I have made no secret of growing up poor, so it was a big deal when the house got a Nintendo Entertainment System. I don’t know if it was secondhand, or simply less expensive because it was the tail end of that console’s run. Since it came with the light gun and the dual Mario/Duck Hunt cartridge, I suspect the latter. It was late enough in the console’s run that we had no issue finding inexpensive games or cheap rentals from Blockbuster, so we accumulated a modest little library of titles, and played even more. Among those we owned was the original gold cartridge Legend of Zelda game. And I sucked at it. In fact, nobody in my household managed to beat it. Oh, we made concerted attempts, but that game beat us.
Years pass and the next Nintendo I own is a Wii, and of the four titles I bought for that console, there was another Legend of Zelda title – Twilight Princess. And… the WiiMote beat me. The ergonomics of that controller made it literally painful for my giant meat-mitt hands to operate it. So I never got far enough to see Link leave wolf form in that title. Besides, I had a growing Steam Library more than willing to eat up my time.
Years pass again and I pick up a 3DS mostly to play Pokemon, but also get drawn into Fire Emblem titles. I wouldn’t have bought any of that had some fans not made the unofficial Pokemon Uranium for PC, since I was quite solidly a PC gamer at this time. It was these two franchises which led me to buy a Switch and attach it to my computer monitor on one of the alternate HDMI ports. Then I picked up a title which came with a free month of Nintendo’s nostalgia bait subscription service. I didn’t buy a subscription, but playing those old titles reminded me of the old white whale in the golden cartridge – which I still suck at.
Oh well. The free trial lapses and I go on with my existing gaming habits. Until last year.
Watching video game lore videos just to fill the silence, I was reminded that despite multiple attempts, I have never beaten a Legend of Zelda title in the first thirty-eight years the series has been out. While I’m sure all three of my more recent devices still work, the Switch was still hooked up and ready to go, so I went and picked up all four titles available for that platform – Link’s Awakening Remake, Skyward Sword HD, Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom.* That was the order I decided to play them – chronologically by release date. And that’s the order I’ll talk about them.
*Since that mass purchase, Echoes of Wisdom came out and I acquired that as well.
Link’s Awakening Remake
Spoilers for a thirty-year old game incoming. Yes, the Remake of Link’s Awakening was a remake of a 1993 title for the original GameBoy. I did not own a GameBoy, so I went into the game blind. It starts with Link’s ship getting caught in a storm and wrecked. He wakes up on an island and is told that the only way to leave is to wake up the Wind Fish. The bosses are Nightmare Monsters who don’t want the Wind Fish awakened. If the thematic naming hasn’t keyed you in yet, the reason the Nightmares don’t want the Wind Fish awakened is because they know that the island is all in a dream and waking it will end everything on it. I made the guess that it was Link’s Dream. This was in error. Link fell into the dream of a Skywhale, obviously. After waking it up, Link is left drifting on a fragment of his ship, abandoned by the flying whale. That skywhale is a dick.
The game itself retains all the original 2D game mechanics, but all of the assets are rendered in a cartoony 3D art style. It works fairly well, and unlike the other 2D titles, I was able to work out where I needed to go and what I needed to do largely on my own. I did say largely because there were a handful of spots where I went “What am I supposed to do?” These turned out one of three ways “How was I supposed to figure that out?” “Well, I should have seen that.” and “Well, that is just stupid.” The last one was mostly reserved for the final boss fight.
There were only three times I was frustrated to the verge of quitting. The first was the fight against the Slime Eye boss, where the technique needed to trigger stage two of the fight required close timing with the use of an item whose long windup time and awkward controls made it nearly impossible. But I lucked into getting it only twice, and the second time I won the ensuing second stage. The second time I almost quit was during the Eagle’s Tower because I couldn’t figure out what I needed to do, and the mutable layout hurts the brain. The last one was the final boss fight, where I had to look up how to damage the first stage. This was the “Well, that’s stupid,” reaction. Turns out the weapon to use was the magic dust. Prior to this fight, the only things I’d used magic dust for were to light torches and to change one raccoon back to a human. I never felt compelled to dust an enemy, since it is basically a melee weapon which does not aim well.
