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Zelda
I beat "Zelda: The Legend of the Wind Waker" on the GameCube over the weekend.
When Teri bought me that game for Christmas, I was disappointed. I hadn't asked for it, and when I looked it it, it seemed like a kid's game; bright and cartoony. Nor could I make a lot of sense out of the beginning.
Boy, was I wrong!
Wind Waker is simply awesome. In the two months that I've been playing it, all three of us have become big fans. In terms of sheer enjoyability, I'd put Wind Waker on a par with my previous all-time favorite, Super Mario 64.
I won't go on and on about it, though; this isn't a review. A few quick points, though:
The game is incredibly long. We got at least a couple hundred hours of playing time out of it, and we by no means exhausted all the possibilities.
The game is very exciting, but almost totally child-appropriate. The only two things that scared Sebastian were an undead monster called a Redead (they scream, which paralyzes Link, and then chomp loudly on his brain), and the Ghost Ship (which has Redeads on it).
There's an emotional depth to the game that surprised me. In a long exposition toward the end, the ultimate Boss, Gannon, really changed my entire assessment of him; he became almost a sympathetic character. The same is true of his death.
One thing that I liked very much is that the game didn't require incredible fast-twitch reflexes and a million tries to beat bosses. In fact, I was often surprised to beat level bosses on the first try. At the same, time, it didn't feel as if they were too easy - more that other games require you to spend too much time being frustrated, practicing the same moves over and over to reach an almost impossible goal.
Likewise, the game itself required thinking more than anything; Link (the hero) has many tools, so it was often just a matter of figuring out which tools applied and how to use them. Logic puzzles, in other words. Those can be annoying, but in this case, they were lots of fun.
In some games I've had to resort to grabbing a walkthrough off the net. In Wind Waker I did rely on a walkthrough for one dungeon, but soon found that it was more fun - and more satisfying - to put the walkthrough aside and play the game cold. There were a couple of places where I did refer to the walkthrough again, mazes that would otherwise have taken much longer, but that was because Teri and Sebastian were watching and I didn't want to bore them.
Or myself, to be honest.
Anyway, we became such huge fans that I went with Sebastian and picked up a relatively rare special Zelda disk for the GameCube; I had to get it used, since it was out of print. But it contains TWO Nintendo 64 Zelda games: The Ocarina of Time (I love that name) and Majora's Mask. Both translate to the GameCube quite well. There are also two very early Zelda games, astonishingly primitive but fun; Sebastian really likes them.
A new Zelda game is coming out for the GameCube in May, and we'll definitely be buying it.
The games have had quite an impact on Sebastian, by the way. Early this morning he climbed into our bed and fell asleep. To my surprise, he actually slept through the alarm clock going off. I watched as he slowly woke up, because he often wakes up smiling and saying funny things. This time, he went "beep, beep, beep, beep, beep" opened his eyes, looked at me with a BIG smile, and said "That's the Ghost Ship!"
Actually it makes more of a ghostly moaning song, but I didn't tell him that.
When Teri bought me that game for Christmas, I was disappointed. I hadn't asked for it, and when I looked it it, it seemed like a kid's game; bright and cartoony. Nor could I make a lot of sense out of the beginning.
Boy, was I wrong!
Wind Waker is simply awesome. In the two months that I've been playing it, all three of us have become big fans. In terms of sheer enjoyability, I'd put Wind Waker on a par with my previous all-time favorite, Super Mario 64.
I won't go on and on about it, though; this isn't a review. A few quick points, though:
The game is incredibly long. We got at least a couple hundred hours of playing time out of it, and we by no means exhausted all the possibilities.
The game is very exciting, but almost totally child-appropriate. The only two things that scared Sebastian were an undead monster called a Redead (they scream, which paralyzes Link, and then chomp loudly on his brain), and the Ghost Ship (which has Redeads on it).
There's an emotional depth to the game that surprised me. In a long exposition toward the end, the ultimate Boss, Gannon, really changed my entire assessment of him; he became almost a sympathetic character. The same is true of his death.
One thing that I liked very much is that the game didn't require incredible fast-twitch reflexes and a million tries to beat bosses. In fact, I was often surprised to beat level bosses on the first try. At the same, time, it didn't feel as if they were too easy - more that other games require you to spend too much time being frustrated, practicing the same moves over and over to reach an almost impossible goal.
Likewise, the game itself required thinking more than anything; Link (the hero) has many tools, so it was often just a matter of figuring out which tools applied and how to use them. Logic puzzles, in other words. Those can be annoying, but in this case, they were lots of fun.
In some games I've had to resort to grabbing a walkthrough off the net. In Wind Waker I did rely on a walkthrough for one dungeon, but soon found that it was more fun - and more satisfying - to put the walkthrough aside and play the game cold. There were a couple of places where I did refer to the walkthrough again, mazes that would otherwise have taken much longer, but that was because Teri and Sebastian were watching and I didn't want to bore them.
Or myself, to be honest.
Anyway, we became such huge fans that I went with Sebastian and picked up a relatively rare special Zelda disk for the GameCube; I had to get it used, since it was out of print. But it contains TWO Nintendo 64 Zelda games: The Ocarina of Time (I love that name) and Majora's Mask. Both translate to the GameCube quite well. There are also two very early Zelda games, astonishingly primitive but fun; Sebastian really likes them.
A new Zelda game is coming out for the GameCube in May, and we'll definitely be buying it.
The games have had quite an impact on Sebastian, by the way. Early this morning he climbed into our bed and fell asleep. To my surprise, he actually slept through the alarm clock going off. I watched as he slowly woke up, because he often wakes up smiling and saying funny things. This time, he went "beep, beep, beep, beep, beep" opened his eyes, looked at me with a BIG smile, and said "That's the Ghost Ship!"
Actually it makes more of a ghostly moaning song, but I didn't tell him that.