Super Zeldathon

Zeldathon is running the whole week, collecting money for the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Check it out and maybe leave a donation. This time it's digging deep into the 90s nostalgia and they even have SuperMCGamer back on board, who started the whole thing, but stepped down from his leadership role after Zeldathon 1986 two years ago. And that's making me nostalgic as well.

Zelda Fest 2024

If you can't get enough of the Zelda charity marathons, then you might want to check out the upcoming Zelda Fest by The Awakened Cast. It starts in exactly three days and lasts for a week, so it runs from September 28th to October 5th. There also shouldn't be a secret about how this is clearly inspired by the amazing Zeldathon, but you know what they say: imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And that doesn't really matter, it's all for a good cause, I suppose.

The timing is also quite interesting, with Echoes of Wisdom releasing... right now! Maybe this was intentional, maybe this was coincidence (there was actually a German fan gathering planned for that exact time frame as well, by ZeldaChronicles, but it got cancelled). In any case, they will probably stream the newest Zelda game as part of the marathon... I will certainly avoid that segment and I will also be too busy playing the new game myself, but I will still check it out in between. And maybe this is something for you as well.

Zeldathon 1986

... starts in 24 hours. The charity marathon will last for six days and collect money for the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. I usually tune in and also leave a couple donations, because the Zeldathon is always a good time, but I rarely ever promote this on my blog, which needs to change. And as someone born in 1986, the year that made legends, I'm really digging the classic The Legend of Zelda retro theme here. The logo and background are absolutely gorgeous, so I wanted to share this in any case.

You can find all information about this on Zeldathon.com, check it out. They also have some crazy cool stuff in their schedule, like TUNIC, Zelda: Tilt 'n' Rumble or Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore. The latter is this CD-i Zelda inspired game made by the guy who remastered Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon for the PC. I've been meaning to check those out for quite a while now, if only I had more time...

Cia by Sciamano240

source

I rarely post fanart on this blog, but there are the occasional pieces that are absolutely amazing, like this one. Cia is my favorite character in Hyrule Warriors and this art captures her seductive nature perfectly.

Midna's Christmas Spirit

Merry Christmas, everyone! The above artpiece is Midna's Christmas Spirit by VanEvil and one of my favorite fan arts out there. It's five years old now, but it's still worth sharing. Princess Midna is just perfect for that Sexy Santa look.

Hyrule Blog will be on hiatus next week. I'm currently preparing my end-of-the-year review, which will be published on December 31st, as always. Don't expect anything else in the meantime, but do enjoy the holidays!

Time's End II & Terrible Fate

Theophany is back with a follow-up to his Time's End album from four years ago! To top things this time, he cooperated with EmberLab creating a massively amazing Majora's Mask fan animation about the Happy Mask Salesman and Skull Kid receiving Majora's Mask. Really good stuff, so check it all out:

TerribleFate.com
Theophany on Bandcamp
Terrible Fate on Youtube

It seems like Theophany focused on the Woodfall / Swamp region with this album, while the first album was about Clocktown, so we might get more releases for the remaining regions in the future...? I certainly wouldn't mind at all!

Replaying Ancient Stone Tablets, Dubbed

Well, this was certainly an interesting experience. I've played through Ancient Stone Tablets several times now, but never before with the full program. Thanks to the efforts of the BS Zelda Homepage you can now listen to an English version of the broadcast while playing the game, which includes orchestrated music from the Sound & Drama album next to the voice acting.

Unlike with the first BS Zelda game you get a larger cast of voice actors including Kira Buckland as the lovely voice of Princess Zelda, who has a lot more to say this time. (Kira is actually a professional voice actress, who already lend Zelda her voice in other fan projects, such as Zeldamotion or Four Swords Misadventures!) Even the Old Man in the form of Aginah (Sahasrahla's brother) isn't as bad as previously, but he creates a comedy duo with the really awkward sounding Fortune Teller. And this can be quite fun, even if some of the funnier parts may not be intentional.

"Master Aginah..."
"What is iiit...?!"
"I see something happening somewhere..."
"Is that sooo...?"

This dialogue gets repeated so often that you could turn it into a drinking game. The Fortune Teller always talks in a very strange voice that you just want to mock and Aginah seems constantly annoyed by everything and everyone. It gets even sillier, when Zelda takes over Aginah's role in the 3rd week and then suddenly adopts his "Is that sooo?" catchphrase. It's essentially the "Excuuuuse me, princess" of the BS Zelda games and thanks to Aginah's gambling addiction it's not even the only running gag in this. Also, just like in Hyrule Warriors you have useless soldiers calling for help. Better let a kid with a sword do the job!

