I see you.
I see you watching the Food Network on weeknights, laughing every time someone forgets an ingredient on Chopped. I hear you mutter to yourself “I could do better” in between bites of reheated Chinese take-out. I feel it when you roll your eyes at Rachel Ray, Alton Brown, and at Bobby Flay, wondering why they’re famous and you’re not. Then you finish your microwaved meal and continue picking Dorito crumbs out of your belly button, just like you do every day.
No more.
Today, we embark on an adventure. Throw away your microwave. Clean out your freezer. Set your “instant” foods ablaze and never look upon them again. Today, my friends, we cook.
Read MoreUpon your victory, the party's souls happily return to their bodies from the busted robots, and you receive letters from friends and family. You walk Paula home. Everyone seems happy, and everything is...normal. You look at photos with your mom. You talk to your sister, and your dad wishes you a happy early birthday. You visit your old clubhouse, and the only thing that has changed is that you're more mature, that you're older— maybe not in age, but in mind.
And as the credits rolled, that's all I could think about.
I'm 24 years old, but there's a large part of me that remembers all those elements of my childhood, that reaches out to them even as I know I can't return to that state of mind. It's a part of growing up, and everyone does it. That doesn't make it easy.
Read MorePeople think it’s easy to draft a Pokémon QB. The issue isn’t one of power, however, it’s one of accuracy. Just because Machamp has a huge arm doesn’t mean he can deliver the ball accurately. One Pokémon out of the entire original 151 towers above and beyond all others in terms of throwing ability, and that’s Marowak. It’s literally been throwing things since its (tragic) childhood. Marowak is the only Pokémon here has the potential to be able to throw a football with the trajectory of a boomerang without the use of illegal telekinetic powers, so it’s unlikely he’ll turn out to be a bust.
Read Moreon a female main character in the Legend of Zelda series
As a white male, I can literally point to thousands of games, The Legend of Zelda included, where I can see myself as the protagonist without having to do a bunch of mental acrobatics. Instead of simply playing through somebody else's story, I get to lose myself in the game and play through the adventure as if it is my own. It's one of my favorite things about gaming, and is a feeling entirely unique to the format.
And that's a privilege that non-male (and non-white, non-cisgendered, non-heterosexual, non-binary for that matter) people either don't have, or have to look a lot harder for. Nintendo could really have blazed a trail here and allowed a gigantic audience to experience the new Legend of Zelda game in a new way by structuring the story around a female hero.
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