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Zelda - Four Swords Gets Tetra's Trackers Bonus
Thanks to 1UP for the news that the forthcoming Legend Of Zelda: Four Swords for GameCube will include Tetra's Trackers as a bonus game. Four Swords makes use of GameBoy Advance connectivity as players compete to collect jewels - entering caves or buildings switches the action to your GBA, "...allowing you to scavenge for jewels that your opponents can't see", whereas Tetra's Trackers, also shown at E3, is another multiplayer connectivity-based title, this time with most of the action on your GBA. The disc also includes a "story-driven single-player campaign" using elements styled from Zelda: A Link To The Past, and the package is due next February in Japan. Elsewhere, 1UP has a Zelda merchandising retrospective that includes various pictures of "obscure items related to the series", including beach blankets and plastic plates.
Nintendo's marketting is really pissing me off. I own a GBSPA and I don't regret it, but their shameless attempts to make you buy extra crap for it is infuriating, because they cheat and make things that have no technical reason to require a Gamecube, or a Gameboy, have them.
You're right, sometimes there's no technical reason for the requirements, though there may be asthetic reasons. For instance, with FF:CC you probably don't want to stop the game every time one player needs to access a menu when playing in multiplayer. Or, in this case, you don't want every player to see what a single player is doing when he's in another part of the map collecting gems that may give him a lead in the competetive portion of the game.
I might have bought the Mario games, rehashes that they are, but I'm ticked off that to truly use everything on the cart, I have to shell out for a e-Reader. Why? No technical reason, just that Nintendo wants to sell you an e-Reader.
OK, so even though there are 4 Mario GBA games, you're ticked off that one of them has e-Reader compatability that allows them to add extra stuff that isn't part of the game that's on the cart? As far as I've been able to tell, none of the other Mario games have e-Reader functionality, and nothing on the e-Reader cards for SMB3 was in SMB3 to begin with.
It backfired; now I'm considering getting a flash ROM for the GB and putting the Nintendo emulator on it instead. To hell with that crap.
And you'll get, *gasp*, the exact game you could've gotten if you just bought the cart (without the e-Reader), except that you'll be doing it through emulation. Personally, I never owned a copy of SMB3, so I'll stay on the legal side and buy the GBA cart. Then again, I bought an e-Reader the same day I bought my GameCube, to mess around with in Animal Crossing (which really didn't need the e-Reader, as you could just use codes to get most of the stuff on the cards).
So here's another game that sounds like it should be playable with just two Gameboys but requires a Gamecube (probably). I am not impressed here at all.
Four Swords (w/ Link to the Past) for GBA works fine with just 2 GBAs. This is the GameCube version of Four Swords, which has some changes and a couple of extra games thrown in. I don't know how you could own a GBA-SP and never have seen the GBA version of the game before...
Not going to stop buying games for my GB but I find myself avoiding Nintendo's first-party games like the plague. I don't have a GameCube, I'm not going to get a GameCube, I don't want a GameCube. (I have a PS2 and if I get a second console it'll be an XBox... or considering the likely timing of that purchase, an XBox 2 if it's reverse-compatible at all.)
So don't buy a GameCube. They're not doing anything to GBA games that requires a Cube. They're just doing a hell of a lot to Cube games that requires a GBA. Good luck with the XBox, I know I'm really enjoying mine between rounds of Mario Kart. I highly recommend Crimson Skies, but if you have a PC there's not much else I can recommend for the system (except the multi-console titles).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
... but Four Swords was *the* most fun game I played at E3 this year. Kept going back so I could try all of the levels in that demo. It was a blast even playing with complete strangers. While it might be a little of a hassle to get 4 gbas and 4 people crowded around a gamecube, the people who are able to get the set up are going to have a ton of fun next year.