2/1/2009 - Zelda Ocarina of Time on Halo Custom Edition

Even though they are fun and can be very well done, I feel that first-person shooters are overdone in today's gaming landscape. It's even worse than it was in the 90's when fighting games were overdone. Almost every other game on the XBox 360 is an FPS, and that's probably not an exaggeration! I suppose what makes them popular now is because they lend themselves so well to online play. Gamers who are hungry for violence let out their frustrations by "killing" others live on the internet. I keep waiting for the next big genre to break through, but I fear that the FPS will stay for quite some time. It's gotten so bad that people are converting games of other genres into first-person shooters. You wouldn't think that the Nintendo 64 classic The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time could be modded into an FPS, but if there's a will, there's a way:

1/25/2009 - Legend of Zelda medley - A Capella Voices and Violin

This is one of the only YouTube videos where I would recommend watching with the browser window minimized. It's music from the Legend of Zelda series sung in A Capella with violin by one person. While the artist is undeniably talented, and the music is some of the greatest in videogaming, the performance looks... I don't know... it just looks strange when you have four unblinking singers stare at you for the entire performance:

11/27/2008 - SMule: Ocarina for iPhone

One of the annoying things about owning an iPod Touch instead of an iPhone is that I can't use any of the applications that require a microphone for input. For example, the latest version of the Google application uses voice recognition to decipher what you are searching for but just speaking your query. Also, I would love to try out those apps that recognize any song you're feeding into the microphone. But this app might just trump them all.

The ocarina may not be the most popular wind instrument in the world, but it has gained fame amongst gamers for being the title instrument in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. In the game, Link uses the Ocarina to cast spells that range from teleportation to changing the weather to time travel. As the game exploded in popularity, so did the ocarina. I remember them selling ocarinas within the pages of Nintendo Power.

It took some real ingenuity to design an application for the iPhone that mimics the functionality of the ocarina. This can only be done because the microphone can pick up sounds such as blowing, and because the screen is multitouch. Of course if you are going to demonstrate an ocarina application, you must play a Legend of Zelda song:

11/26/2008 - Resident Evil 4 - Playing As Link

What happens when you combine two of the most successful games on the GameCube (Resident Evil 4 and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess)? You have Link wielding a gun:

6/24/2008 - Link Favors the Kirby Series

Nintendo really should re-evaluate their position and make Link talk in the next Zelda game. It was always understood that the technology wasn't there for speech even in the Nintendo 64 days, but there's no such excuse now. If Metal Gear Solid 4 can have hours of fully animated and voiced cutscenes, a new Legend of Zelda game should be able to raise its level of presentation to near cinematic level. It may be some kind of philosophical thing for Nintendo for Link never to speak, but I think it was the same kind of position they had with Mario for a long time, and he speaks almost too much now. If Nintendo doesn't have a speaking Link soon, they'll continue to be the butt of jokes like this one:

4/21/2008 - Legend of Zelda Movie trailer

When I saw this trailer, I said "Wow!", they were making a Legend of Zelda movie and they kept it secret for this long?



I expected a Zelda movie would happen sooner or later. After all, if they can make movies out of Tomb Raider, Mortal Kombat, Doom, Hitman, Bloodrayne, House of the Dead, Street Fighter, DOA, and Super Mario Bros., then why not a movie of one of the most popular game franchises of all time? Especially since the Legend of Zelda's storyline could easily be made into a screenplay... particularly that of the Ocarina of Time.

But then I was wondering who are these no-name actors? I guess it would be a good move... you don't want big-name actors distracting from the audience's perception of the characters they know intimately from the game series. It's a lesson you'd think George Lucas would have learned from the success of the original Star Wars trilogy. Sadly, he cast well-known actors for the prequels and it was not for the better, in my opinion.

I was this close to being excited for an actual upcoming Zelda movie until I realized the date this trailer was released: April 1st. Yes, this was all an elaborate April Fool's joke... one that I actually fell for! And who could blame me? It must have cost a fortune to do this trailer! Ever since the famous Sheng Long April Fool's joke in EGM, game magazines and websites have tried to one-up (pardon the pun) each other in creating the most elaborate hoax. I have to say that this year's prize belongs to IGN.

