I am Mog Anarchy, and I like to play games. Whether they are old, new, retro, modern, online, offline, console, computer, critically acclaimed or notoriously bad. Here on my blog, I rant about, review, trash talk, praise and generally talk about all of my favourite and least-favourite games. I also write my own guides on how to accomplish tricky tasks, show off my creative endeavors and challenge myself with crazy in-game tasks. I also have a bunch of gaming merchandise which I am glad to show off. So drop me a comment, I love hearing your questions, criticisms, comments and general gaming discussions. :)
So, I've been replaying Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask - of course opting for the portable remakes on the 3DS - and something really, *really* pissed me off.
Fans of the game will already no doubt be aware of the House of Skulltula in Kakariko Village from Ocarina of Time. The apparently wealthy family have all been cursed and disfigured into weird spider-human hybrid creatures. The only way to save them is to seek out and destroy the 100 Golden Skulltulas that are hidden throughout Hyrule - some you must defeat in the past as a child, some you must defeat in the future as an adult.
Each time you defeat 10 Skulltulas, one of the five children will be turned back to normal and will present you with a gift. 10 for the first, 20 for the second etc. Their father requires all 100 to have been destroyed before he turns back to normal.
So why does this sidequest piss me off so much? Well, to put it simply - you spent virtually the entire game destroying these damn things, backtracking, time-travelling, warping, riding magic beanstalks and playing the Sun's Song until your fingers fall off - you crawl back to Kakariko Village clutching the 100 shiny Golden Skulltula tokens, only for the patriarch of the family to present you with...
A huge rupee. 200 rupees. Are you fucking serious.
The five children all give you fairly decent rewards - the adult and giant wallets are pretty cool, the piece of heart is always welcomed, the Stone/Shard of Agony is awesome - the Bombchus are kinda meh but still an acceptable prize - why the hell does their father, who to rescue might I add you need to defeat another FIFTY Golden Skulltulas then proceed to present you with the shittiest and most useless reward ever?
By the time you've defeated all 100 Golden Skulltulas, you've quite clearly finished the Spirit Temple - you're 95% of the way through the game. Guaranteed if you're a completionist you'll have already collected all of the heart pieces, bottles and whatnot - and no doubt you're walking around with an overflowing giant's wallet with fuck all to spend your 500 rupees on. So WHY does this moron feel the need to present you with 200 fucking rupees?!
To be honest, I always find rupees in Zelda games to be absolutely terrible quest rewards. You find rupees from cutting grass, killing enemies, winning mini-games and finding hidden treasure chests - there is absolutely no need whatsoever to complete practically a game-long quest to collect (or destroy in this case) ONE HUNDRED well-hidden things just to be blindly given more money!
I mean sure, this *might* have been acceptable in Majora's Mask - after all, you're tasked with amassing 5000 rupees in your savings in order to earn a heart piece... And of course due to the 3-day repeating mechanic, you're often tasked with needing to re-buy items instead of wasting time harvesting them. Items also tend to be more expensive in general - like the Goron Powder Kegs that cost 100 rupees (and you'll need several of them in order to complete all of the sidequests) and the 500 rupee All-Night Mask. The most expensive thing in Ocarina of Time are the Goron/Zora tunics from their respective merchants - which you'll only need to buy if you were careless and let a bastard Like-Like eat your clothes.
Again I compare this to the far superior game, Majora's Mask and its "big" sidequest if you like - collecting all of the masks and trading them with the children on the moon for the Fierce Deity Mask. Sure, this is an optional item - but it's also totally fucking awesome. It's immensely satisfying to be rewarded for your dedication by being handed what is essentially a giant FUCK YOU button to the final boss - making it insultingly easy.
What the hell is 200 rupees going to do against Ganondorf? Such a missed opportunity here to do something similar - or even redirect the final Great Fairy's defense upgrade reward - which also comes far too bloody late in the game to be of any real use - but is certainly more useful than pointless money that wouldn't even fit in my wallet.
With the constant threat of global warming and the exhaustion of the earth's fossil fuel supply - we need to attack the source - which company is wasting a vast amount of plastic that could be better used elsewhere?
Coca Cola? Lots of plastic bottles… no.
Amazon and eBay? Lots of plastic packaging… no.
McDonald's? Plastic cups and straws? ...no.
The company that is to blame for wasting massive amounts of plastic and simultaneously charging consumers an extortionate amount as they do so - FUNKO POP.
