The Legend of Zelda

As with so many classics from the days of the NES, playing the original Legend of Zelda 26 years after the fact makes it feel incredibly dated. I do have vague memories of being a young gamer (like, 6 years old) running around and killing things in Hyrule, and I'm pretty sure I accidentally stumbled upon the final level by accident and the creepy music gave me quite a scare, but I never actually got too far with the original Legend of Zelda. This all ended... about a month ago, when I finished that last sentence. Oh god, I've put off this entry for quite a while. It's no knock on the game, merely the fact that I've kept myself busy in the month of December. Not even logging, but holy crap has Halo 4 multi-player taken up a lot of my time. Anyway, Zelda. It's the original, and it's hard to ignore how revolutionary this game was. A lengthy adventure game like this didn't really exist at the time and it's made with such high quality that it's still playable today. Not particularly fun anymore, but playable. It's completely bare-bones Zelda- a 'plot' that exists in a sentence or two, tons of exploring and finding items, stumbling onto dungeons, and such. I played this as a downloadable title on my 3DS, and as such was able to take advantage of an emulator-like save feature that lets you save at literally any moment in the game, no matter what is happening, which made this significantly easier than normal- you could save after each enemy kill in particularly hard areas. Still I found the game pretty tough- the old NES controls are pretty unforgiving. I'm happy I got the original Legend of Zelda out of the way for completion's sake, but I won't be returning to this first installment again.