The Wild Blog in the West

I'm not going to swear an oath I can't uphold. When enough people make false promises, words stop meaning anything. Then there are no more answers, only better and better lies. - Jon Snow (GoT, Season 7, "The Dragon and the Wolf")  Countless takes have been written about Game of Throne 's final season, Season 8, since the final episode aired on May 19, 2019.  That said, my outrage is still fresh, and I have a perspective that I have not seen entirely covered elsewhere. As any fan of A Song of Ice and Fire knows, George RR Martin was and is still working on the sixth novel in the series , The Winds of Winter .  There is no official ending to the series, and there may not ever be.  Therefore, many fans of the novels took solace in the fact that Martin's intended ending would appear, in some form, in Season 8.  Flash forward to May 19, 2019, and the collective riot nearly took down the Internet (though actually the riot began the week before, after the episode, ...

Image: Nintendo This critique contains spoilers for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild . I had not played video games for 25 years.   Then came The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild . The Legend of Zelda premiered in 1986 as an eight-bit top-down style adventure game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).   It involved an elf-like warrior named Link wandering through the land of Hyrule, seeking out eight pieces of the Triforce of Wisdom in order to rescue Princess Zelda.   Critics lauded the game for its open world style of play, which took Link through mountains and forests in search of his objectives.   Over the decades, The Legend of Zelda would form a series with a cast of familiar characters and its own lore.     Breath of the Wild (2017) set off an earthquake in the Zelda franchise.   It took the open world concept of the first Zelda and turned it into a 3D experience where Link could climb on ne...