However, I was at the final boss, so I came back the next day, prepared again and won the game. For the first time I’d beaten a Legend of Zelda title (even if I had to look up an answer or three). It was fun enough to recommend it to others. This game has a few interesting quirks – the title character doesn’t make an appearance, despite being name dropped once in an early conversation; there is no Ganon, Ganondorf, or any echoes of that character; Link was both hero and villain, aiding the dream world residents with their problems before destroying that dream world by awakening the skywhale. These aspects whet my appetite for more titles in the series that did not fall into the ‘Ganon[dorf] threatens the world’ setups. I was to be disappointed in that aspect for the Switch titles.
Skyward Sword HD
Skyward Sword achieved a rare feat for a video game – I rage quit the Tutorial.
The problem was the camera controls. Skyward Sword HD is a remake of a Wii title for the Switch. And they didn’t fix the biggest flaw with Wii titles – the misguided obsession with motion controls. I keep forgetting the Joycons for the Switch contain motion control mechanisms because most games have abandoned that as the gimmick it is. Luckily, the menus told me that they had ported over that nonsense, and by tiling the controllers around I got into the options and disabled motion controls in the hopes that normal controls would let me play the game.
In most 3D console games with twin analog sticks will let the player control their character’s movement with the left stick and the camera with the right. This convention is so common that even my muscle memory expects it. That is not how Skyward Sword handles it. The left stick still does movement. The default camera will sort of follow your movement, with enough lag that you can smoothly maintain a direction. But if you wanted to turn the camera, you need to hold down the left shoulder button, which gives the right stick its expected influence. But the moment you release the shoulder button, the camera becomes fixed at the last angle you had it aimed at, regardless of your movement. You can reaim it using the same freecam shoulder button, but to get back to the default follow behavior, you need to switch to first person mode then back to third.
This camera nonsense stacked frustration on me and I asked the internet how to get regular camera controls. Turns out you can’t. The programmers wanted to use the right analog stick for sword swinging shenanigans that would otherwise have been the realm of the motion control nonsense.
I had enough, I was out before I’d managed to exit the starting dormitory. Another Zelda game beat me by WiiMote proxy.
Breath of the Wild
I have heard some people lay superlative hyperbolic praise upon Breath of the Wild. While it is an impressive achievement I wouldn’t go so far as to declare it the best ever. It does use the conventional camera and movement controls, so I didn’t have the same problem as Skyward Sword. Looking back at it, it’s just kinda forgettable. I finished it in that I defeated Calamity Gannon and got a closing cutscene. But the problem was I triggered the final battle because I realized I was standing right above the entrance to it. I was actually hunting clothing pieces at the time and went. You know, I’m actually just bored, let me wrap this up. So I dropped into the throne room and beat the game. I had done the regional quests of cleansing the divine beasts and had all that assistance, so it wasn’t a reckless decision, but it did seem kinda anticlimactic.
Tears of the Kingdom
Breath of the Wild, but you can build machines!
This suffers much the same flaw as Breath of the Wild – It’s forgettable. There’s a lot of sand in the sandbox and a lot of things to do, but all of it slips from memory as mellow mush. I did beat the surface bosses, recover all of the dragon’s tears, recover the master sword, and mapped most of the depths. The problem was, opening the quest to beat up unmummified gannondorf required chasing Master Kohga around the depths and having fights with him. I did not want to do that. These fights are not fun. They’re not hard compared to boss fights I’ve beaten, but they’re not fun either. I couldn’t be bothered to chase the chubby ninja down to beat up his constructs and then run to the next base he was at to repeat it.
The construct mechanic was not interesting, and I resented when I was forced to interact with it for puzzles.
