Our Lord Ditto died for your sins so that His prophet, this regular ordinary human child, could rebuild a society for Our Blessed Trainers to return to.
I feel this. I'm on a Stellaris bender and I'm only responding now... :sweat:
Lol, no worries. I mean, I took nearly a month, it's not like I'm in a hurry!
Gameplay diary
I played a short session! Took an embarrassingly long time to find the fourth carpenter (it was the one near the Gold Skulltula alcove with only one entrance), but I did track him down in the end. After grabbing a Skulltula and discovering a secret hole behind the carpenters' tent, I raced (and lost to) the Running Man, although I still beat the record. I made my way through the Gerudo training course thing, getting a good bit of it done, although I think I need some additional items/abilities to get all the keys. I quickly got the 1000 pts Heart Container from the horseback archery course on my second try, although I didn't feel like grinding out whatever the 1500 pts one is, and found a Gold Skulltula on the far side of the course.
I then made my way across the Haunted Wastelands, buying some (overpriced?) Bombchus along the way and snagging the Gold Skultulla in the building (I have yet to actually use a Bombchu outside of the minigame. Am I right in thinking there's a limited number, or does the carpet guy represent the first unlimited source of them? At any rate, I should probably at least try to use them and see how useful they are. ...wait, I just realized something: can Bombchus trigger buttons?). I arrived at the looming Desert Colossus, taking out a final Gold Skulltula, went inside to receive the time travel hints, and met Sheik to get the Requiem of Spirit. I warped to the Temple of Time, which is where I decided to leave things off.
I have to make a decision whether I tackle the Fire Temple first, which I assume is intended, or keep the momentum going and do the Spirit Temple. The one thing holding me back from going for the Spirit Temple is that there might be some item in the Fire Temple that I need to collect stuff in the Spirit Temple, so I might induce unnecessary backtracking. But then again, as long as I take notes, it's not like it's a major hardship to warp directly to a Temple and spend a few minutes running to whatever I missed.
...okay, I played another quick sesh today and while I did at least collect my Skulltula token and Heart Piece courtesy of the bean platform after visiting as Young Link, I'm not quite sure how to get past the Gerudo blocking the entrance to the crawlspace. I tried playing Zelda's Lullaby for her, but no dice. And then I thought about trying to walk back to Gerudo Fortress, but since the Poe's not there to lead you back (and I couldn't hookshot across the quicksand pit at the end even if it was), that doesn't seem viable. The only other things I noticed were that there's a hole in the ceiling at the top of the stairs (presumably a backtracking shortcut) and that outside there's a chest in one of the Colossus' hands (still haven't figured out how to get to that one, but I'm sure I will!), neither of which seem useful. Not asking for a hint just yet, but I just want to check: is it possible to enter with my current loadout, not having beaten the Fire Temple?
After putting a pin in the Spirit Temple, I ended up doing a bit of wandering around, and I picked up a few Skulltula tokens + a Piece of Heart in Hyrule Field thanks to the Stone of Agony. I also cheesed a Skulltula token on Death Mountain: there's one inside an unbombable rock that I suspect I will be able to break/move with whatever I get from the Fire Temple, but I was able to kill it with a bomb and then collect the token by standing close to clip Link's hand inside the boulder and spamming my longshot.
I also remembered that Poe collection sidequest. Farming them is a little annoying because sometimes they don't seem to want to spawn (and when they do, sometimes they immediately run into walls and despawn, or when I pull out my bow I do my best impression of a Stormtrooper), but I'm up to 400/1000 points (i.e. 4/10 Big Poes).
spoiler'd because ¯/(ツ)/¯
The iron boots are definitely a pain, and they fixed it in later releases. I'm glad the port takes care of that detail.
Maybe I didn't have too much trouble with it because Mario 64 has a similar level.
Took me a second, but then I realized you were talking about Wet Dry World! Incidentally, there were a lot of kids writing into Nintendo Power confused about how to raise the water level to the top. The entry variables for Wet Dry World and Tick Tock Clock are both such wonderful little mechanics!
