Forum Overview :: Article Submissions :: 96. The Legend of Zelda (1986, NES)

[quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"]96. The Legend of Zelda Creator: Shigeru Miyamoto / Nintendo Genre: Action-Adventure Year: 1986 Platforms: Nintendo <a href="https://www.mobygames.com/game/3393/the-legend-of-zelda/">Mobygames link</a> Available through: eBay, MisTER, <a href="https://www.zophar.net/dos/nes/nesticle.html">NESticle</a>, NEStopia. It is beyond the scope of this article to note the various ways that Nintendo has repackaged and resold the emulated version of the game over the years. It looks like you can buy it for almost all of their systems, something I had done at one point. Other games that make up the legacy: <a href="https://www.mobygames.com/game/3549/the-legend-of-zelda-ocarina-of-time/">Ocarina of Time</a>. There are certain games that, if you do not have them on your top 100 games of all-time list, make you an asshole, and this is one of them. These lists need Legend of Zelda more than Legend of Zelda needs them. The Strong Museum of Play from the city of my birth has an oftentimes poor "video game hall of fame," but they got this one right and have included it in their HoF. It had to have been influenced by the games <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osTKrmM8JKo&t=297s">Venture</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCCGIP4SifE">Tower of Druga</a>, but Miyamoto is the kind of guy that would tell you he never set foot in an arcade before creating the design for Donkey Kong or that Japan never had the color cobalt blue before he got it into the ice cubes for Mario Bros., and we sort of have no choice but to believe him. I was curious if Zelda would appeal to our nation's modern-day five year olds. I have a Retron 77 machine that takes, among other things, NES cartridges - I can confirm that Super Mario Bros., Double Dribble and Excitebike hold up. Nintendo wanted/needed the NES to seem like a toy, not a video game system, in America originally, and to their eternal credit they made a bunch of games that appeal to every generation of kid since the NES debuted. I don't have The Legend of Zelda in cartridge form, but I do have the ROM, so I started up an NES emulator (I used NEStopia, as the original recommended one - Mesen - did not play Zelda correctly when I started it up, offering graphical glitches and I have spent enough time with emulators and configuring them that if an NES emulator can't instantly show Zelda correctly, I am just going to try one of the other 50 ones that exist). It is fun, my nephew had a good time with it. I gave him a little guidance to go into the black area on the first screen to grab the sword before trying to kill all the enemies at first and once he did that he figured it out. You gotta give Nintendo credit, they figured out how to make timeless games for kids. There is one part of The Legend of Zelda that we have to talk about and it almost stopped me from including it entirely, except for what I wrote at the beginning. When your health is low in Legend of Zelda, a tone will play as a warning. It continually repeats. It, like any other tone, is obnoxious and undesirable. Now. I found getting more health to refill the health bar to be easy, but this is not acceptable. It should have never made it into the cartridge. This is one of the things you would notice if you had people play it who were not experts. Nintendo does a good job when it comes to consumer testing otherwise, so I am shocked that this made it through. I guess bumping this game into the late 90s is a fair compromise. (Star Trek: A Final Unity, the adventure game, is not here because of a similar issues - on the second away mission, IIRC, you have to solve a puzzle in a room with a similarly shrill, terrible sound effect and I just stopped playing. It was awesome up until then.) This is a Top 100 list about going beyond. So I grabbed a copy of the .NES file and orchestrated a patch off the disassembled code that lowers the volume of this shrill sound so that it can no longer be heard. I felt that tweaking the volume rather than eliminating the sound was safer. You may find and enjoy it <a href="https://www.caltrops.com/downloads/Z.nes">here</a>. When you aren't worried about clickbait, your Top 100 games of all-time list might engage in dabbling in some light Assembly programming to create the most perfect version of a classic video game. Other efforts just list Stanley Parable. <img src="https://www.caltrops.com/images/top100/legendOfZelda01.png" width=900> [/quote]