Speaking of Zelda games, this weekend I’ve also been watching my flatmate playing Majora’s Mask (GameCube). I can’t believe I never got round to buying this when it came out on the N64, not to mention feeling a little depressed at being part of the reason more concept games like this don’t get made.
Majora’s Mask opens with amiable protagonist Link tragically metamorphosed into a Deku Scrub (a sort of stubby-legged forest creature with wooden troll features) by a pesky shamen called the Skull Kid. It later transpires that Link only has 3 days to save the town from a looming and fatal threat, also of the Skull Kid’s making.
But unlike pretty much every other Zelda game to date, this is played out Groundhog Day-style, with Link slowly unravelling the mystery by repeatedly going back in time until all the pieces of the puzzle have been chronologically set in place. Characters aren’t static, they move about from location to location. You get a very strange sensation in-game knowing that in a few minutes’ time a mugger will come steaming round a corner and make off with an old lady’s handbag, and it’s all the more gratifying when you can prevent the crime from occurring. This cyclic narrative lends much more of a sense of time and space and makes the story much more believable, in the same way Pulp Fction or 24 feel so well-rounded because we see the before and after and can make sense of why things are happening.
Anyway, inventiveness like this deserves rewarding, so if you haven’t got it I’d implore you to get onto Virtual Console and see what you’ve been missing out on. /plug
I’ve also had a bit of a stab at the Spark editor, released in pre-alpha state to pre-orderers of Natural Selection 2 (the sequel to my all-time favourite multiplayer game, second only to Counter-Strike). I’m struggling to unlearn the arcane techniques of interfacing with the Hammer editor, though, so it will probably be some time before I have anything to show for my efforts.
Welcome to another edition of Currently Hurling, our semi-regular look at what games we’ve been playing here at Splash Damage and what we’re looking forward to. 2009 is slowly but surely coming to a close but it’s going out in style with a huge crop of awesome games across all platforms. With Assassin’s Creed 2 now out there, we get to enjoy a few weeks of quiet before things heat up again in January. This works out as it’ll actually give us time to actually spend time with all the great games that appeared in the past few weeks.
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