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Ocarina of Time was more impressive
Written by Tommy on Saturday, September 23, 2000
By now, we've all seen the beta screenshots of the Zelda title for Gamecube. (By the way, it should be Gamecube, not N-Cube, as some people call it. That's like calling the Playstation the S-Station!) We've stared, drooled, and done it again. But, in all honesty, I was more nuts when I first saw the first shots for Zelda 64 (it wasn't given the title Ocarina of Time until a few months before it was released). Let me explain in detail.
The Legend of Zelda was released in 1987, and The Adventure of Link in late 1988. In 1991, when I was six, I first played them. I got used to seeing 8-bit graphics like this:
 
It was my babysitter and her family who led me to love Zelda. The first time I went to her house, her brother Scott was in the living room, playing A Link to the Past on Super Nintendo (this was summer 1992, mind you). I was amazed when he told me it was a Zelda game. Suddenly, my impression of Zelda went from 8-bit to 16-bit:
 
I hadn't really understood Zelda until Christmas 1993. I'd been bugging my parents for a Game Boy all year. Finally, it came. I was so psyched, and I began playing Tetris right away. I stopped for a while and opened my other presents. The last one, behind the tree, was Link's Awakening! I turned it on, and watched the whole opening, with Link's ship getting struck by lightning and Marin finding him on the beach. I began playing, and that's all I did for the entire day! The following screenshots are from the 1998 Game Boy Color remake:
For the next few years, for many times I was with Elizabeth, Scott, Sam (other sister), Sue or Mike (parents), I'd be playing video games, a lot of the time Zelda. I was the one who owned the one Zelda game they didn't have, and they had all the others. I played LTTP all the time. The furthest I'd ever gotten until Elizabeth stopped being my babysitter when I was eleven was to the beginning of Ganon's Tower. So, this is what I thought of when I thought of Zelda:
When I discovered there was going to be a Zelda title for the upcoming Nintendo 64 (now it's spring 1996), I was overjoyed. Zelda in 3-D, where it belonged! These are some of the shots I first saw:
 
 
At the time Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation were released, everyone's view of video games changed. 3-D, 64-bit was the only way to go. Until up to then, the closest thing to 3-D was the Sega Genesis 32X. The jump from 16-bit to 64-bit took the world by storm, playing video games the way they're supposed to be played.
When Ocarina of Time was released, it was the only thing I did for months. The sharpness, the 3-D controling, the different ways to play, nothing anyone had done before N64 was anything like this.
Majora's Mask was said to be under work only about seven months after Ocarina of Time. This time, we're focused on the gameplay: the story, the characters, the overworld; basically, the simularities with Ocarina of Time, and how different it would be with many of the same things.
Ocarina of Time was one of the titles that started us down the road to playing video games like we're playing TV. Now, four years later after a first glimpse of Zelda 64, it's becoming even more towards that. Now, this has been introduced:
 
Those screenshots are the first three from the not-so-secret-anymore Gamecube Zelda project that Nintendo is working on. They're causing quite a murmur, but I'm not involved, because I'm not as impressed as I should be. Basically, we went from this:
To this:
Now, I hear some of you saying, "But why? That's amazing! It's in perfect 3-D! It looks like live action!" Yes, I know. I agree with that. But compare the Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask screens to the Gamecube Zelda's. One is just a more enhanced 3-D version of the other. However, when Ocarina of time was released, it was a totally new experience, with the 360-degree controlling and the amazing graphics for the first time, whereas Gamecube Zelda will be like an upgraded Ocarina of Time, because we'll be seeing the stuff we've seen in OoT again, but just better. Now, this is what this entire editorial's point is: going from LTTP to OoT was a huge jump, and going from MM to GZ won't be as exciting. Will it?
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