"Engaging in a little inflammatory opinionistic contrarianism is a good, fast way to build an audience, and the easiest way to employ contrarianism is to stuff thyself a strawman and refer to the dreaded 'other critics'... I can attest to the importance of this step above all others: any good devil's advocatarian begins the composition process with a statement they do not agree with, and then, researches deeply until they muster some fragmentary angle towards that statement that they do agree with."
- Tim Rogers, ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS DOOM
if you'll allow me to narrativize my history: action button season 1 changed my life. unlike the other idols of my arts criticism trinity, hazel and thorhighheels, their reviews went so far beyond being a mere artistic influence as to become worldview defining. they encouraged me to find beauty in small things in a time when life seemed overwhelmingly bleak. in a more immediately relevant way, they made me realize there was so much more to art than rote consumption, neurotransmitter regulation, or escapism. without action button, i would not view video games as anything more than a shitty pastime.
this influence manifested in a new way a few years ago, when i began to take my writing more seriously. the brazen abrasiveness and contrarianism of action button.com (and formerly of my friend chandler) inspired me to adopt a personality suited to my growing social angst and anarchistic thoughts. i en-masse downloaded and categorized games that had reviewed exceptionally well, or poorly, or were just cult classics, hoping to minmaxx instigation edge magazine -style. the quotes at the top of this page became my guiding light. most of those reviews never came to fruition or were deleted. of the ones i published... ugggggggggggggggggggggh. in my brazen pursuit, my ideological leanings - many of which libertarian, uninformed, and frankly repulsive - and my presuppositions about game development bled bright red through the page. it came to a head in my review of silent hill 4. i approached that playthrough with a slant prepared before i'd as much as touched the controller, and harbored such superficial and artificial resentment through its runtime that i was left completely burnt out by the end. what was once a newfound invigoration had turned into something jaded. even my positive reviews were dogshit, incapable of introspection as to what i enjoyed or why i enjoyed it. worse than that, i'd become abrasive in conversation. i started saying shit i thought would push away the LAME LIBERAL TENDERQUEERS and attract c00l people. instead, i pushed away some would-be friends. i was stupid, individualistic and unempathetic.
it wasn't long after that burnout when i got the sense my worldview needed to change yet again. without making this already masturbatory opener much longer: i read a lot of history and semiotics and spent REAL LIFE (woah!) time with people who weren't floridian chuds (for once!). doing this de-re-constructed my ideology and pried me away from religion and reactionary politics. fascinating. i also played ocarina of time.
OCARINA OF TIME & THE FUTURE
THAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT'S RIGHT BABY FUCKIN VIDEOOOOOOOO GAAAAAAAAAMES. If ever there was such a thing as the best or most inviting video game title screen ofall time, one that gets you ready to play the game, it would be this one.That's one I've seen hundreds of times.Ocarina of Time is one of many N64 monoliths that have loomed over me since childhood.I've been engaging with games criticism and journalism for longer than I've been engagingwith actual video games in my hands.When I was younger I wasn't really allowed to play video games.And so I saw these Nintendo titles built up with such reverence by the magazines I readand the YouTubers I watched that when I finally got the opportunity to play them for myselfvia emulation, it was almost too daunting to go through with it.Like, am I truly ready to experience the best and most important 3D video game that therehas ever been in existence?It took a lot of time to deconstruct that mythos, and so it wasn't until this yearthat I finally decided to sit down and play this game and a couple of other N64 gamesfront to back myself.I own the console physically now and I have most of my titles in a flash cart, but Ocarinaof Time was one I felt like I had to own on a physical cartridge.It just represents so much of the evolution of the way I've engaged with games over yearsand how increasingly important they've become in my life, even as the rampant, almost addictionthat I had to them when I was younger and finally got a taste has subsided.Kokiri Forest is one of the most magical things that I'd ever witnessed at thetime. I could probably draw you a map of it as well as Hyrule Forest off the topof my head with all the points of interest before I'd played more than the first coupleof dungeons.There was something so magical about seeing a full 3D polygonal space just like the otherkids had in their video games rendered, you know, in front of me for me to explore.And I think that the wonder which I garnered from this experience, from that experience,has fueled a lot of the way I approach games in general.Though my priorities may have shifted a number of times, what is always going to first andforemost grab me about a game is the opportunity to explore its environments.And these are perhaps Ocarina of Time's greatest strengths.They are so lush and the development team put so much effort into making sure they feltcinematic and grand to explore.But I think on top of just the general feeling of like, oh, this video game is too specialfor me to just engage with casually, one of the things that had stopped me from playingthe game front to back until this point was the design of ChildLink.Gonna be completely real with you here.I don't understand exactly how the video game playing message, which at so many pointshave critiqued games for being too slow or not satisfying enough managed to consistentlytrudge through playing as childlink and love it.Maybe it's just the fact that the difficulty is practically non-existent, but he is notfun to play as, like even a little bit.Running around and exploring as him feels wonderful, but the dungeons and the combatI felt like having all the goddamn joy that I had had building up to play this game overthe years ripped out of me.One of those pieces of games criticism that I