3/23/2008 - Carrot Ocarina - The Legend of Zelda: Song of Time

So I didn't know there was this phenomenon with making musical instruments out of vegetables. I don't know if this is strictly a Japanese thing, but a Japanese vlogger on YouTube by the handle "heita3" has taken it upon himself to catalog all the instruments he has made out of various vegetables. The one instrument that interested me the most is his ocarina made out of a very fat carrot. Why? Well, if you're going to make any kind of ocarina and demonstrate it, you absolutely HAVE TO play an ocarina tune from The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time.

7/30/2007 - Thriller Remixes/Parodies (3 videos)

Directed by John Landis, Michael Jackson's Thriller video is more a short film than a music video. At 14 minutes, it certainly has less music content than non-music content. It is, however, the choreography of the "dance" part of the video that makes it stand out. If zombies were to really dance, it would probably look like the Thriller video. MJ may be a freak now, but he was actually cool in the 80's...

Of course, with such a popular music video, there is bound to be some remixes and parodies, and YouTube is the ideal place to find them. This first one was found as an extra in the Final Fantasy movie DVD. It's actually a great showcase for the breakthrough computer animation they used (I'm surprised they haven't made more movies like FF with photorealistic CG actors).



The next one may not exactly be a remix or parody of Thriller, but it certainly reminds me of the music video. It is a Japanese commercial for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and like most Japanese commercials, it's a strange one. I mean, I don't think watching this commercial would actually persuade anyone to buy the game. There's not even any gameplay footage!



The last one is a music video that is perhaps an alternate universe version of Thriller sung by Michael Jackson's Indian counterpart Michael Jackson. Unlike MJ's version, this one actually gives me the creeps. And yet, like all Indian music, it is strangely hypnotic. In fact, in GTA: Liberty City Stories, I tune into the Indian station just to retard any activity in my higher level mental facilities.

7/14/2007 - The Legend Of Zelda - We Are The Champions

Queen's song "We Are The Champions" brings back so many memories for me. It's a song that always gets played during high school assemblies after our athletic teams won... and we had pretty good teams. Monday, April 2, 1990 was a particularly memorable day. It was the day of the National Championship Game between the NCAA basketball teams of Duke and UNLV. I was living in Las Vegas at the time, so I had a rooting interest for the home team. Everybody did.

The Friday before, March 30, 1990, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Movie debuted. Being a huge fan of the cartoon, I was totally psyched for the movie. I was counting down the days, ready to bring my Raphael action figure to the theater. I didn't want to watch it opening weekend, though, because I was sure the movie theater would be packed. The following Monday night was the perfect time to watch it because everybody would be watching the basketball game. My father and I watched the movie in a half-filled theater and it was Awesome...Totally Radical! The theater also had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game, so naturally I plunked down a couple of quarters into it right after watching the movie. Sweetness!

When we got back home, the basketball game was almost over. UNLV had a commanding lead, which wasn't surprising, because we had a great team that year. We were able to beat Duke by a record 30 points, and people were celebrating in the streets. I had just watched a kick-ass movie and came home to see our team kick the ass of the other team. All to the tune of "We Are The Champions". It was one of the greatest nights of my life.

I've actually been privileged to be in the cities of two NCAA basketball championship colleges during the time they won their championships. In 1997, I was a junior in the University of Arizona studying Computer Science. March 31, 1997 our team was playing Kentucky for the championship after defeating two other #1 seeds. Kentucky was also a #1 seed, so if we won, we would have beaten three #1 seeds for the title, an unprecedented feat to say the least.

I remember having a programming project due in a few days, so I was in the computer lab for the first half of the game. We couldn't operate a radio in there, but we had the internet. It was the internet in the early days, though, so no streaming video or even audio. In fact, the only thing we had was a Java client that just showed the score and which team had possession. My lab partner and I were monitoring it very carefully, and that little scoreboard on the screen was exciting enough. That game was so close and had so many lead changes that it became too distracting for us to finish the project.

