echoplex

The NGC version aged like fine wine.
I just hope they didn't change the music too much.

Do we know if this is a limited thing?

@Bomberman64 I agree, but here the publisher themselves quoted Lovecraft in their description. So it might be accurate this time!

I wonder if her fluffy pink top hat is an unlockable in the game?
I love that she's playing with contrasts here.

Oh, wow, who knew *acts surprised while trying to remember what the E in NES stands for
Watch them buy LEGO in less than 10 years.

@DDFawfulGuy Yes that was my point, I may have expressed myself too quickly for the sake of conciseness.

Funny thing that people find drinking alcohol more offensive than praying to be healed in most JRPGs.

Is it really audio only? The game looks visually quite intense enough without those speech bubbles cluttering the screen a little bit more.

Elephant Peach is the one character whose existence I didn't know I needed to acknowledge to get on with the end of summer

Nightdive Studios should be awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award or something. The work they're doing for the History of Gaming is absolutely amazing as it is flawless.

@Devann I won't put it as harshly as you did but it's the first Zelda game I did not revisit after completing the main story (using the word lightly).

I won’t regret the multiplayer which was really repetitive and random. Except for the Undead Nightmare mode with the successive waves of zombies which was really great.

Apart from being brighter and noticing a different sort of clouds, I’m really bad at judging from this kind of videos. It looks like two different Instagram filters to me.

I prefered the cumulus over those dumb altostratus though…

For those interested, a huge update has been released for this game, adding a 'Horror' difficulty mode, a new weapon to find, a new boss, new graphics options (you can play it like it's 1999) and fixing dozens of bugs.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1413870/view/3649634250033778361

Love the artwork. Summer of '90 vibes right there.

I'll wait for a sale AND a few updates.

Thank you for this great article.

What I remember about SoM when it comes to colours is the visual effect of magic on the characters or enemies, that morphing gradient of blue when you get healed or the yellow-to-red effect when a boss was defeated. And the rainbow-like gradient when you used Luna's magic. I've always found that effect beautiful.

@Cashews *voilà.
“Viola” is rape in the past tense.

So there is some curation on the eShop after all…

I don't see how the quality of the final product can testify of how development went, good or bad. A game can be botched because the team took it way too easy. So I don't really trust that statement.

@Lizuka I've only played Undead Nightmare, as it was sold separately, and it was excellent. Never played the mainline games, so if this ever sees the light of day I'll probably get it.

The Yiga Clan is probably what I'll remember the most from TotK; as their will to harness the Zonai power drove them to build underground camps — I just wish there had been a big underground Yiga city, as an opposite to Gerudo City for instance. I really loved the cartoonish MadMax atmosphere their encampments had, with their crazy vehicles and paper lantern-lit makeshift houses. I really loved they made the fake random travellers harder to tell apart from real ones too.

@RiasGremory I don't think the terms 'explore' or 'discover' are relevant with TotK when you know that the map is the same and once you understand the Depths is the mirrored version and includes the same (tougher) foes of the aforementioned map. I think 'revisit' is a better way to put it. And when most of the action is packed in 2-minute 'memories', I feel a bit frustrated. I know we can fight Ganondorf as an army in Hyrule Warriors but I really wish we would be able to to that in a mainline game 30+ years after the creation of the franchise.

TotK is a game that was made for TikTok content*.
Change my mind.

*Which is okay, I don't have anything against that. I just think 6 years of development to be able to build Korok rotisseries or phallic spaceships is a bit too long.

This game is really just BotW with the Ultrahand rune, a few sky islands sprinkled around and an underground mirror version of the map which adds nothing more than more locations for armor that already existed in the first game (which doesn't really explains convincingly why we must find them all again) and in-game currency (zonaite, charges and cells) which is another bad idea. Even the names of the lightroots are the shrines spelled backwards — seriously, how lazy is that, no matter how the in-game lore explains it?

The first dog that came to mind was the Duck Hunt dog ;(

Okay, but is that broadsword rusty or not?

I loved Quake II on the N64. I'd be really happy to play it again on Switch, especially if the team treat the port with as much love as they did Quake 1.

I've always loved the art direction of the original game. I used to think of it as a mario rpg with Donkey Kong Country graphics.

They could have bundled them all in a 4-game pack.
Great news, still.

@BingleyBongley toutafé

As a character I prefer his Wind Waker version. As a boss, OoT forever <3

I mean if I want to hunt a monster 20 times to get its horns I’ll play Monster Hunter, where using duplication glitches would actually make the game pointless.

