The Burnzo Diaries: Nintendo 64

Showing posts with label Nintendo 64. Show all posts

Friday, July 28, 2023

PROXOS IN THE PLEX: A Goldeneye 007 N64 Retrospective

I am not sure I would have even bought a Nintendo 64 had it not been for the game Goldeneye 007, a.k.a. “Bond.”

My first introduction to RareWare’s Goldeneye 007 a.k.a. “Bond”—I will henceforth refer to this game as “Bond” and nothing else—was at my friend Adrian’s house in 1997. He played a mission for me and I was completely blown away. At the time, the 3D graphics were better than anything I had ever seen before. Up until that point, the best sprites (fancy word for graphics) I had ever seen were in the game Donkey Kong Country for the Super Nintendo (also uncoincidentally made by Rare). What I saw in Bond was some next level shit.

I don’t remember whether I played multiplayer Bond with Adrian or whether he simply showed me a mission or two. I think at that point the game was so new to me that I either played it and was terrible at the game or may have simply preferred to watch Adrian play instead. However, when I left Adrian’s house that night, I had made a decision in my mind and that decision was that I had to purchase a Nintendo 64 as soon as I possibly could.

In the early winter of 1998, I was at a Walmart and I saw that they had a Nintendo 64 on sale for about $100 or maybe it was a tad more than $100 at that point. It’s possible it was even $150, but I think I remember it being around $100. If my memory is correct, I wasn’t working at my first job (CVS Pharmacy) at this point, but I did have a lot of money saved from the paper route I had since I was in the fifth grade (where my fellow Patriot Ledger paper boys at? Holla at ya boy!). I had the $100-$150 to spend on the Nintendo 64. I did discuss the purchase with my parents beforehand, but they pretty much said it was my money and I could do what I wanted with it. Thus, Nintendo 64 officially became the first video game console that I bought with my own hard-earned money. Up until that point, every video game system of mine had usually been a Christmas gift, although I think the original 8-bit Nintendo that my family got in 1987 or 1988 was not a Christmas gift. I think my brother may have paid for that with his own paper route money, but I’m not sure. All I know is that it wasn’t a Christmas gift because we got it in the middle of the summer. And I definitely didn’t pay for it myself because I was, like, five or six years old.

Indeed, the Nintendo 64 was going to be the very first game console that I could call my own. Of course, I would share it with anyone who wanted to play, but it felt good knowing that this video game system was something I bought myself and I owned myself.

The Nintendo 64 box

One unfortunate thing about getting the Nintendo 64 for such a bargain price was that no games came with the system. But I still had a good amount of paper route money to throw around, so I immediately bought two games that I knew I wanted from the get-go. One of those games was Mario Kart 64, and of course the second game was Bond. And those two games were all you really needed anyway. If you had those two games it would take a very, very long time to get sick of playing them. In fact, I would argue that the only other three games worth getting for Nintendo 64 were Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Super Mario Bros. 64, and Perfect Dark, the latter of which wasn’t released until the year 2000 by Rare and was an unofficial sequel to—that’s right—Bond. Although there were a couple other good games that came out here and there, I’m pretty sure you were good if you had the five games that I mentioned above, but you were even good for a while if you just had Mario Kart 64 and Bond.

Actually, screw it, all you really needed was Bond. Bond was a game that was so good that you didn’t need any other games to keep you entertained.

The box art for Goldeneye 007, aka "Bond"

In fact, Bond was such a good game that it may come as a surprise to learn that the first-person shooter actually came from very humble beginnings. Made by an extremely inexperienced team of about nine or ten people in a farmhouse in the middle of England’s countryside, Nintendo never expected Bond to be the blockbuster game it turned out to be.[1] In fact, Bond was originally going to be a game for the Super Nintendo and designed as a “rail shooter,” much like Virtua Cop and Star Fox, as opposed to the free-roaming first-person shooter game it ended up being.[2] Rare, however, had enough freedom to experiment and be as creative as they wanted to be, mainly because Nintendo never expected all that much from them. Had they not had this kind of creative freedom, Rare probably never would have ended up making the masterpiece they ended up making. To say Bond was an unexpected success would likely be an understatement. It was one of the best games ever made that NOBODY saw coming.

I remember playing the first mission in Bond as though it were yesterday: THE DAM. You start out with the silent PP7, kill a few soldiers as stealthily as possible, trying your hardest for the headshot, and then you make your way up the stairs of a patrol tower and get the weapon that blew everyone’s mind upon first playing the game: The Sniper Rifle.

Oh man. Think about how fun it was getting that first kill with the sniper rifle up on the patrol tower there. You zoom in as far as you can, or maybe not all the way because if you’re zoomed in all the way, your breathing actually makes it a little difficult to aim. You go for the head. And, if you’re a skilled marksman, you take the Soviet soldier out in one shot.

It’s only a few minutes into the game at this point, but this is basically when most people decided that they were in love with Bond. The rest of the mission is great, but it’s definitely that first experience with the sniper rifle that hooks everyone in.