Anyway, with the audio they do give you a five second countdown before the Bombos and Ether power-ups, they explain other power-ups like infinite Bombs/Arrows and they will tell you, when the Gold Potion becomes available and when the weekly minigame is open for business. The rescue missions are also part of the broadcast, so you can hear Zelda scream, when she's in danger...

They won't tell you about the Mole, however, so that's probably just something you're ought to discover at random. His position will be at a random location, but I would have expected to at least learn about his existence and at what time he's going to appear. This is the one thing that you still have to look up to get it right, otherwise you now can play the game blind without missing anything important.

The Mole on the 4th week is the worst, however, because he doesn't appear until the 34 minute mark. There is no warp point at the summit of Death Mountain (where the Mole opens a cave with 1400 Rupees inside), so you can't just go back later. You have to find the Mole and then start the Level 8 dungeon, which cuts things extremely close.

In fact it was so close for me that I experienced a very weird scenario. I beat Ganon, but right after he was defeated, the time ran out and the bad ending of the game played, where Ganon laughs maniacally about having conquered Hyrule. But he was killed! I saw it! Game, what are you doing...? Well, at least I could take a look at the funny Game Over screen:

Luckily I had a quicksave right before Ganon's Tower, so I could just try again and beat the giant pig a little bit faster, which then counted. It's my own fault, however, because I'm really obsessed with getting everything in this game, opening all the chests in all the rooms, even if it's just for a silly highscore. I didn't manage to beat my score from the last time, but it was close:

As you can see, I played as the girl and if you think about it, this game was ahead of its time in so many different ways, not just the orchestrated music and the fact that you were downloading content onto a video game console in 1997. Exactly 20 years before the release of Breath of the Wild you already got voice acting of important (and less important) characters and the choice to play as a female hero.

I can only advise everyone, who's reading this, to try out the BS Zelda games for themselves. With Nintendo's current habits of "intellectual property enforcement" they may not be available in their current fan-restored form forever.

Now the Master Sword really sleeps forever... until A Link Between Words!

Replaying BS The Legend of Zelda, Dubbed

Originally I didn't have the BS Zelda games on the list of my 30th Anniversary replay session, but things changed with the BS Zelda Homepage finally releasing the pinnacle of 17 years of amazing restoration work: fully dubbed versions for BS The Legend of Zelda MAP1 & MAP2 and earlier this month also for Ancient Stone Tablets.

In case you don't know, what I'm talking about, let me give a short summary. In the late 90s the "Broadcast Satellaview" add-on for the Super Nintendo existed (yep, "BS" doesn't stand for what you might think at first), which let you receive satellite data. And with this came actual video game broadcasts, where for a fixed time you could play different Zelda episodes from three games in total:

• BS The Legend of Zelda (MAP1)
• BS The Legend of Zelda (MAP2)
• Ancient Stone Tablets

They were divided into four episodes each, with each episode featuring two dungeons. If you want to know more, just check out the links above. The important thing is that these are in fact official Zelda games made by Nintendo with the usual level of gameplay quality. The way of presenting and distributing the games just was very unusual and they would be completely inaccessible today, if it wasn't for the team of the BS Zelda Homepage.

Well, I played their restoration project several times now, last time back in 2011 for the 25th Anniversary, but this time they outdid themselves by also adding fully translated English voice acting based on the original broadcasts. Now you finally are able to experience the games exactly like they were supposed to be played in full glory. If you play 16-Bit Zelda with the Legend of Zelda song from the Akihabara Electric Circus playing in the background and some Old Man talking to you, this will you magically teleport you back into the 90s.

However, this can also be as annoying as the annoying Bubbles that constantly get mentioned by both the Narrator and the Old Man to tell you, how annoying they are. "Those Bubble, they are the most annoying thing..." - I get it, Old Man! With important information the game even pauses and makes you listen to the sloooow and obnoxious talk from some person, who is obviously not old enough to dub an Old Man. I guess, he has to talk so slow to stay in sync with the original broadcast, but it's a little nerving. The Narrator dubbed by RetroDan, however, does a great job, his voice is pure gold, I could listen to him all day. Zelda also seems to have gotten a lovely voice, but sadly you can only hear her talk one sentence in the beginning of the game...

Good thing about with the narration and the calls from the Old Man is that you get a much better sense at what's happening in the game world. When I first played the BS Zelda games I heavily relied on the available guides, so I wouldn't miss anything, like the Heart Container washed ashore at a certain time on the first episode. But this time I could go in "blind" and still find everything. Of course later versions already added text boxes for the announcements, but here you get all the info. The whole game feels more "tutorialized" with the broadcast in the background, where everything gets explained quite well, even the hidden locations of some items in the dungeons, so you're not missing anything important in the limited time frames.