He even has the same heart containers as Link, so it can get more punishing the higher your progress.
That explains a lot! MRW I'm hacking away at beat Dark Link
That whole room is a vibe, and I'm always kinda disappointed that it goes away after. You can see why I didn't want to give away any spoilers.
Yeah, that was definitely one of the most magical moments of my playthrough so far. I checked noclip.website^[Very cool website that lets you zoom around with a free camera in a slew of (mostly Nintendo) video game maps, including all the mainline Zelda games from OoT to Skyward Sword. You can even fly around the entire map of the DS Pokémon games, which is pretty trippy. Also, the creator has a YouTube channel with a small but lovely handful of videos about video game design including this one about Wind Waker's cel shading.] and unfortunately you can't view the room there, which I guess makes sense because it's created with some sort of live effect that fades after the boss fight.
The final boss had a really great and scary intro cinematic—felt like something out of Alien or something!
You should do yourself a favor and watch James Cameron's Abyss because it feels like it's ripped straight from that movie. It's also kinda overshadowed these days because it was released between Aliens and Terminator 2.
Will do! I still haven't seen any of the Terminator flicks (although I have the first one downloaded), but I'll put The Abyss on my list; I think the only reason I've heard of it is because of that one scene with the breathing fluid. Incidentally, do you have an opinion on theatrical cut vs. special edition?
[Water Temple boss room]
Ah, that makes sense. I'm pretty risk-averse, so it didn't even occur to me to jump into the fray if I didn't have to.
I couldn't really see a use for the Cucco (beyond fun) otherwise, since you can longshot directly to the aforementioned roof.
The Gerudo Valley theme as well as the next dungeon theme are my top 1 and 2 favorite songs in the game. Just two absolute bangers IMO.
No argument here about the Gerudo Valley theme, but I'm looking forward to the dungeon one!
[On cinematics and RPGs]
Yeah, I've definitely heard about MGS being called a movie—doesn't MGS4 have like a one to two hour cinematic at the end or something? Funnily enough, I have sort of played MGS4...that is, I played the iPhone-exclusive shooting gallery game Metal Gear Solid Touch, which is a very loose adaptation of MSG4. I don't remember anything about the story, but it was a fun little timewaster!
I also haven't ever played a traditional JRPG. I mean, sure, I've played a handful of Pokémon games, but there's not really a story to it, which is kinda the whole point of RPGs. And I played Undertale, but that's kinda it's own thing. Wait, I take it back—I played Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga! But I think that's literally it. I definitely want to play the OG SNES Super Mario RPG, Earthbound, FFVII, the first two Paper Mario games...honestly, those alone ought to keep me occupied for quite a while.
MGS definitely planted the seed of my leftism because it introduced me to much of :amerikkka: as it was. You could say I'm thoroughly :kojima:-pilled from a young age.
Hellll yeah! I've heard that there are a lot of leftist ideas in the games, so I'm really curious to play them and see for myself.
I highly recommend playing the original (PS1 or PC port) and not the Twin Snakes versions.
I've definitely heard this before! Unless the it's incredibly jank, I generally prefer to get the original experience, anyway, so I don't need much convincing.
I think in-game rendered cutscenes was also necessary on the N64 because it had very little ROM space.
That's true...didn't stop the Resident Evil 2 N64 devs from moving heaven and earth to keep the FMVs, though! There's a reason it was the cover story of an issue of Game Developer—they worked some absolute witchcraft.
It's the same reason every N64 game has blurry textures.
If I remember my Kaze Emanuar correctly, this is partly true, but it's also an issue of a tiny texture cache + slow shared bus speeds. And then with the accumulated knowledge of three decades (god, has it really been that long?) homebrew devs like him are able to do magic that make games look borderline Dreamcast quality, incredible stuff.
Command and Conquer
spoiler
oh also I posted part 2 of my earlier comment as a reply to part 1 but I only just realized that you wouldn't have gotten a notification for that so that was kinda silly of me. Sorry if the volume of text is overwhelming...once I start yapping about retro games it's hard for me to stop 
no need to respond to everything 