Using the sniper rifle in the Dam mission

The next mission after the Dam, the Facility, was always awesome, mainly because of the very first part of it when you’re crawling through a vent, shoot a soldier who is on the john and then you drop through the ceiling into a stall that is in the middle of a large restroom. Then you have some fun opening and closing the bathroom stalls to see if any Soviet soldiers are hiding in there. There is something that feels so authentic about this opening sequence to the Facility mission. The environment feels very “real” and it’s no surprise to learn that the game’s levels were designed by an actual architect named Karl Hilton. In fact, Hilton had more architectural experience than he did video game designing experience.[3]

The first kill from the vent in the Facility mission

Another favorite mission of mine came four or five missions into the game: the Frigate. This was a hostage-saving mission and, admittedly, this was one of those missions that you only beat properly once or twice or at least enough times to advance in the game. Every other time you played this mission you basically picked up not just one phantom gun but the double-phantom (i.e. one gun in each hand) and then you went around the level shooting everything in sight (hostages included) and blew up every computer in sight as well. In short, this was a go-to mission of mine whenever I needed to blow off some stress. Play the Frigate. Get the double-phantom. Destroy everything. Ahhhhh ... goodbye stress. Serenity now.

Double-phantoms in the Frigate mission

Other favorite missions of mine included the train (probably my third favorite after the Facility and the Frigate), the Archives, the Bunker and sometimes the Silo or the Surface were fun to play as well.

My least favorite missions, only because they usually gave me anxiety, were Statue and the Jungle. Oh, and also the Control Room because that mission was extremely difficult, especially if you played it on 00 Agent mode. Come to think of it, I never beat that mission on 00 Agent mode. Never even came close. It’s possible I never even beat it on Special Agent mode, now that I think of it. Damn drone guns got me every time.

Speaking of modes, there were three different levels of difficulty that you could play missions on. The first level was Agent, the second level was Special Agent, and the third and most difficult level was 00 Agent. Each level of difficulty required you to achieve different mission objectives within the mission; obviously, the more difficult the mode (like Special Agent or 00 Agent), the more mission objectives there were to accomplish. I think the Control Room mission is known to be the most difficult level to beat on 00 Agent, second only to the Aztec level, which is one of the secret levels that opens up once you beat all missions on Secret Agent.

This is an excellent playthrough of all the missions on 00 Agent mode.

Like I said before, I never beat the Control Room mission on 00 Agent, nor did I ever beat the Aztec mission. However, I remember watching my friend Marc trying to beat both the Control Room level and especially the Aztec level on 00 Agent. The Aztec was so difficult that you literally couldn’t afford to take more than a couple hits of damage—especially if you had just started the mission—without needing to start over again. The second Marc got hit by a bullet near or around the beginning of the mission, he would restart the mission because he knew it wasn’t worth the time trying to beat it at that point. He had to accomplish the mission in basically a flawless way. I think it honestly took him a zillion tries before he actually beat Aztec. Once that mission was out of the way, though, the subsequent Egyptian mission was easier and I think he beat that one rather quickly.

The Aztec mission

So, yes, I was never all that great at doing the missions in Bond. I especially wasn’t as good as Marc was at the missions. He beat the game completely. I don’t even think I beat all the missions on Special Agent.

However, when it came to multiplayer mode, I was definitely a force to be reckoned with.

Oh yes, multiplayer mode. A mode in the game that almost didn’t exist to begin with. Can you believe that multiplayer was the very last thing the game designers added to the game and it was something Nintendo didn’t even want at first?[4] [5] In fact, multiplayer mode wasn’t even added to Bond until April of 1997, four months before the game was released in August 1997. If they’d had the time, the Bond designers would have spent more effort on the character animations in this mode. For example, they would have altered the animation we see when a character crouches on their knees and goofily slides around on the floor. This animation is cheesy, indeed, and they would have animated this crouching move into something more realistic, but they simply didn’t have the time. Rare had already spent about three years on the game and 2 million dollars or so. Nintendo said it was time to stop development and release the SOB.[6]

Multiplayer mode. Pistols in the Temple.

It is certainly ironic, however, that multiplayer mode, perhaps the funnest and most addictive part of the game, was something that was only added to Bond at the last minute. In fact, it was actually developed in secret by one of the designers just IN CASE Nintendo was interested in having it in the game.[7] I guess once they witnessed the mode firsthand, Nintendo realized this was something the game really needed to have as a feature.

As for my friends and I, we were about as addicted to multiplayer mode as everyone else was. After playing it for hours upon hours, usually in Marc’s finished basement on his late-1980s-style television (you know, the ones that were built into a wooden box), my friends and I reached a point in multiplayer mode where we became extremely good. We were elite. And we were incredibly competitive with one another.

Although there are several different scenarios you can play in multiplayer mode, like Man with the Golden Gun (where you find a golden gun within the level that enables you to get one-shot kills), License to Kill (one shot from any weapon and you’re dead), You Only Live Twice (where you only get two lives and then you get eliminated from the game) or the Living Daylights (which is basically capture the flag), my friends and I usually did either the ‘Normal’ scenario or License to Kill.

