The New Zelda

freakonaleash881 writes "IGN is reporting that the new Legend of Zelda for the Gamecube is going to be a cartoon...that's right, a cartoon! It's supposedly showing off the Gamecube's realtime cartoon shading abilities. I just don't know about this..." I think it looks sweet considering the general poor quality of the snapshots. I tell ya folks, the next few months are going to be really exciting for console games with the new Final Fantasy, and the release of 2 new systems.

Comments

Zelda

[Wind_Walker]

I have never really been a huge fan of the Zelda series but I do enjoy it. I played the SNES incarnations and they were good and I found them fun to play however when I bought the N64 Zelda's I just didn't and couldn't get in to them like how I did with the SNES games - I didn't like the seriousness of the game so I never actually got around to completing them as they just bored me.

When I first saw the The Legend of Zelda for the GCN, it was a picture, and I did think for a split second, oh my god, what on earth has Nintendo done (around this time I had only had about 3 hours of sleep as I stayed up for Spaceworld as I live in the UK). I could not picture Zelda to look like this after seeing last years Spaceworld footage and the N64 versions. However after a lot of thought I realised Nintendo is going back to their roots and that is when I finally understood Miyamoto's reasons for making the changes - he doesn't want to make rehashes of the same old game with just prettier graphics, he doesn't want to do what most other developers out there would be afraid to do and that is to try something different and go along the same lines that made the Zelda series great in the first place.

I believe that the reasons why many people are upset about this change in Zelda is because the videogame industry hasn't had a wake up call (I apologise if I offend anyone when I say this) and that the Sony Playstation has done something to this industry that Nintendo is trying to prevent from happening - and that (Playstation) is preventing developers from making new and original games and stopping them from making new ideas - instead they just release game after game after game which don't have any different gameplay in them and yes, I know you shouldn't fix something that ain't broke but Miyamoto knows that if he doesn't do something to the Zelda series soon, then that too will follow the path of say the Tomb Raider series.

People complaining should think long and hard and try and understand that what Miyamoto is doing is for the good of the Zelda series as Im sure none of you would like to see Zelda dry up, cause if it did, Im pretty damn sure you would be begging for a change in the series like this to happen.

The Legend will live on!

It's the logical move

[novarese]

It makes sense that they would go back to a more figurative representation of the characters instead of continuing to pursue photorealism.

Once you can do photorealistic images (or even get close to it), what do you do next? We already know the answer, because it already happend in fine art. The greeks and romans perfected realistic sculpture, and all sculpture afterwards became more figurative (see byzantine and gothic sculpture). The renaissance artists perfected photorealsim through use of perspective techniques etc, and what followed?

OK, so we're not yet at real-time rendering of final fantasy-quality movies on our desktop, but it's just a matter of raw computing power at this point; there's no new conceptual territory to cover. Hardware will continue to advance, and we will eventually have realtime photorealistic rendering, but expect the mainstream game designers to go back to figurative representations, at least until the next big technology comes along (holographic games, anyone?)

And over at Redmond..

[freeweed]

Nintendo, there better not be any annoying talking fairy following Link around the whole damn time!

Microsoft, following in the inspired footsteps of Nintendo, is adding Clippy(tm) as a sidekick to each of its game titles.

Their first racing demo shows just how much Clippy(tm) enhances a gamer's experience:

You have pressed the 'GAS' and 'BRAKE' buttons at the same time. Do you want to: go faster? go slower? drive into the fully 3d-rendered crowd of spectators?

When asked why so many gamers who have tested Tomb RaiderX have cramped thumbs, a Microsoft spokesman's only comment was 'apparently, some kids thought it would be funny to shoot at Clippy(tm). What they didn't realize is that our beta-testers had already done the same thing incessantly, so we've re-designed the game to make this feat impossible. After all, how could you complete any game without the aid of Clippy(tm)?'