| Best albums of the year so far/Final thoughts on Zelda: Twilight Princess |
[Apr. 8th, 2007|10:59 pm] |
It's been a great first quarter for albums. There weren't any albums so great you would immediately consider ranking them among the best albums of all time, but there were so many good albums it's extremely hard to narrow down a top five or six.
But first, the best two.
Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
I saw these guys in concert a few weeks ago. They have a weird slideshow going on in the back of the stage that has nothing to do with the music, and a bunch of guys in weird costumes (Darth Vader, all white spandex, etc) show up on stage randomly. They played music, too. Their last album, 'The Sunlandic Twins', I never got into. I enjoyed it a lot at first, but could never quite enjoy it all the way through, because it was all sameish and (Except for one song on it) lacked any sort of catchiness.
Hissing Fauna on the other hand has the same sort of psychadelic weirdness as Sunlandic Twins, but every song is catchy and interesting. I have no idea what the lyrics mean. For all I know they used a random word generator then fixed it for grammatical correctness. But what few lyrics I can understand are weird and cool. "We don't want these times to ever end -- we just want to emasculate them forever". "Eva, I'm sorry, but you will never have me, for me you're just some faggy girl, and I need a lover with soul power -- and you ain't got no soul power." I can't stop listening to this album.
Patty Griffin - Children Running Through
This is a bluesy folk album (The same way Lucinda Williams sings bluesy country). Her singing is powerful and emotional and has a kind of 60's feel to it. One song (Which I suspect may be some kind of cover of an old blues song I've never heard of) is about an old man on a bus, and an interchange like "You don't know where this train is going to?", to which he responds "It's going somewhere."
Other strong albums so far this year by:
!!! - Electronica with a bunch of synthesizers and loops. At first it sounded kind of thin like most electronica, but it grows considerably on repeat listens because it's so catchy.
Vieux Farka Toure - Twangy guitar Afro-pop by the son of an Afro-pop legend who recently passed away.
Modest Mouse and the Shins - Indie critics are suddenly starting to say these bands are overrated, or somehow lost something form their earlier, superior works. I wonder why they're saying that? *Looks at album sales charts* Oh yeah.
Amy Winehouse - Original bluesy rock by the critic dubbed free-spirit. I think her song 'Rehab' is a hit or something.
Deerhoof - More wacky freak-folk from pretty much the only consistent freak-folk band. Funny song: "If I were man and you were dog...if I were man and you were dog...if I were man and you were dog...I would throw a stick for you!" (In a Japanese accent with a bit of an off-key melody).
Andrew Bird - A tighter, but less unique album by a guy who plays like 20 instruments on any given album.
Arcade Fire - If you're still reading this post, you know who they are, and you probably have the album. For some reason the indie critics haven't double-backed on them yet like they are Modest Mouse and the Shins.
Peter Bjorn and John - A variety of catchy tunes. A lot of them are really good but the album doesn't really have it's own unique feel or identity.
So, Zelda.
I'm rounding the 45 hour mark, and heading to the final battle right now. Overall, I give it a 7/10 that should have been a 9/10. The developers are really good at game-building, but they have a lot of really bad ideas about what makes a good game.
I keep on getting to places and thinking 'If they did this more like Link To The Past, it would have been a lot better'.
I'll break it down to more specific areas for criticism.
First, dungeons. The dungeons are totally linear. At any given time, there's only one place in the dungeon you can make any sort of forward progress. This creates the feeling of being led around by the nose from place to place, only given a few cool puzzles or something once in a while. This is as opposed to Zelda: Link To The Past where most dungeons have lots of different possible ways to get through.
Second, plot. The plot is the same sort of plot as Zelda: Link To The Past, and equally good. In Link To The Past, you hardly saw anything of the plot. Once in a while you saw a bunch of text that you could skip through if you wanted without making a huge difference. In Twilight Princess on the other hand, they constantly shove the plot in your face, sometimes giving you long plot sequences and minigames. They try to emotionally involve you in their shallow characters and fail miserably.
Third, pacing. Until about the two-thirds mark they don't give you any reliable way to quickly jump around the world. Everything involves long walks from place to place, and having to take the long way around to get half the places. In Link To The Past you could pretty much always go straight to the next part of the game. Then there are all these boring minigames which are forced on you, and have bad controls, and really throw you out of the pace of the game. I've been playing the game for 45 hours. I can beat Link To The Past in under 3.
Fourth, leading you around. In Link To The Past, when there was some sort of trick to getting in somewhere, they only gave you vague hints at it, and let you figure out for yourself. In Twilight Princess, Midna gives you really strong, obvious hints.
Fifth, easiness. You hardly ever have to deal with more than one enemy at a time. They all move super-slowly and when you do have to deal with more than one at a time, you can usually kill them all with a simple spin attack. The developer said 'I don't like hard games'. That's fine for you and other people who don't like hard games, but if you notice, most adventure games now have difficulty levels. God of War, for instance. People who don't like difficulty can play on Normal. People who like a little challenge but nothing hair-pullingly frustrating play on Hard. People who like hair-pulling frustration play on God. It's their choice. You get no such choice in Twilight Princess. It's just easy for everybody.
There are some fun parts in Twilight Princess. Some genuinely fun puzzles, some interesting dungeons. But in general it seemed the game was made for people who were very much not me. I kept running into parts where I thought 'If this game was made by the same philosophy as Zeldas 1-3, it might be one of the best games ever made'. I don't regret spending the time and money to play it, it was a good game. But I don't think I'll ever be playing it again once I finish it. |
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