Sunday, April 14, 2013

Well, Shit. Thanks, Nintendo

I'm currently on the second game of the anthology game Legend of Zelda Collector's Disk. I decided I didn't need to play Zelda II or Ocarina of Time this time around, but I'd do a replay of the original Legend of Zelda and try to beat Majora's Mask for the first time.

Now, it needs to be said that none of these four games are their original versions. They are emulated versions ported over to a Gamecube disc, which I'm now playing through a Wii.

Now I come to find that Majora's Mask has a well known and well documented bug: it freezes without warning. It doesn't happen all the time. I played for some 4 hours, maybe more, and it never happened. Until yesterday.

The very real problem comes from the nature of this particular Zelda and its save system. On any other Zelda, I'd say, "No big deal, I just save all the time and if it freezes, my ass is covered." That is not the case in Majora's Mask. This is a lot like a game version of Groundhog Day. You have three days to finish a quest, but you can always go back to the first day (I got you babe!) You start talking to people and trying to help them, and eventually you learn where and when they will be so that you can help them (What do you say? I've saved you a hundred times and you've never thanked me!) The difference is that when you time travel you get to keep many (not all) of the items you collected. You're basically on a quest that would take considerably longer than three days. You do a bit of it there, go back to the first day, another bit there, go back to the first day, and so on and so firth.

Now, what does this all have to do with why I can't save?  Majora's Mask's save system is different. Here you only have two choices: You can either save and go back to the first day (of a three day quest) and lose the progress of your current objective, whatever bit of the quest you were on before you traveled back to the first day... or you can hit these owl statues that work a lot like a bookmark, saving your progress up to that point, but if you use an owl statue you have to save and quit right then and there.

All this because Nintendo decided to release a port of the game that wasn't really up to snuff. I could conceivably download it from the Wii Shop Channel for ten bucks, but I was really looking forward to not spending any more money on this game.

I'll keep on trucking. It's not the end of the world. It wouldn't be the first time I played a buggy Zelda: I once completed the original Zelda on an NES cartridge that had a dead backup battery, so I had to leave my NES on until I finished it.

I'll make it work. The game is weird, but still enjoyable.

4 comments:

  1. No sabía del sistema de juego de este zelda... Ahora si se me antoja jugarlo.

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  2. Tienes que hablar con gente, ver sus problemas, encontrar una solucion, acordarte de donde y cuando hablaste con ellos y ayudarlos. Hay una señora que la asaltan, pero sólo a la media noche de la primera noche en el parquesito de los niños. El juego te da un cuaderno que funciona como una linea de tiempo y va anotando a todos con los que hablas.

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  3. This is actually my favorite zelda game it is really bizarre but I enjoyed it very much and riding epona as a kid is cool also

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  4. And if you ever decide to replay ocarina of time you need to do it on a 3DS the game is enhanced not only graphics wise but also in the gameplay thanks to the second screen it makes it so much easier to switch items and look at the map and when you get out your ocarina all of the songs appear on the second screen so if you don't quite remember a song it will show it to you as you play it.

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