I bought a Nintendo 64 the day it came out, and I’ve been a huge fan ever since. The N64 is my favorite console ever. It had amazing sound and video and, as always, Nintendo made some incredibly fun games for it. The jump from the Super Nintendo to the Nintendo 64 is probably the biggest upgrade of all time. Going from a 2D 10MHz system to a 3D 93.75 MHz system with CD-quality voices blew me away. When you’ve been used to Super Mario World, Super Mario 64 is unbelievable. Suddenly there were huge immersive 3D worlds to explore, and characters who actually spoke.
For a while, every new game was the best game ever. First it was Super Mario 64, then Wave Race 64, then Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (the first level, at least), then Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, then Star Fox 64. Fighting the Battle of Hoth, or shooting velociraptors that writhed about as they died were experiences that no one had dared to dream of in the previous console generation. The world of gaming had changed.
Then, perhaps the most anticipated game ever came along. It was about 10 years ago that I pre-ordered The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It had a massive 256 megabit cartridge, four times larger than Super Mario 64. It promised a new level of realism, with a realistic transition from day into night. There was the glorious sunset, casting shadows on everything. The ability to realistically cast light and shadows was something new. We take it for granted today, but PC graphics cards didn’t have dedicated hardware for lighting effects until the GeForce 256 came along.
The graphics are beautiful, with shimmering walls and beautifully designed dungeons to explore. You get to ride a horse at some point, which is just incredible! I couldn’t wait to ride Epona.
Zelda OoT featured the most realistic physics of any game created to that point. I’m still amazed by the attention to detail. When Link is running on ice and suddenly stops, he subtly, visibly adjusts his balance as he runs out of momentum. If you haven’t lived in a part of the world that has ice in the winter, it would never even occur to you that people need to do that. I’ve lived in such a place all my life, and I still wouldn’t have thought of it. Someone actually took the time to write code for that. There were rumors that the game might need a 384 or 512 megabit cartridge, so it’s hard to believe that someone approved the storage expenditure to include an effect that most people wouldn’t notice, and absolutely no one would have noticed its absence. The programmers must have been competing to get their ideas included within the 256 megabit budget they were given.
In the world of gaming, we expect small evolutions over time, not revolutions. The Intellivision doubled the number of simultaneous sprites that the Atari 2600 could display, and the Colecovision doubled that, but the games still look pretty much the same. The Super Nintendo looked a bit better than the Nintendo and added layers, but they both mostly played 2D games. Now compare The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, in all its 2D 16-bit glory, to what you see in Ocarina of Time, a 3D game for a 64-bit console. I never expected a leap forward like this. The N64 was miles ahead of the Super Nintendo, and the transition to a 3D world like this is nothing short of a revolution.
Basically, everything from here on is covered by a spoiler warning. Why a spoiler warning for a 10 year old game? Because if you haven’t played this game yet, you have to. It will blow… you… away. (more…)