to an old Chinese man in order to score some more horse, it’s super-effective! That’s back when doctors subscribed to the medical journal of Your Dad Making You Smoke The Whole Pack At Once, and fortunately, they’ve realized their mistake. Not so fortunately, they’ve unleashed the Godzilla of opiates for people who just don’t get the same rush out of King Kong; it’s not enough for them to climb a building and flip off a few airplanes, they’ve got to rip a city out by the subway system and knock the air force out of the sky like a major league baseball player with…I’ve forgotten where I’m going with this. Are we still on the drug metaphor, or have we moved on to kaiju? Eh. Who knows. Honestly, I make so many comparisons between video games and drugs that at this point I think my parents, friends, playground monitors, and pediatrician’s assistant were right all those years ago and that I should go check into rehab for my game addiction.
Beeeeeeees!
But if the massive wall of games and the 4TB hard drive of ROMS I own draws at least one apt comparison between games and drugs, it’s that the high wears off and you’re constantly looking for the next big game to get your fix. Long story short, nothing new on my shelf has been doing it for me lately. And since you can’t OD on video games (Unless you’re Asian, apparently), reaching your tolerance of awesome games like The Legend of Zelda or Super Metroid and then trying out Star Fox Adventure or Lord of the Rings: The Third Age is like building up a tolerance to heroin and then trying to top it with children’s Tylenol. Fortunately, someone out there has found a way to distill the essence out of the awesome games like the last remaining gelfling and feed it to us like some kind of uber-heroin!
Samus apparently doesn’t mind that bug-catching kid sees her as a sex symbol.
For those of you who haven’t heard of randomizers, hackers will rig a game’s ROM to rearrange items, entrances, bosses, or what have you into random locations. So, for example, Link could hop out of bed and pull the power glove out of his chest instead of the lantern. It happened to me. It was awesome. Immediately after rescuing Zelda on my first randomized run, I had the gold sword, the red mail, half the heart containers, and absolutely no way to get into most of the dungeons. Even after playing through seven or eight different runs, there’s usually a point where I get stuck and end up wandering Hyrule aimlessly back and forth like a Jehova’s Witness who wandered into an urban ghetto. The randomizer has a pretty well-developed logic that should prevent you from getting stuck, but I’ve found that even if I choose the option for “no glitches,” sometimes it helps to be able to pull off some of the easier ones, like the Fake Flippers, or .
That sums up my feeling quite nicely.
Even aside from the glitches, playing the Link to the Past Randomizer has helped me learn more about a game I thought I knew well. For instance, I learned there are a total of 216 special items hidden throughout the game. Furthermore, whenever I just needed the hookshot or the mirror or the fucking lantern, I learned just how many of those items are goddam useless-as-fuck rupees, bombs or arrows. I also learned just how long I can spend in a dungeon before realizing that the randomizer’s logic put that last key I need to open the door to get to the final chest inside that final chest, behind the locked door that the key opens. I also learned that the pegasus shoes aren’t considered an item of vital importance, and without them the game kind of crawls along like a sloth on Ambien drowning in a pool of Jello shots.
Hmm…didn’t Link tell me something about bombs and chickens?
But while I necessarily point out the comical flaws for the sake of humor, most of these problems resolved when I discovered a treasure chest I never knew about, a new trick I could pull off, or (more frequently) an embarrassingly obvious item location I walked by six dozen times and just assumed I had already picked it up. But hey, at least I’m not as visually impaired as the boss, Blind, who I learned can only be damaged by the sword or the game’s two canes. That’s our eponymous hero! Bludgeoning the disabled with their only tool for tactilely seeing the world.
So I thought I’d play through once or twice to get a feel for how the game handles when randomized and I thought I’d fill in my off-week with a quick update. Then after about 50 to 60 hours, putting off Tales of Symphonia, neglecting about two weeks worth of classes (hey, I’m just a sub! It’s not like they needed my attention!), skipping several meals, showers, and subpoenas, coming up with a very creative excuse for why the government should accept my taxes in August rather than April, and forgetting what natural, full-spectrum light looks like, I figured I might as well give you a full entry on it. I’m not quite good enough yet to compete in the Zelda randomizer tournaments, but I still highly recommend giving it a shot, especially if you have a close friend and/or Ambien sloth to race against.
…no comment.
Video Game Underworld 