Words On Wednesday

“ The Legend of Zelda - The Wind Waker HD ”  is 2013 Wii U remaster of a 2002 GameCube game. It cleaned up the visuals, introduced a few quality of life changes, and tweaked the game to make use of the console's two screen system. In 2025, it might be a struggle to decide which version to play, or whether to play a 20+ year old game at all, but I can tell you that Wind Waker HD is still a fantastic game and a great representation of the Zelda series as a whole. Wind Waker is tough to analyze from the perspective of someone who didn't live through it. It came out in North America in 2003, at which point I already had a GameCube (I'm pretty sure). I played through once, started a second play through, and put it down for a good 15+ years. On that first run, Wind Waker was... fine. The visuals were bright and cheery, a stark contrast from Ocarina of Time and Majora's mask before, as well as Twilight Princess after. Plus, the cel shaded graphics were just strange to me. Not ...

After years of cooking, trying new recipes, tweaking those recipes to make them my own, and aggregating them into a collection, I want to make a cookbook. When my wife and I first got together, neither of us could really cook. We subsisted on ramen noodles and frozen chicken strips for the most part. Over time, we started branching out with new recipes we found online. The first few met with inconsistent success, but we got better and better as we learned new skills. Now, I can throw together ingredients on the fly and make something decent most of the time. Recipes are more suggestions and riffs on a theme, rather than explicit instructions for me. For a long time, we've been collecting those recipes on Google Drive. We stuck them in a folder shared between us, so we would know where to look when we needed to decide what to cook for dinner. I grabbed a template and created a  document to copy from when we want to make a new recipe card. We've been at it for years and this sys...

“ The Elder Scrolls IV - Oblivion Remastered ” is a 2025 remaster (go figure) of the 2006 action RPG "The Elder Scrolls IV - Oblivion." Oblivion came out originally on Xbox 360 and PC, which I had neither at the time. It came out later on PS3, but for whatever reason I never bought it. Oblivion Remastered was my first opportunity to play through this classic on my own. But wait. This is a remaster of a nearly 20 year old game, the fourth of a pretty popular series. I feel like I need to roll it back and give some context on the series as a whole, in addition to my own personal context. I've often said that Morrowind was my first Elder Scrolls game, but that's perhaps a bit misleading. Morrowind was the first game in the series that I personally owned. Oblivion was the first one that I played, and I didn't buy Morrowind until after I had played Oblivion on a friend's 360. We were in Kohl's sometime in 2006 or 2007 and saw Morrowind for the original Xbox on ...