Fun Facts

I are a little bored, so I figured I'd post some things I find interesting.

- Grand Theft Auto 3 = first sandbox game? Well....not exactly. Developer DMA Design released a game called Body Harvest for the Nintendo 64 in October of 1998. This game had a third-person view, an open world enviroment, updating objectives/missions which you could choose to ignore, and vehicles that allowed for faster travel across the game world. Sounds very much like a sandbox game to me. By the way, in case you didn't know already, DMA Design was bought out and renamed...Rockstar North.

- The home console market nearly died in 1983. Sometimes called "the North American video game crash", sales of games took a nose dive straight into oblivion. This was mostly due to oversaturration. There were over 10 home consoles with an actively increasing library of games. Amoung these were the Atari 2600, the Atari 5200, the Bally Astrocade, the Coleco Vision, the Coleco Gemini, the Emerson Arcadia 2001, the Fairchild Channel F System II, Magnavox Odyessy, Mattel Intellivision, the Vectrex, and others. Each one of these had its own library of games, with a lot of third party support. Atari in particular had an interesting role in this. Despite the release of the 5200, and the announcment of the 7800, the 2600 still regined supreme. However, thanks to some HORRIBLE yet high-profile games (aka E.T. and the Pac-man port), its reputation began to decline. Unfortunately, nothing had enough behind it to take its place as king, and so the gamers of the time scattered to different consoles, dividing up the industry's potential profits too much for anyone to stay afloat for long. And all seemed lost.....until 1985...and a little console...called the Nintendo Entertainment System. So even if you don't like their games or their consoles, we all owe a debt of gratitude to Nintendo, the company that caused gaming to rise from the ashes, and be born anew.

- The first console to feature an analog stick is often said to be the N64....but this is not the case. The first system to feature an "analog joystick" was the Vectrex, released in 1982. Yes, that far back. The Vectrex was different from other consoles of the day because unlike other home consoles which connected to televsions and rendered "raster graphics", the Vectrex came with a vector monitor which displayed "vector graphics", which many arcade machines of the day used. Since the Vectrex was being marketed as a home arcade machine, it seemed only fitting that it have a analog joystick, just like arcade machines. Unfortunately, this did not save from the before mentioned crash of 1983. Production of the Vectrex halted in 1984, and analog sticks on home consoles didn't take off until...you guessed it, the Nintendo 64.

Now that you're more educated on gaming lore, it's Halolz Day!

Tis true. Nothing can save you from the sniper, including the face of your friend.

Retro Review: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

So now, I will do the first of what will hopefully be many reviews, some retro, some current.



The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was released in 1998, a glorious year in gaming history. (Metal Gear Solid and Half-Life came out the same year) It was the fifth game in the already grand series of games. All Zelda games previous had been 2-D, and this was the jump to the third dimension. So, how did it go?



FANTASTICALLY. Ocarina of Time boldly took adventure gaming into 3-D. It took the average gamer several hours to complete, having 8 main dungeons (one of which you actually had to go through twice) and the final dungeon to battle through. In 1998, that was a biiiig adventure game. Not only that, but the graphics were nearly the finest that the N64 in 1998 had to offer. The storyline was an epic one, involving a king of thieves, civilizations in crisis, a traitor to the evil king who aids you, and of course, Princess Zelda, in danger as usual.

Where OoT really knocked it out of the park was its gameplay. It heralded amazing features that are now standards of the industry. Lock-on strafing, automatic jumping, and context senstive buttons are amoung its achievements.

OoT was released to huge critical acclaim. Despite being released on November 21, only 39 days before the end of the year, it STILL became the best-selling game of the year, selling 2.5 million copies before 1999. Two websites, GameRankings.com and Metacritic.com, which both compile separate reviews for games to give them an overall rating, give OoT shining reviews. On both, OoT is the top reviewed game of all time, having a 97.6% on GameRankings, and a 99 out of 100 on Metacritic. Nearly every gaming publication around in 1998 gave the game a perfect score. Oddly enough, one of the few (maybe only) publications that was around at the time to give the game an imperfect score was none other than Nintendo Power. It gave the game a 9.5 out of 10.

Personally, this is probably my all-time favorite game. I've played it all the way through at least 7 times that I can think of. It just doesn't get old. To quote Tony Mott, editor-in-chief of Edge Magazine, "Ocarina of Time's position at the top slot in Edge's 100 Best Video Games shows that great game design does not age." Amen to that. This game will forever have a special place in my heart, and currently stands as the pinnacle of gaming. So here's to Ocarina of Time!

5 out of 5