Here, it’s a minor part of the game, borrowed from other franchises. The evolution to this armour upgrade thing through gathering loot is not a core Zelda mechanic, thus making it feel artificial to me and, as I said, borrowed. I wish Skyward Sword had never introduced that in the series.

@DavidMac This is an important point.
Gamers have aged and have jobs, families, responsibilities (and maybe some have all of that). Playing a game like Zelda is a time investment. I'm not particularly keen on cheating but if there's a way I can avoid a few dozen hours of artificial gameplay then I'll use it. The gaming industry needs to take that evolution into account. I'm not a casual gamer in the popular, negative sense — I just don't have time to play as much as I used to and as much as I'd like to. I never used any glitch in BoTW because I didn't mind backtracking or gathering everything. I'll be off for work for 10 days and 1) I won't probably remember what I was doing in the game ten days before or where to go (turned off the switch last night at a specific place on the map screen and hope 10-days-later-me will remember what objective 10-days-ago-me-then meant to do) and 2) I'll be glad to have saved/duplicated enough materials not to struggle to get back on track.

I agree the game feels a bit paywall-ey at times, and it feels artificial — just to make some quests last longer. Having to pay 1000+ Rupees early in the game to just be able to enter a dungeon (and survive in it more than 45 seconds before freezing or suffocating to death) does not exactly enrich my experience. Pun intended

@deafdood while I believe some of the glitches may have been noticed and taken care of during testing, I remember some of them in BotW required the player to be in a very specific situation (like crouching facing south when raining between 2 and 2.30pm or something like that — I don't think I even exaggerate that much so I doubt they are on their bug-hunting lists) so there has to be glitches that are bound to be discovered anyway?

To be frank that intro felt a bit Uncharted-y.
I’d rather have a 7-minute cinematic epic than an intro chopped down into 10-15 short sequences with you being allowed to move your character for 13 steps before the next cutscene starts or so-and-so babbles on and on.
Story wise it was great, yes.

It's a bit weird to ask how players would like to play it:

• two months before release
• two months before the release of the 4th game in the series

I had no idea Pokemon S/V had shipped that many copies in such a short time.

That t-shirt is such a strange fit. Lycra-tight on the chest but parachute pants loose on the arms.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me but I apart from the obvious ones I thought about Gohma immediately and voted for her — just because I was quite delighted to see her mentioned.

Looks very cool. Love the 32-bit-graphics-but-with-more-polygons aesthetic. They could tone down the wobbly effect though. It's not what I'm most nostalgic of

Love the general design. I hope the puzzles hold up to something great.

'Uncle Matin' sounds weird.

18987 points. Scored 100 points on round 4, it was the most generic BoTW landscape you could get and pinpointed my guess at the exact opposite of the actual answer.

I got pretty easily recognisable ones apart from that, like the spiral-shaped strip of land at the east or the entrance of the underground temple with all the gardians. The others had a landmark (a tower, a village) that helped a lot.

Fun game!

I don’t know why the SNES game has this reputation today when it was actually good at the time of its release. It was an ambitious game technically and was very demanding for the players. I beat it once but years later thanks to an online walkthrough.

And it had one of the best soundtracks of the era.

How dare you leave out Final Fantasy Mystic Quest of that list?
I played it at my cousin's during summer '94 (we got it later than the rest of the world it seems) and got my copy the next Christmas. The gameplay was simple and the battles a bit boring but the soundtrack was amazing. Banger after banger.

The next ones were FFIII on the DS, and FFVII on PS3 via the PS store.
And I also played My Life As A King on Wii which I loved very much.

WW Ganondorf is the one with a unique personality. The other ones look very generic. Make their hair dark and you'll get F-tier characters from Dragon Ball. Especially TOTK 'dorf.

@SoIDecidedTo It's also a bit unrealistic and cheesy. I've never played any game (even less Zelda) with a bunch of friends or family cheering for me. Is it really a thing? Am I old?

Sounds a bit Xenoblade-y.

I was on the DLC train until I watched this last trailer. Now it does feel like a sequel. And as a sequel, it has to be similar to the previous game. I get that now.

Gave it a spin last night and literally fell asleep during my first battle. Also I don't get why this gets an 8/10 when two thirds of the game are unusable since requiring a GB save to play.

I was stuck at 99.91% too for a while and had lost all hope until I found a list of easily missed locations here (I had found the 900 koroks beforehand): https://www.reddit.com/r/Breath_of_the_Wild/comments/7p8qxj/comment/dsfflb7/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x

For me it was Pondos Lodge. Hope it helps!