Sunday, November 24, 2013

999 Seconds in Cucco Run Endless Mode???

Ah, come on, Nintendo...!

Lately I've been trying to truly 100% all Zelda games. What's the difference between 100% of all items and a true 100%? Well, the latter includes everything that is possible to unlock. Even small changes and silly rewards that noone else would care about.

Luckily this was kept within limites in the Zelda series. At least so far. I already did the ridiculous 999 hits thing in the sword training of both the Wind Waker and Spirit Tracks. There are special tricks for that, so it's somewhat possible.

Next step was Rollgoal. You know, the terrible marble track minigame at the fishing pond in Twilight Princess. Clearing all courses once unlocks the Frog Lure, so that was basically a must. But I never bothered with going beyond the Frog Lure, as any sane person would do. However, I lost my sanity a while ago and clearing level 8-8 unlocks a nice level select, so if you truly want 100%, you need to clear all 64 levels. Have fun... Well, I already mastered this on the GameCube. Got pretty good at the game and it took me about an hour to beat all 64 levels, so it was not as bad as expected. But I probably will never attend a 100% run of Twilight Princess ever again (something likes this truly kills the replay value for 100% runs) and there's still the Wii version left to complete, where Rollgoal has motion controls... oh, joy.

But after the Wii Rollgoal madness, finishing the 2nd Quest in The Wind Waker HD and clearing all StreetPass challenges in A Link Between Worlds, I was supposed to be done with everything...! To have cleared every Zelda game! I was actually looking forward to this... but then I learned of the newest horrors in A Link Between Worlds.

There's an unlockable for staying alive or 999 seconds in the endless mode of the Cucco Run minigame... you get 3000 Rupees and a stupid large chicken appears that can heal you. You can compare it to the unlockable cow in Link's house in Ocarina of Time... Why, Nintendo, why...? Why can't it just be the 3000 Rupees? Because then it wouldn't unlock anything special and therefore wouldn't count... Or why not unlock the big chicken after 100 seconds...? Why the full 999? Why did this have to be? Why is it called "endless mode", if you actually have to beat it?

And the minigame is so unfun and frustrating... after a while I enter zombie mode and just do it without thinking. However, one small mistake and you get ripped out of it. I can easily see myself being hit in the 996th second or something... I've once written an article about minigames in Zelda and how bad minigames can ruin an otherwise perfectly fine Zelda game. And the Cucco minigame is a great example of this can happen.

A Link Between Worlds has such great replay value, I actually saw myself playing this over and over again. But as a 100% guy this is bad. Really bad. I know, I shouldn't let myself ruin it all by such a small, insignificant thing. But I just can't help it. Call it an "itch" as Sheldon Cooper would describe it - if there's something left to do in a Zelda game, I feel an itch until I got it done. And now the game turned from "fun to replay many times" to "if I replay this, I have to go through the endless chicken hell again"... great, Nintendo, just awesome! I'm sick of you adding ridiculous 100% chicanes. Please patch this.

It also takes A LOT of time to deal with this. 999 seconds is about 17 minutes. But of course you won't do it on your first try. It probably takes many hours of practice to finally beat it. Urghs... Well, looks like I won't be buying Super Mario 3D World then, because I will probably be busy dodging chickens for the next months... Too bad. :D

23 comments:

K2L said...

"Well, looks like I won't be buying Super Mario 3D World then, because I will probably be busy dodging chickens for the next months... Too bad. :D"

Come on! You can't resist the cuteness of the cat powerup! ^-^

lx4 said...

I have the same completionist tendencies but I skipped the cabana sliding puzzles in a Wind Waker since my brain just can't deal with those. But a now I have to ask, is there any special reward for completing all of them?

TourianTourist said...

@lx4:
Nope, if you complete all cabana sliding puzzles, you get some more Rupees and they will simply reset. So, you start all over and there is no proof that you ever have beaten them.

Which is why they don't count towards completion.

Anonymous said...

I wonder if there is a reward for beating the game with 99999 rupees collected in total.
After all, the game tells you the number of total collected rupees at the end... Guess we'll find out once someone gets crazy enough. Maybe a Majora's Mask hint is hidden in there?

Jaysee said...

99999 Rupees wouldn't be too hard, you get like 5000+ rupees for a less than 10 minute clear of the treacherous tower on advanced mode. With red mail and level 3 sword + the advanced spin attack it's a joke. So doing some quick math it would take less than 200 minutes (or 3 and a third hours to go from 0 to 99999 rupees in the worst case scenario!

