Udvarnoky

Say whaaaaat?

While Majora's Mask is a direct sequel, it's very self-contained. The biggest kinship between MM and OoT is the fact that MM re-uses a ton of OoT's character assets with (in most cases) different names. The manual justifies this by calling Termina a "parallel world" or something.

Time certainly moves in the temples, but if you start a temple at the beginning of a slowed down cycle (as the game encourages), you have three real-life hours, which is very likely more than most have ever spent getting through a single Zelda temple without interruption. And of course the secondary purpose of the owl statue is to provide you the means for that interruption. The three day mechanic seems pretty evidently conceived for the unique story concept, as well as a clever way to give a lot of depth to a game that, by virtue of an existing engine and a lot of re-used character models, only had a year of development. It was never my impression that the countdown is a feature intended to stress the player, even if it inevitably had that effect. The accommodations mentioned above support that.

This doesn't make sense to me. The whole point of the game having an owl statue in front of each temple entrance is precisely so you can dedicate an entire (slowed down) cycle toward clearing the temple. You wouldn't be mixing in side quests or otherwise meandering while doing that, although I agree that things get very frustrating and stressful if you're trying to find all the stray fairies while completing the temple for the first time.

I've been out of the pre-order and even Day 1 purchase game for what feels like a lifetime, so maybe this is just the skewed perspective of the naïve and out-of-touch, but I feel like scalping situation for these limited Majora's Mask products is kind of...heightened?

Another thing about Majora's Mask is that roughly 50% of the game's content is sidequests. And it's real content, too, not just inane collection quests a la the gold skulltula scavenger hunt (although there's stuff along those lines too, of course). Because there's only four temples, there's 52 heart pieces to find (by far the record back then), and it's one of the few games where going for completion feels justified. It rewards curiosity and exploration, and punishes whatever the opposite of that is. I'm interested to see how much this new and improved Bombers' Notebook does to address this. I've brought this up a lot over the years, and here I go again: I think that the conceit of Link losing all of his "perishables" at the end of each cycle (rupees, arrows, etc.) actually restores a trademark of the series that got lost by Ocarina of Time: the need to actually go out and attack shit for resources. In Ocarina, you always seem to have just enough money, hearts, and ammunition at any given time. Majora's Mask brings back the need to slash/roll/bomb your way through the overworld to replenish. It doesn't require any significant amount of grinding, and there's a lot of shortcuts (the giant bird, the combination of your bank and the trading post), but it still feels like they fixed something that got broken. And to serve that fix, the overworld is teeming again in this game. Hyrule Field in Ocarina was pleasingly massive, but where the hell were all the enemies? During daylight you have like, occasionally some birds (?), and then there's those skeletons that come only by night. I don't know if it's because of the Expansion Pack or what, but Majora's Mask has, along with the righteous return of the Zelda theme song, more activity going on in Termina Field...you'll find dodongos out there. And that makes me happy.

Majora's Mask is my favorite Zelda, and I judge no one for giving up on it after a first attempt. It was by far the thing I wanted most for Christmas 2000, and I walked away from it after a few hours for what might have been a full year. It betrays one of the tenets of Zelda, which is the franchise's reliable accessibility. But man, once you force yourself over the hump.

The measures Grim took to abandon an interface were definitely imperfect, and I think the debate over whether it represents a fair trade-off will be perennial. Me, I kinda can't help but wince when I see a cursor over Grim, because getting rid of all that stuff was a big part of Tim's vision for the game, a vision that he courted controversy to achieve. It's why my face has always been ¬¬ at this assertion over the years that if only Grim was point 'n click, it would have been perfect. For better or for worse, the direct control, interface-freeness is tied to Grim's identity for me. Cycling through inventory definitely became a nuisance, although Tim did seem to deliberately make inventory items way more scarce starting with Full Throttle, removing item combination (and its headache-inducing potential) in the process. The Monkey Island series, in its irrepressible old-schoolness, reversed both of those streamlining efforts. Note that Monkey3 is based on Full Throttle's interface, and Monkey4 on Grim Fandango's. What are the two specific things Tim pointedly removed that Monkey Island revived when it poached those respective engines? Sentence line, and inventory combination.

Part of Tim's motivation for the direct control was to get rid of a conventional interface entirely. No cursor, no overlays.

Here's a guy talking over 30 minutes of gameplay footage.

Anyone who doesn't defiantly stick with the tank controls is Not A Real Fan™.

This is terrific.

Ah, I was going by Amazon's listing. On further research, I think it'll be Q2.

Wow, I had no idea. The thing comes out in December, for crying out loud!

Right, it's the pre-order that's exclusive. Grim Fandango has been high on GOG's customer wish list for a long time, plus GOG forked over the dough to license some LEC classics for their service a few months back. They need to resume that, incidentally.

So the latest http://nintendoeverything.com/zelda-majoras-mask-3d-revamps-the-bombers-notebook/'>info is that they will be revamping the Bombers' Notebook in some fashion. There's some varying physical bonuses depending on your territory. If you're in the U.S., you have the option of a Limited Edition that comes with a Skull Kid figurine, while UK folks can get a paperweight of the titular mask as a pre-order extra.

Perhaps the best approach is to make this a special edition in terms of absurd amounts of bonus content and do little to the game itself. How likely is it that the original voice files even exist anymore? You think they would have bothered preserving the stuff from the MONSTER.SOU days? Sound might be the best aspect to focus on.

Was it really the fact that it was built on top of SCUMM that was responsible for the Monkey Island compromises? I think the animations that were light on frames and the leftover pixels were more the product of a time/effort deficiency than a tech one.

All it communicated to me was that things are so early that Double Fine doesn't know what it's going to be yet.

I don't know, but I appreciate that they're erring on the side of pandering to purists. Having a version of the game exactly as it played in 1998 available is just good form, especially since this functions as a re-release.

If the rumors that Disney had begun work on a DOTT remake of their own a few years back are true, I'm assuming Double Fine's team would have access to the assets they had come up with. I have a morbid curiosity about what it was going to look like.

The fact that Double Fine is referring to this as a "Special Edition" as opposed to the "Remastered" moniker they attached to Grim is pointed, so I'm going to speculate that they're at least planning a Monkey Island style overhaul. Which is what's going to make the F5 key so important. I will previse that whatever Double Fine does to the art that we're all going to judge as a failed experiment is bound to be more interesting than Monkey Island, though I really thought that what the Temple of Doom slave kids out in Singapore came up with for LeChuck's Revenge wasn't bad. Fans will live longer if they start treating these new versions as alternatives rather than replacements, and if Double Fine is offering the classic mode toggle for a facelift as unobtrusive as Grim's, you have to think they'll preserve DOTT in the same way.

I felt the same way about the Monkey Island remakes. The music alone justifies their existence, as does their ancillary function as a re-release for two classic out-of-print games (thanks to classic mode). Except vertical scrolling got lost!

I think it was considered pretty gonzo at the time as well. The justification for pumping so much money into it from LucasArts' perspective was that it was meant to be their big investment in the 3D frontier. I think, for instance, that they were touting ILM's involvement in the press the same way they were doing it for Star Wars 1313 (and insinuating that it was this novel collaboration). "Loss leader" is not the appropriate term, since LEC was not expecting this to be a loss and in fact it made a modest profit long-term, but I would suspect that a significant amount of the R&D that went into making Grim was utilized in some form or another by a lot of subsequent games, adventure and otherwise.

It just makes it look all waxy and smooth at the expense of detail, like when a movie studio gets so overzealous with the noise reduction filters that they wind up putting out a Blu-ray for Patton that has no film grain.