We called it a night at halftime, and I went home to watch the rest of the game. Of course I wouldn't be writing about it if we didn't win, but I have to say that it was one of the most exciting basketball games ever, even if you didn't have a rooting interest. We had to beat them in overtime, after all! Again, there was celebration in the streets, and again to the tune of "We Are The Champions".

So in the context of celebrating the wins of the teams I root for, "We Are The Champions" evokes a real positive response from me. It also happens to be playing at the end of one of my favorite comedy movies from the 80's, Revenge of the Nerds. Therefore, when I saw "We Are The Champions" used in such a creative way as in this video that pays tribute to the Legend of Zelda video games, I just had to add it to My Favorites.

7/2/2007 - The Legend Of Zelda Retrospective Part 6

I didn't get into playing the Legend of Zelda games until I bought a used copy of A Link to the Past. It was a good, thing, too... the first Zelda game was hard as hell, and the second one just sucks (IMHO). I had subscribed to Nintendo Power and saw that LttP was voted the #1 game month after month (I think it was up there for at least three years!). I kept putting off getting the game because I thought it was just another RPG or a maze-type game, both genres of which I was not fond of. Boy, was I wrong!

A Link to the Past was the first game in which I became "addicted" to... and when I use that term, it doesn't mean that I would play it over and over. It's sort of an obsession I feel when the game is unfinished, a boss is defeated or an accomplishment achieved, but something else is unlocked in the process, forcing me to investigate further. And that is, in essence, the beauty of the Zelda games. They plunge you into a world where you use your dexterity AND your brains to get past certain obstacles only to have other obstacles appear.

Some people call A Link to the Past Zelda III because it was released after Zelda II: Link's Adventure, but according the text on the game's box, the story of LttP took place long before the first Legend of Zelda game. So, in essence, the game is a prequel to the first two games. The game that would follow in the series would be Link's Awakening for the Game Boy. But was this game a sequel to the first two, or a sequel to the prequel, or a prequel to the prequel? Things were getting more confusing. According to the manual, Link's Awakening takes place months after LttP, which makes sense, because the nightmare boss at the end of the game takes the form of some of the bosses in LttP. So after four Zelda games we have this as the "official" chronology: LttP, Link's Awakening, the original Legend of Zelda, and finally Zelda II. Everybody got that?

Then we come to the game that totally messes things up: the Ocarina of Time. Whenever you have a storyline that introduces time travel, you know you're in for a world of hurt when trying to keep a timeline straight. I'm not sure if it was in the manual, or the box, or in Nintendo Power, but OoT is supposed to take place even before LttP. Yes, that's right... a prequel to a prequel. I really have to ask now... WHY? Why obfuscate such an epic storyline by continually putting out games whose major releases are prequels (LttP, OoT) and then release minor sequels to those games (Link's Awakening, Majora's Mask respectively)? Why can't it be like the Mario games? Each game in that series is a direct sequel to the game before it. No prequel BS!

Well, the folks at GameTrailers tried their best to come up with their own Zelda timeline, trying to use the story elements as a guide while ignoring the "official" sequence as stated by various instruction manuals and boxes. They even go the Back to the Future Part II route by splitting the timeline to fit their concept. Note that this was postulated before the release of Twilight Princess, which I believe ruins their best laid plans...

4/18/2007 - EHS Winter Percussion, NES

If you are still a disbeliever of the retro trend, take a look at this video. It's a high-school percussion band playing the themes of some of the classics: Legend of Zelda, Double Dragon, and Super Mario Bros.

Sure, LoZ and SMB have had their remakes and emulations on the Wii and the GBA, but Double Dragon was perhaps in the second or third tier of those old NES games. If you want to play the NES version, you'd actually have to dust off the old system, or use an emulator.

It's debut was around 1988, around the time when these high-schoolers were still infants. So it's doubtful that they "grew up" playing Double Dragon. And yet, here it is, a central part of their presentation -- and the crowd recognizes it. How did they come about integrating the music of a good-but-not-great game in their collective minds? It's something that you'll hear me say again and again: RETRO IS IN!

Anyway, the kids here did a good job. Not just in their music interpretations, but their entire presentation. The costumes look really authentic and the enlarged covers of the 8-bit games are the icing on the cake!