‘Normal’ mode was when you picked a weapon or group of weapons and then hunted each other down, killing your opponent once their energy bar and body armor ran out. There were several weapons to choose from and several levels to choose from, but there were only about three or four weapon scenarios that my friends and I would play with and only four or five levels that we would choose from: the Complex (known to my friends as ‘the Plex’), the Facility (known to my friends as ‘the Faculty’), the Archives (known to my friends as ‘the Chives’), the Basement (known to my friends as ‘the baaaaaaase-ment’ said like Madam Ruby in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure [that goes without saying, right?]), the Stack, sometimes the Temple, occasionally the Bunker and very rarely the Caves. The other levels, like Library, Water Caverns and the Egyptian, were garbage in our eyes.

We normally began our “Bond session” with something like proximity mines in the Complex, which we would usually call “proxos in the plex” for short. There is one area of this level where the proximity mines are located, which we would refer to as “the fort,” and usually whoever gets in this area first is able to dominate the game because you basically booby trap every pathway that leads up to this fort with proximity mines and then wait for all of your opponents to get blown to bits. If you knew that somebody got to this area first, the best thing to do would be to try and take them out of there with the badass AR33 Assault Rifle as quickly as possible before they got situated and booby trapped every surrounding area with the mines. If you failed to do that, you could also try getting mines in their second location on the opposite side of the level, throwing them into the fort from far away, eventually all the mines would explode from being in too close proximity with one another and the fort would consequently become one big fire ball. Once the flames cleared, not to mention the stench of roasted flesh, you could go up there and take the fort over for yourself.

A view of "the fort" from below

The other good level to use proximity mines in was the Facility. Much like the fort in the Complex, the key to succeeding in this level would be to situate yourself in the bathroom (one of the two areas in the level where the proxos are located) and then throw mines everywhere outside of the bathroom, and wait for everybody to get blown to bits.

Now, if you were really savvy with your proxos, you would rig the body armor, ammo boxes and even weapons with the mines, usually in ways that were the least obvious so as to trick your fellow opponents. You would also rig the areas in a level where players commonly “spawned,” meaning the areas in the level where players are born again after they die. If you rigged the right places, you could kill your opponent within seconds of their spawning.

Other popular weapon/level scenarios were as follows:

Rocket launchers in the Stack. I think this was one of my favorite scenarios because I was good at shooting a rocket launcher from long distances and successfully hitting my target. I also liked shooting people from below the catwalks. Or, from the next room over, you could sometimes see somebody’s legs or even feet in the very long distance, you could shoot a rocket that way and take them out.

Grenade Launchers in the Temple. I’m not sure if it’s because the Temple has those large open spaces, but grenade launchers worked very well in this level. The fun thing about the grenade launchers was using your geometry skills and banking the grenades off of walls, almost like you’re shooting pool, banking your cue ball shots in such a strategic way so that they hit one or two sides of the pool table first before hitting your target.

Power Weapons in the wherever. Power weapons basically worked in any and all levels. The RC-P90 was the weapon everybody wanted, but if you were good with the shotgun, you could take your enemy out with just a few shots or sometimes even two shots if you aimed right for the cabeza.

Now, all of the scenarios I’ve mentioned above were good for a lot of fun times. But, to be frank, hours upon hours could be spent playing one particular scenario and that scenario only:

That scenario would be License to Kill with pistols.

This was, I think, by far the most fun scenario and I think this was the scenario that separated the men from the boys. There was a level of skill and slickness that was necessary to be good at License to Kill (i.e. one shot and you’re dead) and my friends and I got REALLY good at ‘License’ and I mean REALLY good.

You have to know how to lean around corners, how to strafe (with the N64’s yellow arrow buttons), how to quickly duck and you even have to learn how to crawl and/or slap if you find yourself in tight quarters and in a bind. In fact, sometimes it was actually easier using your slapper as opposed to a pistol. Using your slapper would often catch your opponent off guard … unless, of course, they already knew your habits and, in my case, my friends knew each other’s habits before long. In fact, I was known to do a lot of cheap shots with slapping and/or crouching while slapping, so they knew to expect such cheap shots from me. Let’s just say I was known to get the “Most Dishonorable” award more often than anyone else. I would occasionally get the “marksmanship” award as well (especially when playing Rockets in the Stack), so it’s not like I was a complete coward. I mean, if I were a total bitch, I would have chosen Oddjob for a character every time I played, which I never did. Oddjob was the most unfair character due to his short height that made him difficult to shoot. No, instead, I usually chose the female Moonraker Elite, whom my friends and I nicknamed “Emma.” Okay, she was on the short side as well, but nothing even close to the height of Oddjob!

Oddjob was so short!

It was difficult to shoot Oddjob due to his height

But, yes, playing in License to Kill mode took a tremendous amount of skill, no doubt about that. Perhaps the most skilled License to Kill player of all, however, was the one who knew how to use the Cougar revolver in a manner so that they pulled the trigger just a moment before they actually had their intended target in their sights. This was done because the Cougar was so slow in shooting that your target would be out of your crosshairs by the time the shot actually got off. Cougars also shot through doors so that could certainly come in handy. If you were behind a door or perhaps hiding in a bathroom stall (think Facility) and your opponent had a Cougar, you knew you needed to get the hell out of there. The door was not going to provide you sufficient protection from the Cougar bullet.