Echos of Wisdom
A Legend of Zelda where you play as Zelda. A first for the series, the main player controlled character is the Princess herself. My first fears were “oh no, please don’t be a modern audiences thing”. Thankfully, this was not the case. Zelda herself is actually not good for combat except when using magic to channel Link, and that’s time limited. Made by the same studio who did the Link’s awakening remake, it shares the cartoony style, but the rest of the game is original. In the tutorial, you do control Link who has finished most of a different off-screen Legend of Zelda title and has arrived to rescue the princess from the boar demon Gannon. The Gannon fight is part of the tutorial. You win, but Gannon’s spear pokes a rift in reality, and Link falls in. Before he goes, he shoots the crystal holding Zelda, and she becomes the main character.
Turns out that wasn’t Gannon, but an echo of Gannon created by the villain of this game, Null. Null is a primordial entity of nothing trapped inside the planet and trying to delete creation so things will go back to being quiet and empty. The Goddesses don’t care for that idea, since they put all that effort into creating that world, so they create an army of little fairy things called Tris to go and patch the holes Null eats in the world. Only over time Null has managed to capture enough of them that they can’t patch things up anymore and he’s gained the ability to create Echos. One of the remaining free Tris gives Zelda the ability to make echos of her own, and this is the main mechanic for the game. You use echos of objects and/or monsters to solve puzzles and win fights, or traverse the map. There was much less looking up answers online in this game, I don’t recall any incident that made me go in search of a guide.
Echo Link shows up as a boss three times, each time you beat him, you collect one of Link’s actual weapons and gain the ability to use it when magically channeling the swordsman. This is a limited resource, and I saved it for puzzles rather than combat. Eventually you do free all the Tris Null has captured, close his rifts, and free Link, who joins you for the final dungeon and battle against Null. I’m not convinced Null is dead, since a primordial entity of nothingness is a bit hard to classify as alive or not. But you do beat the crap out of his avatar and whack him with a triforce wish. That is enough to put things in order for a good long time.
In Conclusion
I don’t know why, but the 2D games just worked better for me. I can’t even say it’s the lack of odd mechanics, because the echos are very odd for the series, and that game was fairly memorable.
*Ties onion to his belt*
In my day, there weren’t “guides” and “cyberwebs” and the like. We spent recess comparing notes (often literal on-paper notes) about all the different things we had tried re: Zelda. Trying to burn every tree in a forest when you only had the candle you could use twice before needing to exit and re-enter the screen sucked balls.
Every time I rety the original, it kicks my ass, even with the internet.
I haven’t owned a console since the OG Nintendo. I got hooked on Wing Commander in 1991, and all my gaming has been on PCs ever since.
Well, and that loud/expensive/variant which has a match at KFGC this weekend.
There were guides. They were published by Nintendo or Konami and you had to buy them at a bookstore.
I guess our local bookstores were sub-par. We had to crowdsource everything.
They cost almost as much as the games lol, only the spoiled rich kids ever had them.
I remember we had two major bottlenecks. Someone found the magic sword VERY early, and it took us a while to be able to find the white sword and enough hearts to get it.
The fact that I can remember this must mean something about how much of my brain was filled with the game.
Oh there were guides, but you had to buy them.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/357695919221
I swear I have this still somewhere in my garage.
This, and also gaming magazines. I defeated the first Zelda because a friend had filled in every square of the map that came with the game and he loaned it to me.
It’s been very rare for me to spend the time and effort to beat a game without any hints.
In my day we didn’t have Nintendo.
I was pretty lucky growing up. My brother had an Atari 2600 he never let me play, until he discovered girls, then it became mine. For Christmas one year I got a Commodore 64. And then I got the disk drive. I had hundreds of games but probably only bought 1 or 2. ::Cracked by Bluebeard::
Then I got an NES just like you did. I had that same gold Zelda cartridge. That system was fun. The Mario series was incredible.
And then I discovered a girl, and if I ever play video games these days, it’s Mario Kart or something on our original Wii.
Seconded. Burning trees and blowing up walls….
Also, amazing how fast in 1986 did information shuffle from person to person on tips and tricks.
Also, graph paper drawings of dungeons, what walls could be destroyed, forests, where you can burn, enemy types….what nerds
Check out CompuServe.
