The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. Nintendo's Ocarina Of Time remake has been released, after weeks, months, possibly an eternity of wide-angle lens discussions about whether remakes are healthy endeavours within an artistic ecosystem or craven, corrosive money-grabs designed to numb the proletariat with Class-A nostalgia. I find this discussion both reductive and tedious, and now the game is out some people want to continue having it. No! No!! I am putting my fingers in my ears and la-la-la-ing and instead reading articles about the actual videogame Ocarina Of Time. Join me.

Christian Donlan reviewed the remake for Eurogamer, getting at the larger resonance of The Game As Cultural Object while also illuminating what's great about the experience of playing it.

It is my bright delight today to be able to tell you that, around thirty years later, having just revisited the game in Nintendo's new remake, Ocarina of Time is still worth telling people about. It's still an adventure so surprising, so satisfying, so moving that I need to talk about it.

Nintendo regularly run interviews with their own developers. These are obviously a form of marketing, but they often contain real insight about their process and thinking, of the sort Nintendo don't often give to the press. Such is the case in their Ocarina Of Time team interview, in two parts. Here's the first.

Aonuma: Yes, exactly. Back then, we had to make every minute count. That reminds me, when I finally finished the last boss battle just before the deadline, I asked Kondo-san (8) to compose background music for it. What came back was a rather bright and upbeat piece. I thought to myself, "Um...really?" (Laughs) I was really nervous about bringing it up, but when I went up to Kondo-san, saying, "I'm so sorry. It's a gorgeous piece of music and all...it just doesn't feel right somehow," he simply responded, "Alright, I'll change it." The very next day, he came back with the battle theme players know today. He came up with the new piece so quickly that we sometimes joke that Kondo-san must've had two versions prepared from the very beginning. (Laughs) So just like that, we experienced highs and lows every day over all manner of things, feeling our way forward as we built the game piece by piece.

And here's the second. Maybe it's cheating to link these separately, but I wanted to use a second quote.

To help the team understand what we were aiming for, early in development we used phrases like "a puppet-show feel" and "the analog feel of practical effects films" as keywords. Neither puppet shows nor practical effects films reproduce reality exactly as it is. Even so, both create a convincing sense that the characters truly exist within their respective fantasy worlds. We also felt that there was some overlap between these forms of expression and the distinctive nostalgia evoked by the original game.

I regularly buy physical books online, and nowadays when I do, I often receive extremely low quality print-on-demand copies of the books. I'm talking about buying a book published by Penguin and receiving something with pages so thin that you can see the text on the other side, and on the page opposite, of every page. I find reading these copies deeply unpleasant, and since online stores give no indication as to what kind of copy I'll receive, I am giving up on buying physical books that I can't first see and touch myself. Alas, this may not even be a solution. I went looking online for reports of readers experiencing the same and found this 2024 article from Literary Hub, in which bookseller Drew Broussard explains the cause of the problems, which impact physical bookstores too, and which might have consequences greater than merely annoying me.

Earlier this year, Joanne McNeil posted on Bluesky about something strange that happened with her then-brand-new book, Wrong Way: an Amazon order delivered a copy of the paperback-original that was a different size, on lower-quality paper, and featuring a slightly different cover. As McNeil pointed out, many consumers likely don't know the difference between a print-on-demand book and a traditionally produced paperback, at least not at first. But once you do notice, you can't unsee it.

A short one this week! As apology, loop Soul Vibration by Manchester-based production duo J-Walk for the next hour and feel all your worries slip away. It's from their 2002 album A Night On The Rocks. Like it? Consider supporting them on Bandcamp.

Sleep well, videogames.