The best levels to do License to Kill in were the Basement, the Facility, the Archives (although the game only allowed you to play multiplayer in the Archives if you had three players or less; four players were apparently too much RAM for the Archives, I guess), and sometimes the Bunker or the Complex were good for ‘License’ as well.

The worst level for License to Kill and perhaps the worst overall level was the Library, which was basically a combination of the Basement and Stack. My friends and I never played the Library. In fact, whenever we set the level to “random,” which meant the computer chose a random level for you, once we saw that the ramp that led down to the basement was open and not closed, this meant we were dealing with the Library and we would immediately quit. What was wrong with the Library? It was too big of a level and it took too long to find people. Closer quarters was always better, like what you got in the Complex, the Facility or the Archives. The latter level, the Archives, was a two-floor level, but it was still small enough to be enjoyable.

This is a great multiplayer Bond session I found on YouTube.

Other honorable mentions as far as scenarios go:

Lasers (i.e. Moonrakers) in the Temple.

Throwing knives in the wherever (Basement and Facility worked well for throwing knives).

Grenade Launchers in the Archives, Basement and the Complex.

Rocket Launchers in the basement could be fun as well.

Remote mines in the wherever. These can be fun because, if you press the A and B buttons together on the N64 controller, you can detonate the mines right away, so you can literally throw the mines at your enemy and detonate without taking the time to take out your detonator watch. There are also good guns that come along with the remote mines scenario, including the AR33 Assault Rifle and the ZMG, which was basically an Uzi.

What is the worst weapon for multiplayer?

I would probably say sniper rifles and maybe timed mines. A close third is grenades but those can be fun to use if you time the release right (you take the grenade’s pin out by holding the N64 controller’s trigger [i.e. ‘Z button’] and then release the button when you want to throw it but make sure you don’t throw it too late or you’ll blow yourself up). There are also some cool guns that come along with the grenades scenario, like the Dostovei (probably my favorite of the pistols) and the Soviet. Ok, there is the Klobb as well, but who out there actually likes the Klobb? I used to call it the pebble-shooter because it literally felt so weak you might as well be shooting small pebbles at your enemies.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned phantom gun—you know, the one I used to wreak havoc in the Frigate mission—is nowhere to be found in multiplayer mode. I don’t know this for sure, but I’m assuming that this may have had something to do with the fact that they added the multiplayer mode to Bond so late into the production process. They probably didn’t have enough time or maybe not enough memory to have the Phantom in multiplayer mode.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that multiplayer mode also came with a whole slew of options, many of which enabled players to reach even greater heights in terms of their skill level. If you really wanted to be multiplayer elitists, you could choose to turn auto-aiming off (with auto-aiming, your gun automatically aims at an opponent when they’re reasonably close to your line of fire). You could turn sights off as well so you had to aim using your eyes with no help from crosshairs. Additionally, lowering everyone’s health in multiplayer was sometimes fun to do, maybe so that you had a half or even a quarter of a normal health bar.

Along with all these different options, there were “cheats” as well. These game cheats were obtained by doing missions in the game on either Agent, Secret Agent or 00 Agent. For example, one cheat enabled you to turn radar off in multiplayer, which meant the only way you could know where your enemies were was if you peaked at their screen. Some people, however, would take things a step further and tape carboard dividers onto their TV, basically creating small cubicles for each player, just so nobody could look at each other’s screen. Now that we have more updated versions of Bond on Xbox and the Wii, online play makes it impossible for players to peak at their opponents’ screens. Add this on top of no-radar mode, not to mention ‘no sights’ and ‘auto-aiming off’, and the men of Bond are definitely separated from the boys.

The cardboard approach

As for my friends, I honestly don’t think we played no-radar mode all that often; we usually used radars. Also, I’m pretty sure we left auto-aim on most of the time and left sights on as well. So maybe we weren’t as elite as we thought we were.

In addition to no radar, there were other fun cheats in the game as well. DK Mode (obtained when beating the Runway mission on Agent) was one of the funnest cheats that made every character’s head the size of beach balls. Paintball mode (obtained when beating the Dam mission on Secret Agent) was another fun cheat where your gun essentially turned into a paintball gun; instead of leaving bullet holes if you were shooting a wall or blood if you were shooting a person, colorful paint stains would be left behind instead. Other cool cheats were Invisibility (obtained when you beat Archives on 00 Agent), Tiny Bond (when you beat Surface on 00 Agent), unlimited ammo (when you beat Control Room on Secret Agent) and all guns (when you beat Egyptian on 00 Agent).