I honestly did not know this was going to be published today. It was a filler article, so it could have dropped whenever.
Oh goddammit, now I have that music stuck in my head.
Don’t guides take the fun out of games? I got good at Mike Tyson’s Punch Out the respectable way, by skipping college classes to learn how to beat it game by game.
Yep…you won by repetatively getting your ass handed to you
It depends on what you look up.
Prime example – in the original Legend of Zelda, the entrance to the eighth dungeon is hidden under some random tree on a random part of the map you have to burn away to find the stairs – but I don’t recall there being anything in the game telling you where to find it. That sort of bullshit, okay to look up by me. Because otherwise you’re stuck doing what NA and friends did of “try to burn every tree” which sucks even more fun out of it.
My general stance is I will give the game an honest try and only look something up when frustration is reaching a point where I might otherwise simply abandon it.
Im with you. If there are clues in the game or a puzzle that alludes to the solution, then yes, exploration and wandering is fine.
Jesus. I grew up watching the original Star Trek on a 14″ black and white tv. We had an outside antenna and would take turns being the ‘turner’.
I am guessing 90% of people alive today have no idea what I am talking about.
Ive climbed the roof to reposition the antenna…
We had a 30′ pole strapped to the house near the chimney. We would turn it by hand and listen for “Go back!”, “No, a little more!”, “There! Stop dammit!! Wait, go back….” yelled from inside the house.
Reminds me of the rabbit ears. And then you’d let go, and the image would go bad until you touched it again. Someone would say “Guess you’ll have to hold it” and the cycle of trying to find the signal would resume.
Heh, that too.
Our fancy console TV downstairs was hooked up to the roof antenna. But the black & white in the kitchen had the hoop and rabbit ears. Yes, you often got good reception when you held on to the antenna, but occasionally a rolled up piece of aluminum foil might work.
When I tell my kids things like this, they act like I’m from Mars. They barely remember a world where you didn’t just watch a show on demand.
Once my oldest was in middle school, fishing for us to buy her a cell phone (she didn’t get one until high school). She had this conversation with Mrs. TOK’s dad:
– Papa, how old was Mom when she got her first phone?
– Um, I think, 30?
– No her FIRST phone?
– Yeah, about 30.
:: blank stares ::
If we’d put the antenna outside, it’d be stolen. The big antenna was in the attic when we got one.
Ah. Well, we were on a little farm in the middle of nowhere. I dont think we ever had a theft of any kind. There just wasn’t anyone around to steal stuff.
The biggest problem I remember was open range cattle occasionally getting into our field and eating corn and peas. Those fuckers would completely wipe out the sweet peas before you could blink. I didnt blame them. I spent quite a bit of time eating sweet peas off of the bush myself. Wow, does that bring back some memories.
When I was a kid at my grandma’s she had an old black and white tv that took minutes to start because the tubes needed to warm up.
multiple houses shared a phone line it would ring and several wold answer until the right person did
There were blackouts and my grandma had a gas lamp for light.
Also the latrine was in the yard.
This was no thaat long ago (90s) Romania is just behind 🙂
And yes I had to jiggle a tv antenna
then again at my cousin’s place they had a Nintendo
“Romania is just behind”
Huh, I remember all of that stuff from the late 60’s, early 70’s, so not that far behind.
While our TV was color, my anecdotes are from the late 80s, early 90s.
We was just po’
She had a phone? She must have been rich. My wife’s family didn’t have one even though they were on the waiting list for years. They did eventually get an indoor toilet in the 80s though.
TOK: a blank stare I know well. I recently had a young woman (mid-30s) ask me “How old are you….really?”
“Let me put it this way – I watched Richard Nixon resign the presidency live on TV”
I could see by the look on her face that she could not process that.
My middle kid was born in ’00. Eventually she’ll tell people she was born at the turn of the century. My oldest was born “in the 1900’s”.
I guess it was all the old black & white shows I watched as a kid, but I had a lot better grasp of what life was like in the 40’s and 50’s than my kids do about my youth.
