Summer Gaming

Beyond Fun & More Fun

I try to avoid using the word visceral on this blog because of it's toxic "video game marketing" bent - but I have to say that summer is the most visceral month.  It is a season dominated by sensations and feelings, instinct and nostalgia - and excepting the oppressive heat - all of these feelings are positive. Even mosquito bites have a kernel of happiness at their center because one only gets them in the summer (ideally at a BBQ... at a yacht club... on Martha's Vineyard). 

But any serious gamer spent a decent amount of their summers indoors playing video games. Sure this sounds sad, and is probably a truth that is best left unsaid to any girl, but memories of sitting in front of a fan, possibly shirtless, playing Final Fantasy are the equal to any day at a beach eating cheese sandwiches. As a kid/adolescent, summer was an infinite sprawl of free time to play as many video games as possible. I would give a few toes to be as carefree and steeped in games as I once was able to be, able to casually knock of 30 hours on RPG in just a week instead of a month. 

 As my ability to acquire games outpaces my ability to actually play them, I've built up a shamefully thick backlog of games-to-play in my library. This summer, with at least a week out of commission due to impending surgery, I've been thinking about what games I should finally beat and/or rack up more hours in. Yeah, I'll probably just winding up playing Mass Effect 1 and 2 again, but at the beginning of summer I get so nostalgic for the summers of my youth that I only want to play old games. Here are THE five games I need to play this summer:

• Beyond Good & Evil
• Skies of Arcadia
• Final Fantasy XII
• Star Ocean: The Second Story
• Vagrant Story

And, like every summer, I swear to play a 3D Zelda game. Every summer since it was released, I drag my N64 out and hook it up to the TV so I can take another pass at Ocarina of Time. But I only ever make it through the first dunegon and out onto Hyrule Field before I put the controller down, throw up, and never to pick it up for the rest of the summer. Is it because my surviving N64 controller is sorta busted? Or perhaps because the N64 on an HD-TV looks like shit? Or is it because I never really liked Ocarina of Time as much as I wanted to? I suspect the former two, but deep down, I know it is the latter. And that's why I think I try to play it every year - because I love A Link to the Past so much, why shouldn't I love Ocarina of Time? Looking at the other games in the series, would I like Major's Mask and it's eccentricities more? It's arguable that The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess are just updated, more contemporary versions of Ocarina of Time, so maybe I should just skip to them?

Zelda and summer go hand-in-hand especially in my mind because the Zelda games were the first ones to impress a sense of environment on me. Plants, animals, all seemed to be a part of their surroundings, and exploring ones surroundings is what Zelda, and summer, are all about. Ocarina of Time had a fantastic, almost impressionistic sense of place, probably necessary beause of hardware limitations. The impression of these Zelda games always brings me back, but the mechanics of actually playing it aren't that appealing to me. And you know what? I guess I could say the same for summer - it's a fantastic memory, but often in the thick of it, I'm sweating my ass off and giant bugs constantly harass me.

Epilogue: After I finished writing this Zelda rant, I realized that what I love most about Zelda games is present by the boatload in Beyond Good & Evil, the game at the top of my summer list. So check that game out!