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I thought of this as well after I received the Super Spin upgrade a few hours ago.

Matthias said...

Exactly my thoughts! I have played many bullet hell games & shmups during the last ten years, but Link's hitbox is so annoyingly BIG and there's absolutely no valid strategy. I feel kinda punished.

Oh yes, and the zombie state of mind... same thing happens to me on every damn try, from 150 onwards I'm not really sure what I'm doing there.

My current highscore is 290, but I think I will leave it at that - as sad as it is. Thanks, Nintendo. No, really. Great idea.

Anonymous said...

After lasting just over 100 seconds and unlocking nothing I googled to find out if you can unlock anything.. And now I find this.. What a nightmare. I won't be able to rest till I get that damn chicken. This is gonna kill me!!

Anonymous said...

And to prove I'm not a robot I had to enter "henigag". Hen... Gag... Damn you irony!!

TourianTourist said...

@previous two posts:
Sorry, you got stuck in the spam filter for some reason. ^.^

And don't worry, you're not alone. Many Zelda fans are angry about what Nintendo has done here.

But so far noone has done it yet to deliver proof that this chicken really exists. The only "proof" is the Prima Guide, but they have been wrong in the past.

Anonymous said...

Calm down little kids. It's one of those funny things not everyone can do on their 1st or second tries. Compare it to the maiaimais and how horrendously easy it was to hunt them all down.

Anonymous said...

Hello,
I don't normally post on here because I'm not a regular blogger. But I have been playing the game a lot, beat it, and been trying to unlock everything all from the 100%. I first learned about the Cucco minigame from the Iwata Asks panel learning that even the devs had trouble beating it and I've have been searching around the net for days trying to seek answers on how the 999 seconds can be accomplished and noticed this post mentioned about it.

Well...
after countless days of trial and error, endless frustration, anger and patience, I'd like to present to the Hyrule Blog with this:
proof that the Giant Cucco exists.
https://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/912x684q90/844/moo8.jpg
https://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/912x684q90/690/dsd9.jpg
https://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/912x684q90/202/5n3t.jpg

Yes this is real, and I did it all on my own along with my own research I did on how to beat it. I've achieved what everyone is saying here is the impossible, and I'm posting this to at least show the Zelda Community that this is possible and can be done with lots of patience.

TourianTourist said...

"It's one of those funny things not everyone can do on their 1st or second tries."

Haahahaahaahahaaahhahahaaahahahahaaahhahhahaa... as if.

Try "first 500 tries"...


@previous post:
Oh, I shall make a blog post about this then... I was hoping that it wouldn't exist though.

HorseWithTooManyNames said...

Dear Anonymous:

I hate you. -_-'

TourianTourist said...

@HorseWithTooManyNames:
Don't hate a fellow fan, hate Nintendo for including this reward... :D

Anonymous said...

Well hot damn...that just took a lot of wind out of my sail.

Anonymous said...

Congrats man!
Thats amazing!

Anonymous said...

The problem here is that Aonuma ask us to master perfectly the game (difficulty > to Hard Level Ikaruga)to receive an unlockable. The 900 swords hit in Spirit Traks were fair easy than this bulls. We can only do two things: do the game, with patience, time (a lot), and destroing the start buttons, or we can ask for a patch that give us the cucco when the timer reach.. 150 seconds? (5 times the heart piece timer)... and for the 999.99 folks that beated the game, there is the glory of the scoreboard (as every point based game, of course.... If a game BASED on the score doesn't give that kind of unlockables for insane amount of points, why zelda has to do this?)

TourianTourist said...

I agree with the last post.

I could live with 300 seconds for the unlockable, but after this point it just gets too crazy.

And whoever reaches the 999.99 seconds deserves a golden Cucco statue in real from Nintendo. Personally delivered by Aonuma.

Anonymous said...

Can we do something effective about this? I don't know, a petition, a neogaf thread...

TourianTourist said...

Mention it in the Club Nintendo survey. Complain about it on Miiverse.

These two things are the most effective.

I probably made a dozen posts about this on Miiverse already... :D

Anonymous said...

Nope, Nintendo will never fix that, you try it and you'll make it once...

TourianTourist said...

No, they most likely won't fix this, but complaining about it might at least prevent them from doing something absurd like this in a Zelda game ever again.