Rocking the old school Zelda games
After being on AAA-title overload for the last few weeks, it seemed like a great time to get back to basics. My wife and I had recently sat down and gone back through the original Legend of Zelda during my Destiny addiction, so for an encore we figured this was a great time to bust out the SNES classic, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. (There was really no reason to try and play through a Zelda platformer, so let’s just ignore that the Link’s Adventure ever happened.) Even with all of the modern, high-budget, super-hyped games coming out in the near future, I really feel like these old games stand the test of time.
Sure, maybe some of the appeal is nostalgia. Me, I think it has more to do with games that have just the right combination of engaging mechanics, iconic characters, and a splash of story to lend just enough exigency to the experience. Link and Zelda are characters that persist even now in the gaming world. If I owned a Wii U, perhaps I would have been playing Hyrule Warriors instead. While The Legend of Zelda benefitted from being the first RPG-style game for the NES, it was by no means the first top-down adventure video game. (Of course, I could never tell that the duck looking things in Adventure were supposed to be dragons or anything even remotely menacing. Perhaps the Atari 2600 simply wasn’t the ideal environment for that kind of game.)
The Legend of Zelda and A Link to the Past aren’t exactly strict RPGs so much as they’re adventure games with a lot of the tasty bits that make RPGs interesting. They have hit points (in the form of highly recognizable hearts), upgradable gear, and an open world with a somewhat nonlinear quest that involves a fair amount of problem solving. The story was only slightly more involved than Super Mario Brothers (your princess is in another dungeon), but Final Fantasy would eventually come around to scratch that specific itch.
What I love about these particular games now is that they still manage to be head-poundingly challenging. I find myself yearning for my old issues of Nintendo Power and yet still refuse to go find a FAQ or walkthrough online. Look, it’s complicated. I somehow think that because I didn’t have the internet back then, I shouldn’t use it now. No, I had a paper walkthrough that I (or more accurately, my parents) paid good money for instead. Is there really a difference?
Only to my pride.
A Link to the Past has one of the most aggravating dungeons ever conceived of: the Ice Palace. The home of the fifth girl trapped in a crystal (because evil wizard) has the distinctive hurdle of having both icy floors that make it hard to navigate and thin, twisting platforms that I easily fall off of. It results in a whole lot of me yelling at Link to stop (for whatever good that has ever done in a game). It also employs rotating fireballs stacked in a line (just like in Super Mario Brothers), traps that fly across the room, and one particularly sadistic room with creatures that fly across the room while the floor itself moves back and forth at the same time I’m trying to navigate around spiky barricades. Someone was in a seriously bad mood when they cooked that horrible, sanity-pummeling thing up.
Maybe the fact that I grew up with 8-bit and 16-bit consoles when they were new has a lot to do with why I still love these games. Or maybe they really are just timeless classics that will endure for generations. It’s probably a mix of those things. Maybe it’s why I get so excited about pixel art indie games that forgo flashy graphics for grounded mechanics and simple controls. Regardless, I know there are a lot of shiny new titles flooding the market in the next few weeks, but I urge people to take some time and revisit the classics and examine the roots of modern gaming. As for me, my next goal is to fire up Chrono Trigger and get lost in time for a while. Or at least until Megan is done with the new Gabriel Knight game and I can get the gaming rig back for some Borderlands.
