The Year of Zelda

I got a Wii for Christmas.

Yes, I'm a bit late to this particular party, but then when it comes to Nintendo home consoles I always have been. I'm not much of a Nintendo fan by any stretch of the imagination. Those who know me or have read the blog know of my complete ambivalence to anything with the name of a certain mustachioed plumber attached to it. However, that doesn't stop me enjoying the rest of what their consoles can offer. I have an N64 and a Gamecube, and I've also owned a version of every Nintendo portable since the Game Boy Colour.

My Nintendo consoles add flavour to the more mainstream portions of my gaming diet, like a delicious chocolatey desert compared to the meat and veg of Sony or Microsoft. I may not be bothered by much in the way of Mario, but that still leaves delectable treats like Zelda, Metroid, Smash Bros, F-Zero, Star Fox and Wave Race to dance upon my palette.

I asked for a Wii to replace the Gamecube pinched by my sister and specifically to allow me to play two games. Metroid Prime 3 and Zelda: Skyward Sword. Sure there are other games worth playing on the Wii, and I have a list of titles to find, but it's those two that sold the system to me, and prices have dropped to such a level that I can justify buying a console for two games now. If I'm honest, I wanted the Wii just for Zelda. It's by far the best thing Nintendo have in their arsenal.

I came to Zelda late. Dad bought a Nintendo 64 and Goldeneye for reasons that still aren't quite clear. I liked Goldeneye. It was fun, but it was a loan of Ocarina of Time that really pulled me in. I wound up buying it, and Majora's Mask and I still have them. They started a late blooming gaming love affair that I'm always happy to go back to. I bought my missing GameCube to play Wind Waker and hunted down a proper copy of Twilight Princess as well. None of that waggly right handed Link nonsense for me. Outside of my two big-boy consoles, my portables have provided Link's Awakening, Minish Cap and most recently Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks.

The times I actually play the games are pretty few and far between, and I always get them way after release, but I always enjoy them even if it takes actually playing a Zelda game to remind me of that. The most recent entry to do this has been Phantom Hourglass. Up until last week, I hadn't played a Zelda game since the year Twilight Princess dropped. Hourglass really got its claws into me and reminded me why I love this series so much. It also had me reminiscing, and it dawned on me that although I own a lot of them, I've actually only finished two Zelda games - the GameCube ones.

Clearly this is Sacrilege of the highest order, so I've decided to take inspiration from Nintendo's Year of Luigi to have my own year of Zelda. I'm going to play and complete as many Zelda games I possibly can. And if I can, I'm going to do it on the original hardware. There won't really be any order of play, but as a Gamer, I feel like this is something I owe to myself to do. So, once Phantom Hourglass is done, Skyward Sword will follow and after that, who knows? It's going to be a great opportunity to break out old consoles and right past wrongs.

In the process, I'll have to find another copy of Minish Cap, since mine was 'borrowed' by my sister, and work out how I'm going to play The Legend of Zelda, Adventure of Link and Link to the Past without paying through the nose for them. I've never owned a NES or a SNES so I've never played Link's first three games. In fact, I don't even think I've ever seen those game's carts. I get the feeling that going back to those games might be something akin to digital paleontology. It's going to be very interesting.

This is a proposition of epic proportions, and there's every possibility that I might be doomed to failure. Still those who don't try don't win, do they?

So to quote Celebrity Deathmatch, let's get it on!

After the multiplayer rant, time for some multiplayer love.

After last week's rant about not wanting to pay for tacked on multiplayer I got thinking. Online multiplayer just isn’t as personal as it was before the advent of the internet. It brought on a reflection on my gaming past.

Multiplayer for a few means one thing now. Howling obscenities through the headset while playing this week’s Call of Battlefield. Something about the relative anonymity of gamertags just seems to bring out the worst of people online. Angry teens spray out the kind of stuff that would land you in hospital if it were overheard in a pub.

Remember when a multiplayer session was you and three mates huddled round your fourteen inch tv playing Micro Machines Turbo Tournament ’96 on the Megadrive? That is of course unless you had a friend with really accommodating parents who let you hook up to the twenty-eight in the living room. I had a session like that the other day. We sat around my mates fifty-two inch LCD, playing an eighteen year old Megadrive whose graphics looked a whole lot less like ass than we had any right to expect and had time comparable in greatness to any I have experienced in the twenty years I have owned a console. Seriously, it was mental. And while bullshit was called on many occasions, once by myself after one of my own unjustified wins, not once did the banter degenerate into the kind of racist, sexist, homophobic, jingoistic filth that gets streamed through my headset from the mouth of the last person who beat me down in Halo. Something about having the person you’ve just beaten sat next to you puts paid to that kind of thing, you know?

But really, this isn’t a rant about the state of online gaming. This is a love letter to what the young ‘uns call ‘local multiplayer’.  It wasn’t just eight hours of Micro Machines and its infamous Sponge track though. In that same session we played Powerstone 2, Sonic Adventure 2 match races, the insane Chu Chu Rocket and Virtua Tennis 2 on the Dreamcast. After all that, the PS1 was busted out for a round of Crash Bash. The only thing that stopped the whole thing slipping into endless races on Circuit Breakers and Crash Team Racing was time.

It really slammed home how much fun games that are ten, twelve and in some cases up to sixteen years old are in comparison to what is about today. Part of it I suppose is all the old rivalries that we were carrying between ourselves on those games. There was the same old rush for Tommy Haas and Tim Henman on Virtua Tennis and the same endless wars on the sponge in Micro Machines.

