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Collection essentials #552 & #553: The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures (GC) and GameCube – Game Boy Advance link cable

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Here’s a rather peculiar Zelda release. Previously, the GBA remake of A Link to the Past included “Four Swords” as a multiplayer-focused bonus game of sorts. The existence of such a thing is pretty normal, but it’s very interesting how they decided to make a full-on, standalone sequel for it on a console. The game uses 2D graphics, which wasn’t really the norm for console games at the time which were mostly focused on the latest cutting-edge 3D visuals. But what really makes Four Swords Adventures stand out is the way it utilizes a certain accessory, the GameCube – Game Boy Advance link cable. This little cable does what you’d probably guess, it connects a Game Boy Advance to the GameCube for special compatibility with certain games. Sometimes this is a way for GBA games and their GC counterparts to talk with each other in some way, such as with storing and trading Pokémon. In this case, Four Swords Adventures doesn’t interact with any GBA title, but instead just uses the Game Boy Adva...
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Collection essentials #551: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (GC)

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The first Legend of Zelda game for the new generation was hotly anticipated. And no one saw what was coming. Instead of evolving the same graphical style used in Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, the developers decided to give Wind Waker an entirely different and distinct look. The game’s graphics use “cel shading,” something that makes video games look more “cartoon-like.” It’s a very stylish choice, and one that really helps Wind Waker stand out. The game’s opening story tells a legend of a great evil and a “hero of time” who appeared and defeated it, something that fans will recognize as the events of Ocarina of Time. Wind Waker takes place many years in the future, in which the great evil (Ganon) has returned again but this time without a hero to slay him. The world now completely different, as characters live on a series of islands amidst a vast ocean.  The protagonist, another boy named Link, lives on one of these islands, and the plot gets moving when his sister is kidnappe...
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Collection essentials #550: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (GC)

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Ocarina of Time had been one of Nintendo’s biggest smash hits of the previous generation, for the Nintendo 64. To read more about it, please see my blog post about it . When Ocarina first hit store shelves, Nintendo had plans for an alternate version of the game. It would have been released for an add-on system for the 64, but after many delays to said add-on, those plans had to be scrapped. They could have easily discarded the idea and moved on to other pursuits, but luckily they opted to bring it to life another way. This release, as the box advertises, is two games in one. There’s a port of the original Ocarina of Time here, with nothing but button colors tampered with. And then, there’s an all-new version: Master Quest. What is Master Quest? It’s mostly the same game, except the biggest part of the gameplay has been reimagined. In Master Quest, all of the game’s dungeons have been redesigned. They’re still the same locales as in the original game, with the same graphics, music and ...
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Collection essentials #549: Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (GC)

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By 2005, Nintendo had been in the business of 3D consoles for nearly a decade. It took this long for Fire Emblem to finally be seen in 3D. During the Nintendo 64 era, Intelligent Systems developed the fifth Fire Emblem game for the…aging Super Famicom (Super Nintendo), the last Nintendo-published game on that platform, and no Fire Emblem ever graced the Nintendo 64. The series had shifted to the 2D handheld Game Boy Advance for a few years before finally hitting the GameCube late in its lifespan.  Path of Radiance features a brand new continent, standing alone story-wise from the previous game. The continent of Tellius is home to Beorc (humans) and the Laguz (half-beast people who can temporarily transform into full-on beasts). You play as Ike, son of a warrior named Greil who leads a band of mercenaries to which Ike is a new recruit. The nearby nation of Daein is up to no good, and the game’s cast gets caught up in shenanigans after rescuing a woman who escaped from them. The stor...
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Collection essentials #548: F-Zero GX (GC)

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The new console generation had a lot of potential for F-Zero. The previous console entry, F-Zero X, sacrificed nice graphics for a buttery-smooth framerate. A GameCube F-Zero game wouldn’t have to make such compromises. To help bring it to fruition, Nintendo teamed up with their former rival Sega who would serve as chief developer. The results were spectacular. F-Zero GX feels in some ways like a reimaging of F-Zero X, with similar gameplay concepts and the same large cast of characters returning. As a sort of reimagining, the game’s controls and the ways the vehicles move have a different feel to them. Not every mode and element from X returns here, as the X Cup and Death Race are omitted for example. But there are new modes that take their place, such as a nine-chapter story mode and a sophisticated vehicle creator where users get to create a racing machine by putting different parts together. GX takes full advantage of the GameCube’s power and delivers what were stunning graphics fo...
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Collection essentials #547: DreamMix TV: World Fighters (GC)

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With the success of Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series, it’s no surprise that there would be imitators. Here’s an interesting one that only saw the light of day in Japan. DreamMix TV was developed by a little-known company called Bitstep, and published by Hudson, and they managed to get rights from video game giant Konami and toy company Takara for a rather quirky crossover roster. The game looks at first glance like a Smash Bros. ripoff, but it doesn’t quite play the same. The objective of Smash Bros. is to knock your opponent(s) off the stage, which becomes easier to do the more a character has been beaten up. But ring-outs aren’t a thing in DreamMix TV. Instead, characters have health a little more like in a regular fighting game (although it’s represented strangely, with every characters’ health represented in relation to one another in the same meter at the bottom of the screen). When you knock down a character who has no health, a large heart flies out of them, and if an opponen...
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Collection essentials #546: Donkey Kong Jungle Beat with DK Bongos (GC)

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British developer Rare had catapulted Nintendo’s Donkey Kong into being an iconic franchise star in the mid-’90s with the release of Donkey Kong Country. And for nearly a decade, Rare was the one generally in charge of making Donkey Kong games, fittingly. However, in 2002, early in the new console generation, Rare was bought out by competitor Microsoft to develop games for their new Xbox. And so, Donkey Kong’s future was in doubt. For a couple years there were no major Donkey Kong titles on the GameCube.  At the end of 2003, a Donkey Kong rhythm game spinoff called “Donkey Konga” was made with a completely original “DK Bongos” controller, from the same people who made the popular Taiko Drum Master series, featuring similar gameplay. There are several releases of Donkey Konga, officially three games in total but seven in a sense since each release in one of the three major regions has a different song list. I do own some Donkey Konga games, but they aren’t making my list because I h...
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