The game that ended it all: Zelda: The Ocarina of Time

Every Nintendo fan has his or her favorite Zelda game. My personal favorite is The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the SNES, with a close runner-up being Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, so that shows you how out of touch I am Nintendo fans. Link to the Past had everything that made the original Zelda so great and kicked it up a notch - not a mere sequel to the original game, but a re-envisioning of it: fixing old game-play elements, tidying up less-developed areas, and all the while including the player in a unique narrative that spanned the gamut of heroes and legends.

Players took the role of Link, a pointy-eared but otherwise ordinary boy living with his uncle. One dark and stormy night, Link dreams of a princess named Zelda calling for help. He awakens to find his uncle wielding the family sword and shield, shaken and preparing for a late night rescue. Despite his uncle's command to stay put, Link follows him to the castle of Hyrule, where there is clearly something evil at work. Link sneaks inside only to find his mortally wounded uncle, who passes him the sword, and tells him to rescue Zelda. It's a classic opening to a story worthy of an epic game, and lacks in the pretentiousness so many game stories are obsessed with nowadays. The rest of the game follows suit, and although challenging, it engages the player in a way that few games at the time could. This is what made it my all-time favorite Super Nintendo game.

How much difference a generation makes, eh?

I'll save a full gripe of the N64 for later, suffice it to say that it had already ruined my other favorite Nintendo franchise (Super Mario Brothers) with a collect-a-thon of poorly controlling but nonetheless pretty 3D garbage. What's more, most other N64 offerings were ugly, blocky, polygonal low-res textured messes with choppy frame-rates to match. Still, when I heard that Zelda was coming out for the N64, I was excited: I loved the four Nintendo-produced Zelda games out at that time, and the last two (Link to the Past and Link's Awakening) had streamlined the franchise into something water-tight and exciting. I paid the $49.99 for the game well in advance of its release date, which I then began to see getting pushed back before my eyes. When it finally did come out, the price had gone up twenty dollars, but I got a free hat with it (whoop-de-doo). It now stands with Mass Effect as the two most expensive games I have ever purchased, and I have never finished either of them. That's right, I never beat Zelda:TOOT, and I never will.

Here's why:

GRAPHICS: No real complaints here. Though everything does look low-poly, low-texture, and washed out in a cruel and pathetic attempt at realism, that's pretty much par for the course since developers back then decided to make everything 3D on woefully under-powered equipment.

SOUND: Terrible. There are only a few voices in the game, all of them are repeated endlessly, and most are just those annoying "girly giggles" that ten-year-old Japanese school girls make and that all Japanese men seem to find disturbingly alluring. They do a good job on ambiance for the most part, and overall the sound effects are good, but the Legend of Zelda theme is nowhere to be found in this game. AT ALL. I'm sorry, but I'm not tired of it yet, and it's exclusion makes the game seem less epic and more malaise. I remember when Link pulled the Master Sword(tm) from the stone in A Link to the Past, and when the Zelda theme started afterwards I felt charged and ready. Almost all of the music in this game is stolen from A Link to the Past, but they didn't include the most important song, and I can't forgive it for that.

STORY: Remember when I was discussing A Link to the Past's story earlier? Most non-orphan people can relate to losing a loved one or a father figure. Young Link being left alone in a world that is out to destroy him is a powerful statement.

Now, contrast that to Zelda: The Ocarina of Time where you are avenging a tree. Let me state that for you again, just in case you think that was a typo: Link is avenging a talking tree when he sets out on his quest. There's nothing even remotely analogous to this in real life. I've had plants that have died, sure, but I've never cried out on the dark precipice to the night and said "by the power of Thor(tm), I will avenge you my hibiscus!" Not once. The game tries to make up for this by having Link live with a bunch of "lost boys" type elves, who are all pretty annoying to begin with, like self-sufficient first-graders. The tree is supposed to be the wise father figure, but it's a tree and can't move, so one has to wonder how good its parenting skills actually are.

In his journey to stop the "evil man" that is causing all the trouble in Hyrule, Link meets a plethora of friendly characters that basically amount to the enemy races in the previous games. Rather than fight them directly, now they just give Link pointless and irritating quests to waste his time. Personally I liked the earlier versions.

I struggled to keep my interest up until Link got the Master Sword(tm), the pulling out of which sends Link forward in time and ages him into an N*Sync-style douche bag complete with fingerless elbow-length gloves and an earring. This is where the game lost me because far be it for me to question the sword making him go forward in time, am I to understand that "young adult" Link has the diminutive mind of an eight-year-old? Or, if he's spent the last ten years in limbo training to become a master fighter, then why doesn't he know how to do anything significantly different than accessorize his wardrobe?

I still struggled on hoping that there would be some payoff to the whole thing, but by the time the fairy had told me to listen for the 79,898, 636,873rd time I just stop caring.