Helpfully, since the openly hostile attitude of online multiplayer was nowhere to be seen I was also able to manage the realisation of something of an age old gaming dream: To bring my significant other into the fold, and miraculously, she had as good a time as the rest of us. It helped to show up how the most accessible games are the most fun. You are instantly good at Virtua Tennis as soon as you return a shot. Chu Chu Rocket’s barely contained insanity bought the laughs and howls of despair at having a cat dropped in your rocket seconds before the lead was translated into victory. Sonic Adventure 2 is admittedly less than accessible, but since we only played that to settle a simmering old rivalry from the last time we had the Dreamcast out, it’s a moot point.

The high point of the session was undoubtedly Crash Bash. Its collection of quickly understood yet downright silly mini games just clicked with my girlfriend for some reason. She beat three seasoned vets of Crash Bash hands down in Polar Push, Pogo Pandemonium, Crate Crush and Ballistix. We all had a laugh and she left feeling great, having her first multiplayer victories under her belt. I doubt I’ve ever seen that online.

It left me thinking that the only one of the big three that gives local multiplayer a look in now is Nintendo. Think about it, the 360 can connect to up to four controllers, the PS3 can take seven or eight, but can you remember the last time that actually happened? If you own one of the more ‘hardcore’ consoles, multiplayer all but confirms the stereotype of the lone gamer sat in the dark in his bedroom. And that seems like a step backwards.

In positioning the Wii as a family friendly machine, Nintendo found a ton of local multiplayer games forthcoming. But for every light hearted game like Mario Kart, Mario Party or Smash Bros, it seemed like there were a dozen lightweight mini game collections that got it all wrong. There’s a difference between the two. The lightweight stuff doesn’t need much in the way of thinking and the gameplay boils mostly down to the Wii Waggle. There’s no satisfaction in victory from that. The best multiplayer games are light hearted and accessible to the n00b, yet still need you to think. The thrill of a good multiplayer game comes from the feeling of outsmarting your opponents, not waving your arms in the air. Supersonic games understood this when they made Micro Machines Turbo Tournament ’96. That’s why they included the sponge track. You can joust on it.

There was another feature of Micro Machines that made it a great multiplayer game. Pad sharing. Eight people sharing four pads and eight cars on track at once, with all the mayhem that came with it. It’s a feature that seems to have disappeared altogether, now that multiplayer seems to have lost its sense of fun and gotten serious.

And fun is really what multiplayer should be all about. It really is worth tracking down some of the multiplayer Greats for a session at a mate’s house. Those who have played Bishi Bashi, Crash Bash, Crash Team Racing, Circuit Breakers, Micro Machines, Smash Bros, Goldeneye, Mario Kart (even though it’s an irrational personal pet hate of mine, don’t ask why because I couldn’t possibly tell you), Mario Party (better without the boardgame element), Micro Machines, Tekken, Street Fighter, Timesplitters, Dancing Stage and Rock Band will tell you that competing together, in the same room, is the best part of gaming as a whole.  

I’ve probably missed one or two there, but with a few mates and a few drinks they make an amazing night in. I have a feeling there is a yawning gap in the market for games like these that isn’t being filled. Ok, we get the odd release like the recent Sonic and Sega All-Stars, but a lot of the time, multiplayer in a new release boils down to a tacked-on online mode. I might be right, or I might be horribly wrong on that statement, but split screen games bring people together in the best possible way. Online is at its best when you’re in a closed party with people you know. And in that case, why not get everyone together in one room?

There might be beers.

Are we waiting too long for flashy new consoles?

There's a bit been said about this console generation being a bit long, and that it's stifling the industry as a whole.

But you know what? I don't mind. Frankly it's been nice not to have to shell out over three hundred quid on a new bit of all singing all dancing hardware. My 360 is doing very nicely thank-you-very-much. The games are mostly good, and it's pumping out visuals that comparable to a lot of CG animated movies of just a few years ago. If you don't believe me, compare the looks of some of the very latest releases against movies of the same vintage as the first Ice Age film.

Yes this generation is seven years old. That should mean that developers don't have to worry about how they work within the architecture they have (they can already manipulate the hardware to the best of it's capabilities), so they should be able to focus the spared effort on getting really creative. But instead we have some of the major developers and publishers saying they need new hardware to encourage them to take risks.

The indie developers don't seem to be having that problem. If you look at any of the download services, Steam, XBLA, or SEN for instance, there's a plethora of fun and imaginative titles to chose from, yet a lot of what we get from the major Triple A publishers are macho dude-bro sequels. Now I like a good sequel as much as the next gamer, but what I like more is a new IP, and there doesn't seem to be many people out there willing to take that risk anymore.

Thankfully there are is smattering of all new stuff coming through. Even at this late point in the console cycle. Dishonored, Beyond: Two Souls and The Last of Us being shining examples of this. There's even a couple of exciting reboots of established names in the new Tomb Raider and DMC games on the way. And even though they're not entirely new IPs, they're taking risks with our preconceptions of what those two games should be. Reading the previews, it's looking increasingly like those risks have been entirely justified.

Here's a thought.

Technically the last generation is still soldiering on. When the Wii came out, it was derided for using last-gen hardware, and yet, discounting the shovelware, some of the best, most fun and most innovative games of the last few years have been released upon its decidedly low powered circuit boards. Games like Madworld, Smash Bros: Brawl, Mario Galaxy, Zelda: Skyward Sword and No More Heroes showed that you didn't need massive power to make awesome games. Yes, you can say that the Wii remotes add a new dimension to the way the system works, but it's still running on last-gen tech. The Kinect isn't. And it's rubbish. The Wii sets a great example of what can be done with old tech if you stop moaning about how underpowered it is and concentrate on making games that are fun and innovative instead.

We shouldn't need shiny new hardware to encourage developers to be imaginative, it should come naturally. It's just a shame everybody seems to be so risk averse these days.