The biggest advantage, however, is gained with the announced Power-ups that happen at certain times. One of them destroys all enemies on the screen and this felt rather random before. But here the Old Man gives you a warning upfront, so you can potentially use it on some Darknuts or whatever.

Of course the timing of these Power-ups can also be rather comical. For example, when I reached the end of Level 8 on the first Map, I had to defeat a set of Triple Dodongos with only six Bombs left, so there was no room for mistakes. I somehow made it, but my victory became meaningless about ten seconds later, when I suddenly got the Infinite Bombs Power-up among others. Or the Old Man might send you fairies, when you're at full health, etc.

One Power-up I liked was the "people sensor", which basically worked like the Compass from Link's Awakening on the overworld - it plays a tone, whenever there is a hidden cave nearby, so you can potentially find all the caves behind walls and under trees just by listening. Together with the infinite bombs and Red Candle you can easily uncover everything within the time limit.

I also discovered that you can actually bypass the "desert storm" west of the Lost Woods to get the White Sword early in the 2nd chapter. You have to dodge the whirlwinds and it might take you a couple of tries, but after hours of practice from the Endless Cucco Rush, this comes off rather natural...

However, it's not so easy on MAP2, because there you have little to no room to dodge, and ultimately it comes down to luck, where in this case you're literally wasting your time and should just wait until the end of the chapter, where the Old Man makes the desert storm disappear.

Apropos wasting time, if you're worried about the time limit in this, don't be. Overall there's more than enough time to beat two dungeons and collect everything within the 50 minutes that you have per episode. Usually I even go grind Rupees to kill the time at the end of an episode. Only with the 4th chapter of MAP1 I was having some trouble, because Level 7 turned out rather large and disorienting compared to the rest. Often with these dungeons you also won't find the Map early on, which can get frustrating, if you have no clue, where the hidden rooms could be and you're short of bombs (and time). And some stuff is easy to miss, where you then might lose a lot of time later on to track it down. But otherwise it's quite enjoyable to play and also much easier than the NES counterpart.

I've played through both Map 1 and 2, where the voice acting and narration didn't seem to be much different between the episodes. It's the same events and the same hints, it's just that the layout of the overworld is different, which doesn't have any impact on the narration (e.g. the Lost Woods are still in the East). Considering that you actually have to download 4,4GB of pcm video files in order to play this, things could have been made more compact, maybe...

Anyway, I'm looking forward to play Ancient Stone Tablets in its dubbed state next, because this game was a lot more fun and had quite some interaction with Zelda.

Eagle's Tower in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U

Inspired by the above wallpaper by BLUEamnesiac I created another stage for Super Smash Bros. for Wii in addition to my previous stages. It's the top of the Eagle's Tower, one of my all-time favorite dungeons from my all-time favorite game Link's Awakening:

Eagle's Tower

• Music: Tal Tal Heights
• Size: Large

Gameplay-wise this is probably not the best stage ever, but it does re-create the original boss level accurately. It does look better on the ingame preview than on the above Miiverse image, because you can't actually see the cropped bottom of the tower, only the ocean background. So, if you try to re-create the stage in the Stage Builder, use a large stage and start at the very bottom.

There are no ladders available in the Stage Builder of Smash 4, but using platforms for the ladder to the top was visually the better choice anyway.

Cat Link on the Hunt

Toon Link always looked like a cat, now he finally became one in Monster Hunter Generations:

Watch the trailer here.

I'm not a Monster Hunter fan, but this looks really funny. It also reminds me of this scene:

(art by Purrdemonium)

Lime of the Season

It's hot outside and I have the perfect summer music for you: "Lime of the Season" is the follow-up album to the amazing Essence of Lime, where this time they remixed songs from Oracle of Seasons, including the fan favorite Dancing Dragon Dungeon music.

This already got released in May 2014, so it has been out there for over two years now. It has been featured in the Link List on the right column of Hyrule Blog for most of this time, but I noticed that I never promoted this album via a blog post. And it's never too late to promote something awesome, so in case you've missed this so far, check it out:

Lime of the Season Site

Go to the above site to download the album and its lovely artwork for free!

(By the way, I also had a small conversation on Reddit with HylianLemon earlier this year, he seems like a cool guy.)

