I have a confession to make: I was not a cool kid in high school. I know, shocker right? Well not for the reasons you’re thinking you ginormous asshole. You see, I actually didn’t go to any school at all when I was a kid. Yep, that’s right, I was homeschooled. What the actual fuck right? This guy? This boisterous outspoken crude disgusting human being was at one point sitting at the family table solving pre-algebra problems at 10am on a Tuesday. And you wanna know why?? Well first, my parents thought that public school curriculum was dumber than choosing their own curriculum, which is actually true and explains why I aced college algebra and physics at a community college when I was 16. But they also did it because they thought it would shelter me from the evils of the world, so they could teach me the correct way to go about things. Welp, that scheme didn’t exactly work to a tee did it mom and dad? What it did do instead of your original intentions is make social situations incredible difficult to understand, make it so I didn’t kiss a girl until I was 20, and that I didn’t have an actual serious girlfriend until I was 24. So yea, sheltering your kids is an incredible way to protect them from the world except it isn’t at all and all it does is release crazed sin-hungry beasts into the world so don’t. fucking. do. it.
Onto the next one:
Numbuh 4: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
For a brief period of time in high school, I convinced my parent to let me try this new thing out called “cyber school”. And yes, it was as weird as it seems. You see what’d you do is log onto your computer at class time, sign into a webinar, and you’d listen to a PowerPoint lecture on your class topic. You could ask questions and get called on like in AOL Instant Messenger, and the instructor would give you mic privileges to answer or ask a question. It was all very very weird, and also incredibly easy. I didn’t pay attention at all during class, but I did get a free laptop out of this whole deal. So I downloaded emulators and roms and would play them the whole time. When we owned an actual SNES, my parents heavily filtered which games I was and wasn’t allowed to play; basically anything with magic or scary monsters was off the list. But when I was in cyber school, I did whatever the fuck I wanted. And that’s when I encountered A Link to the Past.
I think its insane that A Link to the Past is the best selling game of all time, yet it’s constantly overlooked due to the N64 entries in the series. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve played through both Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask as well. All three titles are some of the greatest games of all time. But for me, I always have to go back to that first RPG. It’s the one that introduced me to non-linear gameplay, brought new gameplay mechanics throughout the playthrough, and taught me to explore and solve puzzles in an “open” world. Also, the story is fucking awesome. I still remember grabbing the three pendants, getting the Master Sword, beating Agahnim and thinking the game is over. NOPE. You’ve just broken the surface. You still have seven more dungeons and two final boss fights ahead of you. I couldn’t believe it, and I fucking loved it. That’s how you know you’re playing a great game: you think it’s over, you realize you have like 9-10 more hours still to go, and you’re 100% fine with it.
Again, if you’ve never touched A Link to the Past, download an SNES emulator and play it. You absolutely will not regret it.