remember most distinctly from my childhoodwas Egoraptor's video on Legend of Zelda.And while I think some of his opinions and conclusions were a bit blinded by his lacklack of knowledge about games development, the development of this game specifically,the hard knowledge about the hardware and how it functions, and some presuppositionsthat certain things in this game that are not very fun to experience are not very funto experience because of bad game design rather than context, such as the Ost complainedabout constant waiting, which I don't think is necessarily inherently a bad thing to havein your video game.But I think broadly what he said is accurate to a lot of what makes this game not quiteriveting to play.There's a divorce between what I experienced playing this thing, easy as it was, and theravenous leagues of people saying that this is one of the most well-designed, best combat,funniest video games they've ever made.Meanstream Games Criticism tends to focus a lot on fun factor, and I'm just not seeingit with this game.But what I came to realize over the course of playing this game and reflecting on my time playing it over the yearsand my tenure in playing and writing about video games in generalis that if you allow me to make a claim so boldthat I don't think I find playing video games inherently fun a lot of the time. I don't think that many of the games I've played enjoyed or not enjoyedhave been moment to moment funfor me to experience. But there's something interesting about thatbecause video games are one of the only mediums of art we're so consistentlyno matter, or perhaps the only medium, no matterif it's coming from a layman's or a scholars or ayou know, a journalist's perspective, video games are expected to first and foremost be fun.I would take this as a holdover from the arcade era of video games which had fun dopaminemaximizing game design in order to accumulate as much capital as possible.But even going back and playing a lot of older arcade games recently growing to appreciatethem. There's a lot of beauty in the best arcade games mechanics that isn't alwaysnecessarily fun to engage with, sort of things that are very difficult and complex to dowith the simple mechanical systems that many arcade games provide you with. And they alsoprovide a lot of value in showing off what a piece of hardware could do. These are incrediblycool and pieces of software that both were formed by and helped to form technology asit was developing in the burgeoning 3D years in particular.But fun is not what I come to a video game for.The point of, or the primary function, the thing that art is best at is storytellingand communicating andwe are doing ourselves a great disservice if wewill breeze pastumwhat a game's storytelling could conveyconvey intentionally or otherwiseumwhat storytelling a game's mechanics could conveyintentionally or otherwiseumand how that interacts with the visual and musical parts of the medium that hooked meall those years ago. Because, oh, well this thing isn't fun to engage with. This thing is toodifficult to engage with. It's tedious. It's whatever. And this is something that I thinkis reflected in a lot of reviews that I wrote previously. I was using a lot of that languageeven when it didn't really make sense to.I don't think that the video games I loveare video games I love because they are fun.And that's part of what enables a personto engage with the medium more truthfully and inefficiently.All that being said is that I think playing as Childlink is absolutely terrible,but is crucial to what this game conveys.And that was something I came to understandas I butted my head against the fairly easy,but still total drags that were the earlier section of Ocarinaof Time.But that sort of leads us to a difficult topic.It led me to a difficult topic that coincidedwith a lot of the stuff I was going through politicallyat the time, which is that the things that Ocarina of Time conveys both through its visualdesign and its storytelling in the textual and environmental sense and ludicrously isa lot of shit that is difficult to reckon with.And this was stuff that had gone over my head when I was younger because I was not engagingin games, in the game, it's the same way I am now.I generally like to keep my writing self-sufficient, like isolated.You can read this and you will get a complete image of what it is I wanted to get at, butyou know, cheat a little bit here and say that partially just because I want to putpeople on this incredible essay, you should go watch. Or if you don't enjoy the format,maybe read a transcript of, should you be able to make one or if there's one available.Buy some Divine Prank, an essay on, that gives context not just for what I noticed in thisgame, but also how it applies to the game.how it fits into the context of the broader Legend of Zelda series.Ocarina of Time is a game that thoroughly, concisely and beautifully, in every facet of its creation,tells, er er er er er er er er er er er er er er er er er er er er er er er er erserves as fascist propaganda.I have no interest in moralizing over whether or not this makes the game good or bad okayto engage with or not.What I have more of an interest in is examining the practical ramifications.Because the thing that makes operator time so striking is the way in which it illustratesthe intersection ofthe development of these fascist politicswhen a personuh... is given the timeor by a nostalgia I should sayand uh...That's good for right now.
notes - history with ocarina of time and going from consuming games media to consuming games to actually playing games - by some divine prank - most (maybe all?) video games are not particularly fun to me and "fun" is a less than ideal way to critique the medium. love of video games i've discovered is a love of hardware and a love of ludic storytelling. - long process of playing game as i came to identify the ways in which ideological and historical presuppositions on the part of the creators influenced their work, as i realized the same in mine - irony of oot being dug up to be remade as the general populace is becoming aware of fascism's prevalence in the US, Ukraine, etc - changes with website and image going forward and mention that i've updated some older reviews though they're mostly rooted so deeply in what i was going for at the time that they're unsalvageable or still not something i agree with - incorporate what i wrote in backloggd review?END GAME REVIEW