^Hahaha

it's a long read, i only made it ~2/3rds of the way but from what i read i have to agree with what i read.

"They offer elaborate contraptions reskinned with a nature theme, a giant nest of interconnected locks. A lock is not only something opened with a silver key. A grapple point is a lock; a hookshot is the key. A cracked rock wall is a lock; a bomb is the key. That wondrous array of items you collect is little more than a building manager's jangly keyring.

Almost everything in Zelda has a discrete purpose, a tedious teleology. When it all snaps into place, some call this good design. I call it brittle, overdetermined, pale. It's the work of a singleminded god, a world bled of wonder.

Players are constantly reminded that they're shackled to a mechanistic land. There is no illusion of freedom because the gears that keep the player and Hyrule in lockstep are imminently legible. You read the landscape all too easily; you know what it's asking of you."

That part stood out particularily for me.  i have played all the zeldas except SS i just got tired of knowing how to progress long before the solution was even offered to me.  it made the game tedious and boring and not rewarding.  i like how he stated that each item is really just a different kind of key for progression. 

anyhoo, demon's souls and dark souls are amazing games that fit the description presented here.  i guess that's what i've logged ~400 hours into them and didn't even bother with SS.

Eh, with a little more perspective I think you'll find that this has nothing to do with nostalgia.
It also doesn't have anything to do with difficulty, although the difficulty factor is a necessary theme.

What he's saying is that Zelda USED to be about exploration and adventure. Maybe you kids just don't get the same feeling I did when I played the original zelda. And I don't mean "you kids" as in crotchety old grampa saying "you kids today with your music" etc etc, but that maybe you've experienced so much already that the game just feels blah to you.
I remember playing it and it feeling dangerous. It was very exploratory, and it was great figuring out these incredible secrets, and sharing these secrets with friends, spending hours drawing maps and sharing them. "Hey, did you know that this bush is burnable?", etc etc There was a whole game outside of the game, much like the current zelda metagame of "what the fuck is the damn timeline", except it was legitimate :D.

I'd say, that by today's standards, the game that most fits old zelda, shockingly enough, is Demon's Souls, a game that the reviewer himself loves.
However, I do kinda disagree with him on link to the past, and I think Ocarina did a very good job blending the spookiness and eeriness and danergous realism that zelda 1 provided, but he's right that it felt hollow with these characters who are really just plot filler, and towns that always need your help doing even just menial tasks.

It does feel like zelda doesn't have "secrets" anymore. Anything hidden is now marked, all destructible walls have cracks, etc. It's not the same game.

And while overtly, this may look like a nostalgic rant as well, trust that it has nothign to do with nostalgia, and everything to do with pointing out that Zelda has changed. To say it's evolved would be a lie. The game, atmosphere, and mechanics are completely different. Thrown out in favor of accessibility.
The same goes for the new metroid. M:oM is so far gone from super metroid that it's not even funny. Prime did a great job, and for some reason they stopped.

The point is, metroid-vania style is a great style, and dangerous adventurous zelda is a great style. Those styles though have been abandoned. I would not complain if there were simply a new IP to take their place and hold those styles/genres, but now, 2D castlevania is a better metroid than metroid, and demon's souls is a better zelda than zelda.

I'm happy to take those games in place, but it doesn't change the fact that nintendo simply abandoned these great games. Sure the new games are good. ocarina, twilight princess, are great, but there's obviously a hole as to the style these games used to occupy. They simply occupy a new space now, and I can accept that.

About the author, I will say this. He is less forgiving than I. For me, at least I have my demon's souls, and I have my castlevania. The author wants zelda the way he wants it to be. Maybe zelda has moved on, maybe nintendo doesn't care. The industry hasn't changed though. There are still very popular games occupying the holes that nintendo abandons.

if you didn't read it, then don't bother commenting.

I was going to post my first something similar to this, but seeing as you did it for me, there's not much left to say.

That would've been a great first post. Well done, and welcome!

@ The bolded, I honestly don't think that would be possible today, even if Nintendo did make a 'New Legend of Zelda' or whatever. Why? The internet would kill it. Lets pretend LoZ was released today, and you tried to do the same things with the same group of friends. There'd be at least one person in your group who would have looked things up online and know it all already. They wouldn't be interested in spending hours drawing out maps or whatever, when it's all right there on the internet.

So that definitely is something based on nostalgia, because that isn't going to be that way ever again.

I thought others had addressed the content rather well. I probably should have noted this -- although my opening note about him being too serious and too egocentric was intended to convey that point.

Instead, I thought I would examine his motivation and his history. Too often in newsgroup discussions on the Internet I have found items cited second/third/fourth hand without looking back at the source material. Too often rumors get picked up as fact by multiple outlets and repeated until they are accepted as truth, even though they have never been verified. So I wanted to look back at the original work and then looked at his other works.

Nothing else he writes about video games appears (from a cursory examination) to be written in this same style with this same intent. (Please note that appear implies appears to me). And he had not written and posted anything in over six months about video games. Which makes me wonder if this was done in a different -- and perhaps the too predictable I know more than the designers what gamers want -- style to generate hits.  If that is the case, he has succeeded in his quest -- perhaps better than in his quest playing Zelda.

Mike from Morgantown

Perhaps he just finished skyward sword?

It is possible. Me and my gamer friends all have pacts not to look up secrets online, but we do talk in chatrooms about the games with others, and learn things about the game from there. There's FAQs, and then there's boards and there's chats, and there's co-op.

The sharing is still there, but with zelda there's just not much to share anymore.