Ah yes, let's get to that:

FAIRY: Navi is to the player as Kryptonite is to Superman and good taste is to 50 Cent - they all want it to go away, but as soon as they come into contact it can be lethal to them. I would like to know what wonderful drugs the design "teem" (not to be confused with "team," as in people working together would eventually figure out that this was a bad idea) were sniffing when they decided to put a little voice in the game that pops in every other minute to let the player know that they're supposed to be going to the castle to see the princess. The problem is, it takes about five minutes to reach the castle which means that in an even number of minutes you'll hear it twice, and at the odd worst, three before you reach the castle gate. Once you have reached the castle and are attempting to navigate the streets to find the princess, the fairy then proceeds to tell you to find the princess. There isn't even an option to turn it off! I'm sure when gamers (note: not Nintendo fan boys) began to complain about this Shigeru Miyamoto just packed his ears with some $1000 bills that were conveniently lying around.

GAMEPLAY: Some would argue that TOOT's control scheme is revolutionary, I argue that it is convoluted. It's obvious that they were trying to do too much with what control they had, so they decided to take a share of it away from the player. Typically, there is one button that takes multiple actions whenever Link is in a certain position. While this does make the game easier to play on some level, it often devolves into trying to position Link so that he can access the one spot where the button changes actions.

The game's flow also seems less open than in the older games. The original Legend of Zelda and Zelda II were all about exploration. Zelda: A Link to the Past continued that tradition to an extent, allowing players to move around the environments at their leisure to look for items that might help them navigate to more complicated dungeons. This Zelda is strictly by-the-book: An item that you find in a dungeon will HAVE to be used to get to the boss, and will HAVE to be used to make the boss vulnerable so that you can hurt it. As before, you need to collect three things to get the Master Sword(tm), and there are three different temples that you must enter to find them. You can't move on to the next dungeon until you've completed the one that you're on. The roads to get to these dungeons are just that: roads. You can't deviate too much from the prescribed course, and even if there is more virtual landscape than in previous Zelda games it seems constrained. I mean, why even put the Hookshot(tm) in the game if the stupid thing can only attach to a few sparse surfaces throughout the map? It sometimes makes going forward difficult becuase the player has been trained not to rely on it because of its almost utter uselessness - they only use it as a last resort!

Finding heart containers has become more of a chore than a feeling of discovery, involving the ironically time-consuming task of travelling in time, and having the right item at just the right time, and just pads out what is essentially a really short game.

Battles are many, but significant battles are few, predictable, and not very interesting. Bosses are cheap, moving out of camera range and striking distance just to frustrate the player, who has to wait for "just the right moment" to strike, every time, because they have no inherently vulnerable spots. I remember in the Link to the Past, finding just the right weapon to tackle a difficult boss was fun, because bosses could be hurt by multiple weapons. With the advent of the 3D Zelda games, this seems to be a thing of the past.

OVERALL: I think that the worst thing about this game is that so many people like it better than the superior old ones, and that the 3D downgrade to the graphics was so immediately popular. So well was this game received that recent releases of 3D Zelda games all follow the same framework, with almost no originality other than art style or what gimmick Link uses to solve puzzles and navigate the world. Zelda: TOOT made me far more excited about Wind Waker, but after becoming similarly disappointed by it all I can say is this: if I want to experience the feelings of awe and exploration that I got from the original games, I now play Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series. It might lack some of Zelda's polish, but it's a helluva lot more fun to play.

It Came From the Bargain Bin: Jurassic Park (SNES)

Boy, this takes me back.

When Jurassic Park came out in theaters back in 1993, moviegoers were exposed to the most astounding digital effects ever seen up until that point. Dinosaurs never looked so real (well, except for maybe when they were real... unless you're a member of the extreme religious right... in which case the debate between hundred-ton monsters who died out for no perceivable reason leaving behind giant stone bones and a supreme being that looks like an old man sitting on a cloud surrounded by light and naked winged babies urging the republican party to outlaw gay marriage is ongoing)! Even though the movie was for the most part mediocre, it was directed by Stephen Spielberg, back when that actually meant something other than, "Sigh. Are we going to see yet another bad, mediocre, or overly schmaltzy Stephen Spielberg movie?"

In the marketing blitz that followed, Jurassic Park became a hot property with a line of action figures (courtesy of Kenner, the Star Wars toys people), children's clothing lines, and unique video games for every system out at that time - no two were alike! This is part in the individual licenses going to different developers, but it also seemed like they were drawing on the unique aspects of the various systems; the Sega Genesis had a side-scrolling action game, the Sega CD had a Myst-like point-and-click adventure, the 3DO got a series of pointless "multimedia" games, the NES got a two-player exploratory shooter, the PC got a buggy 2D/3D shooter, and the Super Nintendo got an action adventure experience.