Natalya in DK Mode

Add all these cheats onto another slew of options within Mission mode, like playing in cinematic 16:9 ratio screen mode, adjusting the volume of the sound FX and the music separately (for example, you could play missions with only sound FX, no music), not to mention having a choice of four different control styles to choose from (Honey, Solitaire, Kissy and Goodnight) and what you realize is that Bond was probably more jam-packed with cool options and cheats than you ever remember it having. Indeed, Bond was an incredibly dense game with so many things to do and you can tell the game designers put a whole-hearted effort into the making of it. For a movie-based game (games based on movies were usually flops),[8] Rare was NOT messing around when they were making this game. Were they aware that they were making perhaps one of the best video games of all time?

Probably not.

But I have to think that, at many points during the course of the game’s production, the main nine or ten designers responsible for making Bond likely realized they were making something incredibly special.

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Did you enjoy this article? If so, you'll love my new podcast episode "A Nod to the Nintendo 64." Listen on Spotify below or search for THE BURNZO CAST on Apple podcasts:

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MATT BURNS is the author of several books, including his bestselling Kindle singles I Used to be a Gamer and I Dream of Dream Machine. He’s also written several novels, including his ‘punk novel’ Supermarket Zombies! as well as Weird Monster, Johnny Cruise and The Woman and the Dragon. Check out these books (and many more) on his Amazon author page HERE.

Other trending articles by Matt Burns that may be of interest to you:

100 DAYS of ZELDA: Revisiting Ocarina of Time

I USED TO BE A GAMER: The 8-bit Nintendo Years

I Dream of Dream Machine (a memoir of the local video arcade)

Video Store Memories

Some Wicked Good Times: A Love Letter to Newbury Comics

Skateboarding in the 1990s

Revisiting the Blair Witch Project

WAAF Goes Off the Air

NEVER FORGET the Fun-O-Rama (a traveling carnival memoir)

A Love Letter to the Emerald Square Mall (about the death of the shopping mall age)

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeere’s Charlie (a story about Burns’ recurring nightmares featuring Charlie Chaplin)

The Strange, Surreal Moment of Being Called a DILF Inside a Panera Bread Restaurant on a Wednesday Afternoon

Weird Times en la Weirdioteca

RIP PowerBook G3

Getting Your Screenplay Done

Making Your Good Writing Great

Writing the Trilogy

Writing the Sequel

No-No, Learn to Love the Rejection: Some Sage Advice for Writers in Search of an Agent or Publisher

The Story Behind Supermarket Zombies!

The Story Behind The Woman and the Dragon

NOTES:

[1] Ehrenworth, Mikey. “The Retrograde Podcast.” The Complete History of Goldeneye 007 (feat. Alyse Knorr), Episode #23, iTunes, 25 July 2023.

[2] “The Making of GoldenEye 007 (N64) | Documentary.” YouTube, uploaded by onaretrotip, 15 May 2021, https://youtu.be/tokaUo_m39M.

[3] YouTube, “The Making of GoldenEye 007.”

[4] “The Making Of The N64 Classic Goldeneye | A 90s Gaming Masterpiece.” YouTube, uploaded by Wrestling With Gaming, 26 September 2020, https://youtu.be/ZhCKs7DDePM.

[5] Riendeau, Danielle. “Multiplayer wasn’t planned in ‘Goldeneye’, and Other things I Didn’t Know.” Vice, 17 July 2018, https://www.vice.com/en/article/mb4eyy/goldeneye-n64-multiplayer-unplanned.

[6] YouTube, “The Making Of The N64 Classic Goldeneye.”

[7] Riendeau, “Multiplayer wasn’t planned.”

[8] YouTube, “The Making Of The N64 Classic Goldeneye.”

Friday, May 7, 2021

100 DAYS OF ZELDA: Revisiting Ocarina of Time

HEY……….LISTEN!

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, also known as Zelda 64, is considered to be one of the best video games ever made. I realize a lot of gamer nerds out there would have issues with such a statement and point out all the game’s flaws, but, for its time (and despite its flaws), Ocarina of Time is an absolute masterpiece.

I first played Ocarina of Time waaaaaaay back in late-1998 when I was a junior in high school. This super-ambitious 3D Zelda game had only been released for a couple of months before Santa Claus gifted me with the game for Christmas. Now, this, of course, was the original version for Nintendo 64. The game was later remade (and fine-tuned) in 2011 for the Nintendo 3DS. I will talk about this latter version in a moment, but first I’d like to discuss the Nintendo 64 version, if you don’t mind…but…wait, I don’t care if you don’t mind. I mean, no offense, but this is MY blog. So I’m going to talk about it whether you like it or not. I say that with respect, by the way.

Anyway, I was super-pumped when I got Ocarina of Time for Christmas. I had heard great things about this game—basically that it was revolutionary in so many ways, the “ultimate Zelda game”—but I also didn’t know if I would get into it that easily because I had never been an RPG kind of a gamer. I was more of a linear, two-dimensional, straight-forward Super Mario Bros. kind of guy and, you know, Donkey Kong Country kind of a guy. I had always been intrigued by the idea of getting into RPG gaming, like with Final Fantasy games and what-have-you, but it just never happened. I usually only had the patience for beat-‘em-up, shoot-‘em-up kind of games. Mysteries, labyrinths and puzzles took too much brain power and too much time. I had better things to do with my life, or at least so I thought (admittedly, I really didn’t).

