Wednesday, March 7, 2012

New Playthrough: Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Today I decided on a whim that I’d play Twilight Princess again.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

I played through the game a while back when a friend of mine gave me his disc. I liked the game quite a bit, and my memories of it were positive enough that I thought it’d be worth playing through again at a later date. I guess now is as good a time as any, as my backlog isn’t getting any shorter and I’ve pretty much given up hope of ever catching up.

Last time I played it was not exactly an optimal experience. I played it on an old 13” TV I had in my bedroom. Since the TV didn’t have the proper hookups for me to connect it (it only had a coaxial input on the back) I had to run the cables from my GameCube to a VCR we had around, and from there to the TV.

The TV itself was in poor shape, and would randomly (as far as I could tell) switch between proper display and between an extremely dimmed image with some distortion in the colors and image. It seemed to prefer the lousy image to the good one. I was also playing late at night, when I was supposed to be asleep, so I had to turn the sound down really low to avoid waking my parents and calling down their wrath.

So, when I started today, I was pleased to see that on a proper display, with proper volume levels, the game looks and sounds much better than the average PS1 era game. Imagine that! I do feel that whoever was doing the graphics filters leaned way too heavily on the “bloom” controls, but other than that it’s pretty nice.

A key? What should I do with this?

Once I actually got into playing the game, however, I was disappointed by the way the game starts. See, I only got somewhere between an hour and two in today, and I still don’t have a proper sword, and I spent a large portion of the time fumbling around with some non-puzzles trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do next. I can’t think of anything that aggravates me more in a single player game than the “WTF am I supposed to do now?” feeling.

I eventually managed to figure out who I needed to talk to and which path I needed to walk down to trigger the story progression. Maybe I’m spoiled by newer games, but I feel like I shouldn’t have to go through all this hogwash in order to get my game on. Heck, it’s a Zelda game. People remember those for their clever dungeons and great bosses, not necessarily for their nuanced interactions with children who want you to show them your slingshot.

Have you ever played a game that you had fond memories of and found that it wasn’t quite what you remembered?

2 comments:

  1. All I remember is being stuck in the snow temple. You have to dig up a key or something as the wolf and it took me forever to find it.

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  2. I had the same problem. By that point, it had been so long since I had used the wolf's sensing ability that I had completely forgotten that it even existed. If I had just used it, I would have been right out if there, but it took me a couple hours of walking around in frustration before I remembered it was there.

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