I always thought Malstrom isn't nearly as smart as a few people think but this blog post proves he's even less smarter than I thought.
Quote: "What I am saying is that what you call Zelda today is nothing more than a modern day version of King’s Quest or Myst"
=> This is the dumbest sentence in an overall remarkably dumb blog post. At the same time it manages to downplay The Legend of Zelda (one of my most favourite franchises and imo the best action-adventure franchise ever created) and the graphic/point&click adventure genre (one of my all-time most favourite genres). Even Myst - a game I hate - doesn't deserve such a ridiculous comparison.
Malstrom's blog post reminds me of two other observations I have made over the past years:
- The whole gaming industry (developers, publishers, journalists) and the fans of this industry more and more have problems with the definining of genres, especially with the adventure genre as a whole (one of the oldest ones) which today is tacked on every game people want (look up e.g. Endless Ocean in the VGC database, or - yes - Zelda games), but at the same time the graphic/point & click adventure games belong to a [in NA media even despite the recent success of Telltale supposedly dead] adventure subgenre which seems to be only good anymore for the strangest comparisons. Modern Zeldas are like graphic adventure games...yes, of course, Mr. Malstrom.
- "Nintendo-only" fans (i.e. the fans that only seem to care about this one company and its fate) are the strangest fanbase. Not the most annoying one, but the strangest. No other fanbase seem to spend most of their time thinking about what Nintendo could have probably done wrong again, while at the same time they totally ignore that their most favourite company is already by far the most successful and influential one this industry ever had. I never understood what these die-hard Nintendo-only fans want with their complaints: Even more success, even more influence for Nintendo?
If I'm not mistaken the last three Zelda games sold around 15 million copies and got excellent (TP even outstanding) ratings.