However, I was pleasantly surprised with Ocarina of Time. I got sucked into this game pretty much right out of the gate. I fell in love with the “open world,” even though this world is really quite closed by today’s post-Grand-Theft-Auto gaming standards. I loved the graphics, the art design and especially the music (composed by the legendary Koji Kondo who did everything from the original Super Mario Bros. to the original Legend of Zelda to Yoshi’s Island to Star Fox 64 and many more). I also loved the fact that there was no intense pressure to do anything very fast. I could kind of just hang out in this world of Hyrule, accomplish little quests here and there and move along from temple to temple when I felt like it. Overall, I suppose it was the escape into a fantasy land that I enjoyed the most.

The “open world” of Hyrule Field in Ocarina of Time

I played Ocarina of Time intensely during the first week and a half because it was Christmas break and I had the time off from school. I quickly mastered all the controls, how to aim and “lock on” to a target (aka ‘Z-targeting’), how to use special weapons like Deku Nuts and slingshots. How to light torches with Deku Sticks. How to move blocks. How to swim and dive…

All went well in the game until I got to the dreaded Water Temple where I must have literally spent hours upon hours of gaming time trying to figure out what to do in there. This was back before you could look up what to do on the Internet and, out of pride, I refused to ask anybody at school what to do, either. I don’t know how, but I eventually figured it all out on my own and beat the temple but, boy, was that a doozy. In fact, the temple boss (a giant amoeba, technically known as Morpha) was so much easier to defeat than figuring out the puzzle of the temple itself. Getting to the boss wasn’t half the battle; it was the FULL battle.

Entering the dreaded Water Temple

The introduction to Morpha in Water Temple

After the Water Temple came the Shadow Temple and this was when, for whatever reason, I stopped playing Ocarina of Time. From what I understood, I had beat most of the game at this point and that was good enough for me, I guess. I was actually surprised that I had even gotten that far to begin with. I was rarely one of those gamers who actually beat a game. In fact, with the exception of Super Mario World and maybe the very first Donkey Kong Country and, oh, also Aladdin for Super Nintendo, I had never beaten a video game. So, after I beat the Water Temple, I decided to throw in the towel. I would play Ocarina of Time here and there, mostly just to putter around and maybe do a side-quest or two, but I never got beyond the Shadow Temple.

Flash-forward to 22 whole years later.

The year was 2020, one of the worst years in the existence of mankind, the year when COVID-19 came along and there were suddenly less things to do. I hadn’t played video games in a long while and, in August 2020, I found myself having a hankering for video games. I didn’t want to pay an obscene amount of money for anything, so I decided to purchase Nintendo’s portable 2DS XL system. I saw that Walmart had a very good deal on such a system for only a hundred bucks, so I decided to give it a go. Not a bad deal at all, really, since it also came with Mario Kart 7 pre-installed onto the hard drive.

This Nintendo 2DS XL is now selling for almost $500 on Amazon

For the next few months or so, I found myself playing Mario Kart 7, New Super Mario Bros. 2, UltimateNES Remix, some Donkey Kong Country Returns as well, and it wasn’t until January 2021 that I saw on Amazon that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo 3DS version, which is compatible with the 2DS) was on sale for only $20. I wasn’t sure if I was interested in playing Ocarina of Time all over again, but I decided, hey, for twenty buckaroos it would at least be fun screwing around with the game here and there, if for nothing else than solely the nostalgia factor.

Thus, I ordered Ocarina of Time, it arrived a week or so later and I didn’t begin playing it until January 20^th. I know this exact date because it was the very day that Joe Biden was inaugurated as 46^th president of the United States. What ensued was an epic Ocarina of Time quest that would last exactly 100 days. I did not plan for this, but I know it took me exactly 100 days because it lasted as long as Biden’s first 100 days in the White House. Most people would have beaten the game sooner, but it took me 100 days because I only played the game for about 20 minutes at night, almost every night, for a hundred days.

And, oh yes, you heard me right: I did beat the game. No stopping at the Shadow Temple this time. More about all that in a moment, though. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself just yet.

Now, when I first began playing Ocarina of Time after 23 whole years, I wasn’t sure how long I would find the game engaging since I had already played it before. However, to my surprise, I quickly got sucked into the quest and, before long, I knew in my heart that I was going to go the distance this time around. In fact, at a certain point, I made a pact with myself. I could not give up until I beat Ganondorf. I WOULD not give up.

As I defeated the preliminary Deku Tree dungeon and then proceeded to Dodongo’s Cavern and the other temples, I quickly noticed that there was a huge difference between playing the game in 2021 and playing the game in 1998. Obviously, the biggest difference was that it was an entirely new, upgraded version of the game. The 3DS version of Ocarina of Time is known in the gaming nerdiverse to be the superior version, much more beautiful-looking and sounding, more player-friendly and also free of all the blemishes. I’m sure there are a lot of Ocarina of Time originalists out there who only play the Nintendo 64 version and refuse to play the 3DS version, but I’m not one of those people. Although the Nintendo 64 version of Ocarina of Timeis still undeniably a masterpiece notwithstanding its flaws, the 3DS version of the game is the more finely-polished masterpiece, without the kinks and free of the blemishes of the original.