My parents and grandparents had children late. As a result my generational lineage goes back farther than most people’s. I like to tell people “My grandfather was born in ’87 and died in ’86.
Yes, he was 99. Both of my great grandfathers on my father’s side fought in the civil war.
Also, when my grandfather was a boy he and his brother would go visit an old man to hear him tell stories. They were fascinated by his Irish accent and loved the stories he told about Thomas Jefferson whom he knew personally in his youth.
Does that change perspective on time and history for any of you? What seems ancient to people really is not ancient at all.
There were families in my school and church that wouldn’t look out of place in 30’s dusty bowl pictures. Nearby neighbor drove a late 40’s/early 50’s pickup as a daily driver. Was neither a rust bucket nor a pristine restoration.
My May-December wife was a late child of a late child. My MIL’s brother fought in WWI and died in the 30’s from service connected illness (pneumonia/tb?).
@TOK:
I was telling the stepdaughter one time about the days before Amazon and one-day delivery… We’d have to find the product we wanted in a catalog, fill out the order form, total up the shipping ourselves, mail it off, and you’d have your fancy new gadget in 2 weeks if they were really quick about it.
The earlies “news” that I remember is when the nuns came and hustled all the kiddies into church so we pray for the president who had just been shot.
On the positive side, I did see Armstrong take the first step on the moon and Richard Nixon resigning.
Father’s father was born in the late 1880s. I can’t remember the exact year. His wife was 20 years younger. She was born in the oughts.
My brother used to amaze his young coworkers by saying grandma rode a horse to school.
Kinnath, I am so tempted to make a joke about which president the Nuns meant.
James Garfield died on a Sunday. Obviously because he couldn’t stand another Monday.
From my earliest childhood memories (early ’90s) I do remember having a Zenith wood-panelled TV that had knobs on it. I think we got one with a remote control in ’94 or ’95.
The TV that they bought me for my bedroom did have the big round metal antenna, so I remember fiddling around with it.
In my house now, there is something that looks like this mounted on the high gable.
A Remote Control? Fancy.
We had a fake wood panelled RCA with knobs. We got it secondhand and it still lasted over fifteen years of daily usage.
Nice. Shit was built to last back then.
I kind of want a facade for my modern TV that has wood panelling and knobs on it. I can get that fake but still charming wood panel stuff at Lowe’s, and maybe I can find a junker TV somewhere just to pry off the knobs and Zenith decal.
I have seen well-done fish aquariums made with those old console TVs.
A Link to the Past was the pinnacle of the Zelda franchise. Fight me.
You are correct.
Ocarina of Time is a close second. Although because UCS hates everything including BoTW, he probably wouldn’t enjoy either game.
Ocarina has terrible camera controls.
It had Z lock
I took a second stab at Tears of the Kingdom and still couldn’t get past any of the bosses in order to advance the story. Eventually I got tired of farting around the map after 30 hours or so and just stopped playing.
I hear that Wind Waker is available for the Switch 2? That’s probably still my favorite (after Link to the Past…).
The camera controls are not good. They carried over all the GameCube problems. I had a heck of a time beating a boss where you had to aim the grappling hook at a spot over it’s head and swing, because the camera was so slow and finicky that the boss would turn and pummel me before I could line it up. After that I walked away.
Wind Waker is probably my second favorite of the franchise. I knew that you had good taste.
I loved that too. Glad to see it is getting rereleased on Switch 2.
In seventh grade, the computer lab was open during lunch. So we would wolf down our lunch (I brought mine from home because we couldn’t afford school lunch), then race to the computer lab to play Oregon Trail or Astroids.
In eighth grade , I coded an animation in B.A.S.I.C. Dozens of sperm swam toward an egg. When one finally penetrated the egg I had a dazzling light show. My teacher was both impressed and embarrassed.
We used to march down to the computer lab and play games on the Apple II GS computers, but we were always told that Oregon Trail was “broken”. I thus missed out on that quintessential part of ’90s childhood.