The SNES game was developed by Ocean Software and it was an impressive package back in its day, with a large Legend of Zelda-like overworld, 3D interior environments, Dolby Surround Sound, a colorful color palette, multiple weapons with limited ammunition (akin to the survival horror genre), huge sprites, digitized sound, a great soundtrack, mouse support - the list just goes on and on!

So why is it here, on the list of games that I hate? Because for all of its exciting innovation, it has several flaws that could have (and should have) been dealt with before its release, and they just ruined the game completely. As such, I'm going to forgo the usual review structure and concentrate on what's wrong.

5 THINGS THAT MAKE JURASSIC PARK FOR THE SUPER NINTENDO UNPLAYABLE.

1.) THE TEXT POP-UPS DO NOT PAUSE THE ACTION. There's nothing more irritating than walking into an open field in the game, only to have that annoying little twerp, Tim Murphy pop in and tell me not to shoot the Gallimimus, because they could stampede, right before the aforementioned dinosaurs trample me to death because Tim's shit-eating grin is preventing me from seeing them. Better still is when I was collecting eggs from the raptor nests and Ian Malcolm pops up to tell me how many eggs I have left, basically blinding me in a dark room with giant disemboweling dinosaurs. They could have put this message at the bottom of the screen, or at the top, or made it transparent, or paused the game while it was on the screen, or NOT HAD THE FREAKIN' USELESS INFORMATION THERE TO BEGIN WITH. It seems obvious to me that Ocean looked at all of the design options and decided to go with the worst one.

2.) THE BUTTONS ARE MAPPED BADLY. The control actually isn't all that bad, even giving me the carte blanche to manually pick up weapons, deciding what I want to take with me... in the overworld. When I was in the inside stages the character automatically picked up weapons and health, which required me to backtrack every time I accidentally walked over a less-effective weapon. When I was on the overworld, I noticed that the button on the right of my controller (the "A" button) controls the weapon that is on the left of the display while the button on the left (the "X" button) controls the weapon displayed on the right, making the simplest and most often used command in the game something that hurts my brain. As with most games of this era, there is no way to change it in the options.

3.) I CAN'T STRAFE IN THE 3D ROOMS. There is no excuse for this one, as the game came out well after Wolfenstien 3D on the PC, and strafing by then was a standard, not an option. It's not like they ran out of button space: as established earlier, the "pick up" button from the overworld is not used in addition to the "jump button." The "L" and "R" buttons on the top of the controller are used to turn the player slower than with the D-pad, for precision aiming, but there is little reason that they couldn't have skipped that feature and just let the player strafe left and right with them. The mouse is used entirely by itself inside: pushing forward makes Alan Grant walk forward, pulling is backwards, left and right turn, button one is one weapon and button two is the other, so no strafing option there either. This makes the game much, much harder than it has to be.

4.) THERE IS NO AUTOMAP. If any game needs a map, it's this one. Some environments tend to look the same, and the island is actually much bigger than one would expect for an SNES game. Granted, auto-mapping wasn't really widely used when this game was made, but if Zelda: Link to the Past can have a map that shows the general area of goals then there's no reason that this couldn't have one either, as it came out much later than Link to the Past.

5.) As I have mentioned before, this game is quite large, and to collect all of the dinosaur eggs, key cards, and various other items one has to spend a considerable time backtracking or remembering where they've been. I have a friend who took notes as he played and managed to get through the game in about ten hours using his notes from start to finish (I have heard of "speed gamers" beating the game in an hour, but I can't imagine anyone playing it enough to do that). He left it on overnight so that he could continue the next day, but if the power had gone out he would have lost everything and had to start over, because THERE IS NO WAY TO SAVE THE GAME, AND NO PASSWORD TO CONTINUE. Imagine playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Now imagine playing the game, but never getting any more heart containers than the three that you start out with, out of the potential twenty that you could normally end the game with. Now imagine that the battery backup on your cartridge has died, and that in order to see the end you have to play through all three palaces of Hyrule and all seven of the Dark Palaces in one sitting. Now Imagine that when you used up all of your fairies that the game was over, and you had to start from the beginning. That's hardcore gaming right there! Jurassic Park even goes one step further by giving an inhumanely cruel "Congratulations! You escaped Jurassic Park!" text on black screen ending, giving no payoff to hours of torture! This is basically the developer saying that they hate me, this despite the fact that I bought their crappy movie tie-in game.

OVERALL: This is the classic example of how something could have been phenomenal was destroyed simply by lack of common sense. The game's art direction and scope really is impressive for the day it was made. As it stands now, it is merely a long-forgotten footnote in an otherwise impressive SNES library.

It's still better than the last two Jurassic Park movie sequels, though.