The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

The drought is over. Im posting for the first time in many weeks and I am happy to say it is a very rare post for me, a video game. I realized recently that I have played many of the Zelda games but I have not beaten one of my childhood favorites, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I remember playing it a lot as a child but I never managed to start it and play it all the way through till the end, so that is what I set out to do. I started in the middle of last week and I played the entire first section of the game, the light world, in about two hours. I was very pleased with myself and perhaps I forgot the length of the game but I went on to brag to several fellow posters about the fact that I had beat "half" the game. I was sorely mistaken in this statement, as I had completed in reality less than a quarter. Embarrassed and re-energized by my mistake I set out to complete the game in a timely but thorough fashion. I am proud to announce that I completed the game in less than a week and when I say completed I mean COMPLETED. I got every item, including all four bottles, the care of byrna, the magic cape and even all three magic coins.

The game play was much as I remembered as a child. The game, initially on SNES, has been, as I believe Sweeney has recently stated, "dated." The graphics were probably top of the line in its heyday but absolutely nothing to write home about today. I played a downloaded version on the wii and I felt that the game continually lagged and sometimes completely froze for a couple seconds. This did not hinder my game experience but it lead me to ask myself whether it was the downloaded version of the game that caused this problem or if the SNES version suffered from the same problem. I will add this to my list of questions I will probably never go far enough to actually research the answer to.

The game consists of three "temples" in the light world, a desert one, a water one and a woods one. Then it consisted of seven temples in the alternate dark world that the boss Gannon sucks you into after you defeat his alter ego the magician at the end of the light world segment. The first three temples are child's play in comparison to the seven dark world temples. The boss at the end of the first dark world temple took me seven tries and three or four controller throws to complete. After dying for the umpteenth time in the sixth dungeon I threw a temper tantrum, shut off the wii and walked away too cool off. only to realize later that I hadn't saved for quite a while before doing so and I ended up having to replay a good chunk of the game, a good punishment for my childish behavior.

Over all the game was fun and I am glad I played it all the way through. It was a staple of my childhood that I really needed to complete. Playing this game mostly reminded me that I have very little patience for video games and that I have a short temper with a tendency to announce to any innocent bystander that the makers of the game were assholes and that the inanimate bad guys were cheating. I threw a minimum of a dozen hissy fits and alienated most of my family. To them I am sorry, mostly because I have rejuvenated my desire to be a faithful and diligent addition to the back blog and that includes nailing down some other video games I have half played, including another member or two of the Zelda saga.