HORI made an electronic ocarina for the new Ocarina Of Time Gabe is obsessed with, good luck fuckin' finding one though. It can autoplay the traditional songs, or you can learn to play them yourself, and the game can hear you do it! It also has a headphone jack, which is a profound kindness and might save us a trip to the hospital.
Okay, so, last time I was engaging in a kind of Elder Statesman history lesson about the lineage of Queen's Domain, a game I would learn later was made by two people. I guess that makes it more shocking, but not by much; I couldn't be more shocked than I already am.
Gabe grabbed the demo and got rocked by the first skeleton, as his damage output was filth. I would say this knowledge is the sacrament that leads to greater sacraments: Queen's Domain is rigorously dedicated to you figuring it out, and that basically starts with the first swing of the sword. It's some old D&D type shit: quick slashes of the sword do almost nothing against skeletons. They're telling you what type of game it is right away: one where you dance with opponents, wait for enemies to commit, and punish safely with heavier strikes. It's not a game where you roll around on the ground, as is the current fashion. Things are heavy. You are a big bag of pointy, angry sand.
The whole game is a sequence of lethal experiments, whose solutions only offer themselves to the observant. This game doesn't care if you don't see a secret. It just waits. And every time you learn something, there's something else for you to learn - a new place to go, the confidence to deal with a boss, the rust falling away from an old weapon. It's a combination of stern and lavish, like if your dad was also your coach. It wants you to be better and it believes that you can.
The idea that a game this generous costs twenty dollars is one of the firmest indications that a new golden age of the medium is here, ruled by a wicked Queen, whose arrival was not foretold. I find all this "Game of the Year" talk pretty conservative, frankly. It's more about trying to figure out where it rests in the medium itself, the Pantheon, and what games it will mother into the world.
(CW)TB out.