I got this beauty from one of those book fair things and had a blast with it. I made an “AOL Simulator” that was a mock-up of the old AOL browser (which we hated but Mom insisted we had to have for some reason) that would give you characteristic error messages when you tried to do anything. Also modified one of the included “whack-a-mole” type games with a crude MSPaint caricature of my brother so I could imagine hitting him in the face with a mallet every time he popped up out of little windows.
Kind of disappointed in myself for not sticking with programming. Probably could have launched a great career if I had been practicing since I was 10.
For anyone who fondly remembered Oregon Trail and also enjoys zombie apocalypse fiction, might I take this opportunity to recommend Organ Trail?
It’s basically Oregon Trail, but instead of traveling from Independence, Missouri to the Willamette Valley, in a Conestoga wagon, in search of a better life, you’re traveling from the irradiated hellscape of Washington DC to Kingsley Field Air National Guard Base in Klamath Falls, in a busted-out station wagon, in search of refuge from the zombie hordes. The game is quite fun and very replayable.
I wouldn’t say “fondly”.
Tell me they included death by dysentery for the memetic value.
They did! Dysentery, and nine other horrible diseases!
The second time I almost quit was during the Eagle’s Tower
Did they fix the issue where you can wreck the game by losing that big iron ball in the wrong place? If you threw it down the wrong hole, you’d go down to the floor below and find it trapped in some inaccessible place. Even leaving the tower and coming back wouldn’t help. The only choice was to re-start the entire game – aggravating because that’s dungeon 7 out of 8, if I remember right. I somehow avoided this when I played it on my Game Boy Color (the latest and greatest!) in 4th grade, but when I replayed it years later on a PC emulator, I discovered that this can happen.
I didn’t run into that problem, thankfully.
Me neither.
Never got into console, and I am thankful for that. We never had them in the house, so the kids were mostly immune. But my son did get addicted to Magic the Gathering.
Video games never interested me. I’m just not wired that way, I guess.
Somehow, we were able to balance tv, video games, outside all day with friends, girls (or boys), sports, general hanging out….
My teens would act the world stopped if something messed up with their curated timeslots for different activities.
In college, the summer after my first year there, I was working in a physics lab with a PDP8 computer. In our spare time we programmed it for a space war game, where two spacecraft would orbit a planet (using the correct orbital mechanics) and shoot at each other. You could change your orbit with thrusters, and all commands were done on the keyboard (one player got the left side, the other the right side). Fun times.
was the objective to bombard the other player’s land areas and shoot down his ship before your land and ship were lost?
I so want the orbital bombardment mechanics to be true…
Shoot the other spaceship. And, yes, the projectiles had the proper orbital mechanics.
Now I have to ask – did the recoil from firing your weapon impact your ship’s velocity?
LOL, no, we didn’t do that, at least I don’t remember doing that (it was 50+ years ago).
Dumfounding success
The Free Press developed into a full-fledged media company in 2022, expanding its offerings into podcasts and live events. Its investigations and commentaries largely scrutinize political and cultural issues like gender-affirming health care, COVID-19 lockdowns, DEI programs and J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans views.
It’s where then-NPR editor Uri Berliner published his essay arguing the public radio network had lost America’s trust (he joined The Free Press as a senior editor mere months later). The publication, like Weiss herself, is also known for its staunchly pro-Israel views, especially in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and Israel’s ensuing war in Gaza.
The Free Press has built a sizable following. It has grown its subscriber base by 86% over the past year to a total of 1.5 million people, according to Paramount, and is backed by a slew of big names, including venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, hedge fund tycoon Paul Marshall and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.
It’s almost as if there is amarketplace of ideas.
We certainly can’t have that, can we now?
As if the NPR set needed another reason to look down on them.
But she will play a key role in shaping the network’s editorial direction, at a time when it is looking to expand its appeal among right-leaning viewers. When Skydance Media acquired Paramount, CBS’ parent company, in July — a merger that required Trump administration approval — it promised to embrace a diversity of political and ideological viewpoints.
Horrifying as that may be.
