More like Skyward S'bored. Amiright?

Hobby Lobby: Your body, our choice.
Also, 40% off hot glue guns!

I don't know, I just have trouble applauding someone for something they should have done in the first place. And before you get all: "What are you even talking about?" I'm going to talk about video games. Yes, again. The thing about reading a blog that is sometimes about heavy stuff like anti-choice hobby stores and then pivots to something about Captain Picard before lurching back to voter suppression, is that you never know what you're in for. But by this point you probably should. Anyway like I was saying, video games. Yes, again.

No. If you said Zelda II was the worst
you are, I'm sorry to say, incorrect.

Anyway, Nintendo is prying open the rusty hinges of the back catalogue and re-releasing one of the 3D Zelda games, which, depending on how you feel about 3D Zelda games is either great news or, you know...news. Of course the game they decided to re-release is Skyward Sword. And I think most people would agree it's the worst game in a series of really good games, but still, the worst. I played it back when it first came out ten years ago and remember it being kind of frustrating. Not the level of difficulty--I could have dealt with that-- but the incessant handholding. 

Above: Skyward Sword's intended audience.

Admittedly, I never made it past the tutorial section so I probably shouldn't have an opinion, but in my defense the tutorial section was an infuriating four hours long and assumes that you've never played a Zelda game before. Or any video game before. In fact, I think it assumes that you were only recently released from some sort of lab experiment designed to study the effects of raising a child in a featureless white room without stimulus of any kind and no exposure to a world outside the box in which you've spent your entire existence. 

"Wait, you push forward to make Link go
forward? Hang on, I've got to write this down."

-Nobody

Look, I'm picking on a ten year old game that was probably ok, but my point is that the game is famous for a number of annoying features. Like, there's this diagram of the Wii controller complete with button layout on the screen at almost all times. It's huge, like it takes up a good eighth of the display. I suppose it's there in case you suddenly and frequently forget what the buttons do mid-game? But if that's something that happens to you, you might have bigger issues than forgetting which button fires the slingshot.

"I fucking know it's worth five rupees!"

-Everyone who's ever played

Skyward Sword, about ten minutes in

But the worst was the item pick-ups. Every time you pick up an item--which in a Zelda game is kind of a lot--the game stops to give you a description of said item. Even if you've picked up that very same item a hundred times before, a thousand times before. In the eyes of the designers, it doesn't matter. They want to make goddamn sure that you know, you know that that blue rupee you just picked up is worth five rupees. You may wonder if the stars are fire. You may wonder if the sun moves across the sky. You may wonder if the truth is a liar. But never wonder if blue rupees are worth five.

It's charmingly tedious!

You might recall--well, ok, if you're roughly my age and spent most of your childhood in a suburban basement solving game tapes--you might recall Castlevania II: Simon's Quest and its infamous day night cycle. Every few minutes the game would grind to a halt while excruciatingly slow text would appear and explain how night or day it had suddenly gotten. In a game from 1988, this is annoying, but forgivable. Almost charming in a retro kind of way. But in 2011 it's the kind of thing that makes you want to give up gaming, go outside, and get some sun.

Well, rest easy fans of re-buying new versions of old games you probably already have. Because according to Nintendo's Tweet, in the re-mastered version, those notifications will only pop up the first time you collect an item.

Well, that's certainly worth sixty dollars.

Pictured: Super Mario 3D All Stars,
which is in no way related to my comment
about lazy, thrown together ports.

Which, great. Super even. But one wonders how the original version made it out of play testing with features so blatantly annoying that a decade later they justify an entire tweet about how you no longer have to put up with the game's nonsense. Look, don't get me wrong, it's super that they've made these changes. Nintendo is famously stubborn when it comes to fan pressure, so the fact that this re-master exists and is more than a lazy port hastily thrown together to placate fans is something. 

But I guess I just wish they wouldn't tweet their own horn about it. Actually, I wish they were re-releasing a better Zelda game, but if it's going to be Skyward Sword, they could at least apologize for it.

I mean, no, but they might as well have, right?