Another difference worth noting between the two OOT versions is the music in the Fire Temple. In the Nintendo 64 version, there is an Islamic chant that was sampled in the temple’s soundtrack (heard in the video above). However, this chant was removed in later versions due to concerns about offending Muslims.

I, of course, appreciated Ocarina of Time for the masterpiece it was back when I played it in 1998, but I didn’t FULLY appreciate it until I was playing the game as an older, more mature gentleman in 2021. When I was young, I took most of it for granted and I’m not hard on myself about this because when you’re young, hey, you kind of just assume that somebody waves a magic wand and, abracadabra, a video game is created. However, playing the game in 2021, I was blown away by how ingenious the game truly was. “How in the world could something like this be made!?” I found myself marveling. I mean, it really is a work of absolute wonder. I can’t even imagine the passion that went into creating such a game. Think about it: not only do you have to create the overworld, all the carefully mapped-out temples, the characters, the weapons, the sound FX, the music etc., but then you have to devise all the puzzles in the game, make them interesting, make sure they actually work and you have to do all this in a seamless manner, so that there are no glitches. And it’s not like there are only a few puzzles; there are literally dozens upon dozens—hell, probably hundreds—of puzzles in this game. Combine all this with a well-written storyline and also pre-rendered cinematic sequences (you know, the non-interactive cut-scenes where you sit back and watch the game like a movie) and then add on the need to keep the game fun and entertaining and engaging, long enough to make people want to play it for dozens upon dozens of hours, and well, my mind is blown. The creators of this game, Shigeru Miyamoto et al., had to have been geniuses.

For all the above reasons, I felt compelled to do a little research on the game’s genesis and development and I was unsurprised to learn that Ocarina of Time took about three whole years to develop (starting in 1995) and, as you can imagine, it went through many evolutions along the way. According to an interview conducted with Shigeru Miyamoto in 2008, the Zelda creator, at one point, conceived a version of the game that was in the first-person perspective (think Goldeneye 007 for Nintendo 64), but Miyamoto and the other creators soon realized that the third-person perspective worked best, especially when they introduced the concept of young and old Link.[i] Also, another early blueprint of Ocarina of Time had the entire game take place in Ganondorf’s castle, much like what we see in Super Mario 64, but that idea was eventually scrapped as well, opting for the beautifully designed Hyrule overworld instead.[ii]

So, yes, the game developers apparently spent a lot of time trying to make the ultimate Zelda game and it showed. As I played through the game during the hundred days, I noticed a lot of small details like Link’s shadow and the dust that gets kicked up from his feet when he runs through Hyrule field. I also noticed how young Link yawns when he’s standing still for a while or how older Link checks himself over and brushes dirt off his cloak. Furthermore, I noticed how the sound of his footsteps change depending on what kind of surface he walks on. I definitely didn’t notice these small details when I was younger, but they really stood out to me this time around.

Ok, so back to me beating the game…

Despite me having played Ocarina of Time back in the late-1990s, I should mention that I remembered pretty much nothing about the game, especially how to solve puzzles or how to beat dungeons or bosses etc. I was basically playing the game fresh and I got stuck here and there, but I must say that the Water Temple is much more playable in the 3DS version. Basically, this version has an added clue or two whereas in the Nintendo 64 version, you literally have to turn the temple inside out and retrace your steps probably about a hundred times—not to mention play your Ocarina dozens of times to raise and lower water levels—before you figure out how to beat the temple.

Once I got to the Shadow Temple, I was entering completely uncharted territory since I hadn’t gone beyond this part of the game when I played it in 1998. The temple itself wasn’t so bad, but the last boss—Bongo Bongo—gave me a hell of a fight. I’m not sure how many times I had to try beating him, but it was a lot and what made it even more annoying was that, each time you died, you had to start at the beginning of the temple and travel to the dungeon-master’s lair via a ghost ship and on this ghost ship there are two annoying sworded skeleton characters (named Stalfos) and battling those fiends over and over again gets old really fast. After the third or fourth time, I figured out that you didn’t need to fight them at all; nope, all’s you had to do was block their blows with your shield, then jump off the ghost ship before it sinks into an abyss at the end of the ride. The Stalfos sink along with the ship if you time it correctly and jump off the ship right before it sinks.

Fighting a Stalfo in the Shadow Temple

Now, you CAN use magic—Farore’s wind, to be exact—to create a warp point that takes Link directly to the dungeon master and, thus, avoids having to battle the annoying Stalfos over and over again, but you can only do this so many times because the warping takes too much magic and you need the magic to defeat the Bongo Bongo boss via the Lens of Truth. After about the 6^th or 7^th try, I did manage to beat Bongo Bongo and, oddly, by that point, I realized he wasn’t all that tough. Once you got it down to a system, he was rather easy to defeat. Basically, it’s shoot arrow to the hand. Shoot arrow to the other hand. Then, turn on the Lens of Truth and slice at the eye with your sword. Part of the reason why I had so much trouble with Bongo Bongo was that I was using the 2DS’ touch-screen controls to shoot the arrows, as opposed to the actual controller buttons. The 2DS’ touchscreen is finicky and less sensitive than the buttons, so you can’t always shoot your arrows as quickly as you’d like to. I imagine that, if I had been using the Nintendo 64 controller instead, I would not have had as much trouble with Bongo Bongo.