LOL
Where’s his band?
So to go back to the Pokemon stuff I talked about last week, I ended up getting 7 of those redeemable codes from Gamestop. I had offered to give a guy from New Zealand some because he wasn’t sure if they were doing it there.
Turns out they were and he didn’t even bother to try. Was just relying on me to get him codes.
I gave him one, but I don’t know if I’m going to bother with a second. If he had made some effort and come up short, ok. But to ask someone you know only online to get them and then do nothing on your own is kind of a dick move.
I’m glad I decided that completionism isn’t my thing. If I finish the main plot and whatever championship element is in the game, I’ll call it done. Filling the ‘Dex and catching shinies is just too much RNG farming to be fun for me.
I cant seem to find it….does anyone know what the name of a pump is that is a series of cups dumping water uphill? The cups balance changes as they fill with water and they then tip over and dump water into a higher cup….the damn things click-clack click-clack as they work. What is that called?
Impossible?
Oh c’mon you are a construction guy. You have never seen one of those things? My great grandmother had one. She lived on top of a hill and that chain of buckets lifted water to her house from a spring at the base of the hill. I remember the endless clacking all day and night. I have only seen one other, it was Chinese and made with bamboo cylinders.
I am familiar with ram pumps that use the pressure of a stream or spring to lift water up hill but they use one-way valves and a reduction in piping to achieve this, perhaps there is a primative version using unbalanced cups but it sounds very much like perpetual motion bullshit. Ram pumps are limited by the head pressure of the spring or crick, if your just filling and tipping cups their would be no limit which as far as I know goes against the laws of physics.
Persian wheel?
https://www.fao.org/4/ah810e/AH810E05.htm
Two girls one cup. It’s a strange name but it is google-able.
In case you are confronted by your other-halves….
The Burbank Airport empty ATCT tower OHMYGOD! Articles are bullshit.
Burbank had a scheduled ATC-0 (no services provided) event due to staffing. All traffic was coordinated and moved to SCT (So Cal TRACON).
Thing is, Burbank, like many high cost of living ATCT locations are hemmoraging personnel and cannot keep properly staffed. This was their 6th planned ATC-0 event since the beginning of August.
Of course, Duffy couldnt be assed to explain that and instead childishly bitched on X on its a democrat shutdown.
The 2-D games are just much better. The realistic Link/Zelda are too complex and it takes away from the fun and puzzle solving.
Thing is, Burbank, like many high cost of living ATCT locations are hemmoraging personnel and cannot keep properly staffed. This was their 6th planned ATC-0 event since the beginning of August.
AI will solve this problem.
Robot air traffic controllers, FTW!
“Assertion: if meatbags were meant to fly, they’d have grown rockets.”
7 days for a repub to cave and offer free shit
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5543107-aca-tax-credits-extension-debate/
I’m not sure I *get* video games, anymore. We got a Sega Genesis as kids, a hefty sum for us that Bro somehow convinced/ tricked /earned out of our parents. Sonic, sure, but Eternal Champions was our favorite fighting game. Played many many games. Warcraft II was also hella fun both he and I played, later III to a lesser extent. Thief (and Thief II) are outstanding ‘FPS’ games, but thru sneaky subterfuge and assassinations. Steam-punk Victorian England. Great-looking game, hard, and I fondly remember it.
My last ‘big’ gaming investment was the original XBox, ~c. 2001. I got Halo, and, damn. That game changed shit. Only two weapon capacity; checkpoints; gorgeous; well-told. God, how I loved it. Red vs Blue was a fun ‘anime’ people made using the multiplayer version for the cameras. GTA III was spectacular fun, as well. But gaming ended for my right after high school.
I understand playing against people, but I no longer have any drive to play a game to just ‘play.’ The most recent ‘gaming’ I’ve done is casino.org/replaypoker/. Free; no real money; no ads either. I’ve done well in the tourneys I’ve competed in. Certainly got to the final table a few times out of 150+ players, but haven’t won-won.
This was a very engaging read, even if its publishing time was unknown to you. Cheers.