I am fucking sick of God damn Pop Vinyl figures. They're everywhere, they're ugly and they represent a far greater evil than the depletion of fossil fuels - to homogenise and destroy every single franchise we hold dear.
Whether it's The Walking Dead or Winnie the fucking Pooh - every single Funko Pop figure is exactly the same - they've stripped each character of their own individuality and personality by inflating their heads and dilating their pupils to the point where they'd be admitted to A&E.
They've somehow managed to emasculate every franchise made for adults and somehow make children's franchises even more sickening. I don't understand the appeal of collecting figures where every single character is exactly the same!
To further add insult to injury - they're inescapable - whether you're at a game store, comic shop, convention or event - you'll be greeted by endless walls of these monstrosities everywhere you turn.
And god forbid you subscribe to one of the fifty thousand mystery subscription boxes plaguing the Internet - you won't be able to open your mail without getting gang raped by physically deformed plastic dwarfs.
Through absolutely no fault of my own, I've somehow ended up with 3 of these fucking things - and I have never knowingly or willingly purchased one!
Which brings me to my next point - in cases where they somehow CAN'T mutilate one of our beloved fictional characters, they just release a generic figurine that doesn't fit in with the rest of the mutants. Some examples that immediately spring to mind are Alduin from Skyrim, the Rosie from Bioshock and one from my own reluctant “collection” - Claptrap from Borderlands.
This is CHEATING - you've assigned yourself to warping all of these characters into goblins with bee stings all over their heads - stick to your own god damn formula! Don't just release generic figures that the original creators could have made themselves - at a higher quality, no less.
And to any franchise that does whore out their property to Funko - you're nothing but SELL OUTS, pure and simple. Aw, you're not selling enough Walking Dead comics - better inflate all of your characters into toddler toys.
Not making enough money from putting Bioshock on sale on Steam every 3 seconds? Better turn on the fucking BIG HEAD MODE cheat! Scratch that - the aborted EMBRYO cheat.
Funko Pop themselves are even sell outs - shoehorning their ugly wastes of plastic into keyrings, blind bags and other massively overpriced merchandise that can be further overpriced by some scummy vendor at a comic convention.
And if I open another parcel to have yet another fugly fucking Funko Pop leap out at me - I'm going to personally strap down Funko’s CEO, fill their eyeballs with ink and inject their skulls with silicone until they can see for themselves what they're doing to our favourite characters. Saying that, the tortured CEO Funko would probably sell for like £300 on eBay after it got vaulted.
Another forgotten relic of years gone by is when in the morning (usually before school), you'd open up a fresh box of Kellogg's cereal and inside there would be wonderful prizes. (In the UK we never really called them 'cereal box prizes' per se, but the influx of American TV shows sort of introduced us to the phrase) You'd find stationery (like pencil sharpeners), little toys, action figures, books and sometimes CDs or CD-Roms. Because I'm from the 90s (and the UK), I missed the trend of decoder rings and stuff - but I did manage to find this:
That is a little plastic toy of Spyro The Dragon. So I'm assuming Kellogg's ran this deal around the time Spyro The Dragon was at his peak of popularity during the Playstation 1 era, somewhere around 1998. Remember when Spyro used to be good? Before the influx of all this fucking Skylanders bullshit? Yes, everyone with any decent taste in games knows that the last good Spyro game was Spyro 3: The Year Of The Dragon, and the series went downhill from there - very similar to the fate of Crash Bandicoot - as soon as they hit the PS2, they got shittier and shittier. At least Crash Bandicoot never lent his visage to a series of games that cost upwards of £500 to access every area of the fucking game!
FIVE FUCKING GRAND. Are you SERIOUS? And in order to maintain their mint condition, you'd NEVER be able to remove them from the packets! Oh, and bear in mind, these are just the figures - NO game is included! I mean for fuck's sake, I'm all for DLC - and the idea of DLC you can physically hold in your hand is awesome - but Skylanders as a gaming property is just utter SHITE. I mean really, compare this:
To this:
What the fuck really. What the bloody hell did they do to Spyro? The original 1998 Spyro in his pseudo-64-bit graphics looks a million times better than the new Spyro. He looks like he's got some sort of learning disability, with his fat face and squished nose. The 90s Spyro was cute, as well as being quite cocky. How I miss the 1990s. :(
Each time you defeat 10 Skulltulas, one of the five children will be turned back to normal and will present you with a gift. 10 for the first, 20 for the second etc. Their father requires all 100 to have been destroyed before he turns back to normal.