Link battling Bongo Bongo

From the Shadow Temple, I moved on to the very last dungeon, the Spirit Temple, which ended up being an easier dungeon than the Water Temple and the end boss—named Twinrova, comprised of two witches Koume and Kotake—was an easier boss than Shadow Temple’s Bongo Bongo. Then, it was on to Ganondorf’s castle…

Although very intimidating (I had to remind myself it’s just a game! Don’t be scared, Matt!), Ganondorf was not overly difficult and I beat him on the first try. What I didn’t know, however, was that he wasn’t the last boss you needed to battle. After running out of a burning and crumbling castle, Ganondorf turns into the demon monster Ganon and this was a battle I was not expecting. I had no idea how to beat Ganon and he absolutely destroyed me. At this point, I decided to save, shut down the game and try again the next day. What I didn’t know, however, was that beating Ganondorf does not get saved, so I had to beat that damn sorcerer all over again in order to battle Ganon again. This time around, I did not beat Ganondorf as easily; it took me a few tries and this was mostly because I made stupid mistakes.

As for Ganon? It took me at least four tries to beat him and this was tedious because, although you don’t have to beat Ganondorf again as long as you don’t shut the game down, you do have to keep running out of the burning castle, which is a timed, anxiety-ridden three-minute escape sequence and you need to defeat those pesky Stalfos in one room along the way. I finally had Ganon figured out pretty well by the fourth try, but I also realized that I was running extremely low on arrows and you need the light arrows to stun Ganon before you bash his tail in with the Megaton Hammer. I thought I was screwed when I ran out of the arrows completely and figured I would have to reset the game and restart pre-Ganondorf, just so I could stock up on arrows. What I ended up having to use instead was one of the first weapons you get in the game: simple Deku Nuts. These stun Ganon for a much shorter amount of time than the arrows, but it was long enough for me to slice away at his tail and I eventually defeated him to the point where Zelda steps in, uses magic to hold Ganon still, and then you walk up to the demon and take one final slice with your sword. That last sword slice never felt so good. Hours and hours of gaming time all leading up to that one final blow to the skull.

Ganondorf battle

Battling Ganon

The end felt poetic as well. I was so worried that I needed the fancy light arrows, but all’s I needed were simple Deku Nuts and that’s what got me to beat Ganon. I almost felt as though it was “meant” to happen that way. The seemingly most useless weapon in the game became the most essential. What irony.

And, with that, the quest was officially complete and I nearly shed tears as I heard the orchestral version of the original Legend of Zelda theme playing triumphantly over the credits, all movie-like. I felt so proud of myself. I wanted to tell everyone I knew that I beat Ocarina of Time—friends, family, random people in the street, the local librarian, the woman working behind the counter at Dunkin Donuts…but, alas, I knew nobody would care. It wasn’t like I was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize or anything. I felt like everyone should be bowing down and worshipping me, I defeated the evil that cursed Hyrule, dammit! But nobody would understand. Nobody ever gets me, man.

A screenshot I took of the End Credits when I beat Ocarina of Time. This is the only evidence I have that I beat the game.

Anyway, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time will probably go down as one of my favorite video games of all time and probably is, in fact, the best video game of all time. Playing it for the 100 days gave me so much joy…well, not THAT much joy, but it was incredibly fun. I know Zelda games have only improved since then, but I think Ocarina of Time is when the Zelda franchise peaked. The stars definitely aligned for that game and I’m not sure any other video game has ever been made with so much passion, heart and soul. In fact, I think that’s why I enjoy playing Ocarina the most. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the game itself, although it’s very fun. I think what I find most interesting about the Ocarina of Time experience is that I’m literally exploring the hearts and souls and minds of the game’s creators. After all, when you’re playing through all the various temples in the game and solving its puzzles, what you’re really doing is navigating through the genius minds of the game’s designers. After a while, you kind of learn their patterns and anticipate their moves. You’re basically reverse-engineering or maybe decoding their brains.

What now? Should I move along to Ocarina of Time: Master Quest? Master Quest, if you don’t know, is apparently an alternative version of the Ocarina of Time game but with new and harder puzzles. Or maybe I should, instead, try to do an Ocarina of Time 100% completion playthrough where I collect all the gold Skulltulas and do all the side quests? Or maybe I should do a “three-heart run” where you try to complete the game with only three hearts of energy? Or maybe I should get a life instead? Or perhaps I should move on to Ocarina’s sequel: Majora’s Mask. I’ve never played Majora’s Mask before, neither on the Nintendo 64, nor on any other Nintendo console, but I hear great things about it. Most of all, I hear it’s weird and creepy. Maybe 100 days of that game is what fate has in store for me.

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