My little contribution to Zeldathon St. Jude

It's maybe not the best timing considering that there already has been another Zelda marathon two weeks ago, but whatever... I didn't follow the TSG marathon all too much and the new Zeldathon has a nice concept, where they are streaming two different games at the same time. So, if one game bores you, you can switch to the other, which includes some fun stuff like the CD-i games or Minecraft.

McGamer set up a Minecraft server just for this marathon, so you can even play with these guys. And since he's part of the Mindcrack network, even Minecraft developer Dinnerbone might join the fun (he even donated at the last marathon). For me as a Zelda and Minecraft fan this is pretty interesting.

So, I donated and joined the Minecraft creative server and made a little pixel art:

Nothing special, but better than nothing. There's a miniature version of Mabe Village right next to it, which is pretty cool.

Overall the server and the Zeldathon stream are really cool. I've been following the stream for most of the time and it's really enjoyable to watch. There are some fun guys there and they do a lot of fun things to keep it interesting.

Linkstagram ftw

https://twitter.com/Linkstagram

Just leaving this here. It's absolutely hilarious and shows how great the whole selfie + Miiverse thing really is. Also, Toon Link rulez.

Time's End: Majora's Mask Remix

I already covered this on ZeldaEurope, but it should be mentioned here as well. Today a new remix album from Theophany got released. You might remember him from Crystal Flash, his previous album focused on Metroid. But now he's back and better than ever.

Just in time for the end of the world the album focuses on the dark end time music from Majora's Mask. It's great quality and entirely free (though you can buy the album at a price of your choice to support the artist).

Time's End Site
Listen and buy on bandcamp
Download via mediafire

The Hyrules of Heroism

Some fellow asked me to advertise his short fiction revolving around the original The Legend of Zelda game. So, that's what I'll do. It's nicely written and has a good but decent sense of humor. Here's a quote I liked:

There are other princesses out there. Princesses far more beautiful than Zelda, and held in much looser captivity. Hell, there is a princess you could free simply by jumping over some ugly green fellow who spits fireballs.

If you're interested in the story, check out the link:

The Evolving Existentialist: The Hyrules of Heroism

R2-D2 vs. Phantom Ganon

Wait, what? Well, this is a nice fanart made by Andy J Hunter that features a Zelda x Star Wars crossover:

I guess R2-D2 just needs to keep still, Phantom Ganon is basically jumping right into the Master Sword. Useless Marionette...


Source: Kotaku

Hyrule Ads

Hahaha, great stuff. These would make nice posters. The ghost guy got taller though.

Source: Dorkly (via Zelda Informer)

Fanmade Skyward Sword Boxart

Probably from the same guy who did this 3DS bundle boxart comes this fancy Skyward Sword artwork. I still hate how the artist likes to add a "The" before the title. It's "Skyward Sword", not "The Skyward Sword". And overall it looks more like a box for a Final Fantasy game and not a Zelda game. I still like it though.

What's really important here is that the box looks like something epic, something magical. Zelda games used to be epic adventures in the past and the adventure would already start with unboxing the game. It featured some epic artwork on the box (the sword and shield from the Zelda NES Classics for example), the box included a map of Hyrule and the manual would feature lots of beautiful artwork and descriptions for all enemies and items. That was something! What do you get today? A recycling box with a small sheet for the basics. That's it. And that's an insult to the Zelda series. Zelda needs to be the epic game that everyone wants to play again and it already starts with boxes that scream "omg buy me".

Source: Go Nintendo (via Zelda Informer)

DM-Kokiri_Forest (Beta)

Two of my absolute favorite gaming franchises, Unreal and Zelda, collide in this map made for Unreal Tournament 3 by Chris Pow aka ChangingZephyr. It's a remake of the Kokiri Forest setting as a Deathmatch arena. It's still in beta phase and far from perfect, but worth a look.

Over at Epic Games Forums you can download the map and give some feedback like I already did. If you do not have UT3, you can take a look at this Youtube video and these screenshots:





Lightning needs to be improved as well as item and weapon placement. And overall the Kokiri Forest isn't really the ideal place for a Deathmatch environment, it's too open and the Deku Tree area is completely disconnected from the action. Kakariko Village probably would have been a better setting, it's not as open thanks to the various houses and the tower in the center could be used for an awesome but very risky sniper spot. If I had the time, I would make a Kakariko Village Deathmatch map myself...

Well, I'll keep you posted about this map.

Portal Meets Zelda

Watch: Dorkly Bits: Link to the Past with a Portal Gun

This is epic. And funny, I especially love the last move, nice way to defeat Ganon. And the Moldorm scene is so spot on, oh how I hate this fight. Also makes we wanna play Portal right now.

There's also a Mario one.

Via: Kotaku