Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.
Though we featured a number of Zelda commercials earlier this week, like Vanessa Williams, we've saved the best for last. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, arguably the finest handheld game ever released, had its share of unusual ads, relying on corny rappers and wacky puppetry to sell the ARPG in the US and Japan. In the UK, however, gamers were treated to the slapstick humor of one of Britain's most distinguished comedians.
"Still surprised to catch you, every time.
Still surprised to catch you, by and by and by and by."
"Butterfly Nets," Bishop Allen's carefree track from the band's May EP, might not share the same blood as The Legend of Zelda series, but if you stand the two side-by-side, comparing their congruent features and similar jawlines, you'll see how they could be from the same family tree, or at least the same family orchard.
The New Gamer has put up a downloadable mp3 of the song, as well as an analysis on how its lyrics and mollifying tone unintentionally matches that sense of discovery and wonder one often has when exploring Hyrule. The track's title itself recalls memories of chasing flitting bees and fairies with a bug-catching net in A Link to the Past.
On a somewhat related note, we had the pleasure of meeting Bishop Allen's lead singer, Justin Rice, when the Brooklyn-based indie band was touring with Mates of State a few years ago. He started chatting with us in a public restroom, visibly three sheets to the wind, while we were washing our hands, and somewhere during the conversation, he convinced himself that we were searching for a misplaced friend. We parted ways several minutes later, and he promised to keep an eye out for our off-course comrade. We wonder if he ever found him ...
Having covered our favorite fan-made Link artwork two days ago, we're sharing with you our most beloved official pieces today. These illustrations from the Official Nintendo Player's Guide books that supplemented A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening have always been, without a doubt, our favorite art for The Legend of Zelda series.
Their use of color and light sources vividly recreate scenes from the early NES, Game Boy, and SNES games better than anything we've ever seen before. We have dropped a few choice images from the books past the break so you can see what we mean -- don't miss out!
The "Enemy Bait" item was required in three of The Legend of Zelda's dungeons, to get past hungry Goriyas like this one. As an aside, that's one of the least intuitive puzzles we can think of, and we have no idea how we ever got through it the first time.
But the Enemy Bait was sold (by the "BUY SOMETHIN' WILL YA?" guy and his friend, the "BOY, THIS IS REALLY EXPENSIVE!" guy) primarily as a means of diverting enemies during a fight. Our question: have any of you ever used Enemy Bait for that purpose? Did you even consider using Enemy Bait in the overworld? Was it useful?
The deviantart page for user DekuPyro is littered with all sorts of homemade Zelda memorabilia. From painted keychains to the coin you see to your right, DekuPyro is quite the Zelda fan. And that's the kind of thing we love to see.
The horrific animated cutscenes from the CD-I Zelda games are hilarious enough without any help-- honestly, the only way we can even begin to accept that people made these, and then watched them and decided they were fit for release is if we believe that they did it as a joke. We've embedded the original cutscenes from Link: The Faces of Evil, Zelda: Wand of Gamelon, and the less-common live-action (!) Zelda's Adventure after the break, just in case you haven't seen them.
Those are provided as background for our Zelda Week Featured Friday Video: a mashup of scenes from Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: Wand of Gamelon called "Swords for Dinner." It takes the unintentional humor found in the original videos' weird, jerky animation and pointless dialogue and makes it into a screamingly hilarious story that is only marginally stranger than whatever was happening in the real videos.
It's been a long week filled with Zeldalicious fun, but it has to end sometime. While the themed coverage will continue through Sunday, this is the last of our week long edition of Show and Tell. We're as sad as you are, and we didn't even get through everyone's submissions! If you didn't see your stuff featured here, don't fret -- we'll continue to take our weekly look at your gaming gear, and so there's still plenty of chances for us to revisit some of this week's submissions.
As for today's edition, we wanted to focus on the biggest and the best -- and that means collections. Some of you had some really nice sets of Zelda gear, and this day's for you. Check out the gallery below to see everything, including half of reader Kimya's collection. Yes, half -- the other half is back home in Spain, but she has a Flickr set she keeps adding things to as well. We said wow.
Okay, that's it. We're done. From now on, gamer weddings just don't matter. They're empty, soulless shells next to this. Sure, Tetris cakes are awesome, and Zelda ice sculptures are cool as, well, ice, but this one takes the cake -- literally. This Wind Waker-inspired wedding cake is a work of art. We're pretty sure we wouldn't even be able to cut it, much less eat it ... in fact, we would need to create some sort of force field technology to preserve this thing until the end times. Bounce on over to Kotaku if you want to see the top in detail, and weep that you do not have such an item preserved on a high shelf in your home.
Since earlier this week, we've been arguing about the best of all possible Zeldas, but it's time to discuss the worst. From the votes (or lack thereof), we might guess that Four Swords Adventures might take the prize, but we guess that the real answer may be more complex than that. So tell us -- which game captivated you the least? Did you finish it, or put it aside? What didn't appeal to you -- and why do your favorites appeal more?
In the midst of our celebration of all things Zelda, we asked you to choose, once and for all, your favorites from the franchise (up to, but not including Phantom Hourglass). It was a hard fight, but as many might have guessed, Ocarina of Time snatched the console title away from A Link to the Past. The handheld fight was a little closer -- skip on past the break to see the results of that wrestling match -- but votes were very much weighed in favor of two of the five titles, whereas votes on the console games were more spread out.
The final results might not have been too surprising when it comes to the winner, but the fact that every single game got at least a few votes certainly is. Now that's the mark of a good franchise!
So long as we're spending a whole week assailing you with links about Link, we thought we'd share with you one of the best fan-made art pieces we've seen for the green-capped adventurer. Jainai Jeffries created this amazing realistic envisioning of Link last year, posing him on a tree porcupined with red-fletched arrows. Past the post break, you can check out an uncolored version of the above image and several other video game reinterpretations Jainai has illustrated.
It's time to get away from the body in our special week-long presentation of Show and Tell, and get into something fun. Being a dedicated Zelda fan isn't just about clothes and tattoos -- it's about what you do with the rest of your existence. This means toys, electronics, and even art can hold up your love as a banner for the world to see, and that's what we're looking at in today's edition. Jaunt on past the break to see what what we mean.
Do you have some awesome Zelda gear? Anything from t-shirts to tattoos, to statues and standees, if it features Link, we want to help you show it off. Snap some pics and send 'em to showmeit [at] dsfanboy [dot] com. If we don't get to your stuff this week, we can always show you off in a later edition!
You might think if a level designer at Blizzard opts for a gamer wedding, the main decorative theme might be something like Night Elves and Gnomes, but that's not how Cory Stockton rolls. No, he and his new wife Christi went for something a little more classic: Nintendo.
Clearly, we approve of this decision. Also, of the completely outrageous and awesome ice sculpture, which looks just about perfect for Zelda week. Maybe we could get one of those for the DS Fanboy offices ....
The cake, of course, featured Nintendo themes, with Mario and Peach perched on the top tier, and all of the tables were named after consoles. But the best part? Even the wedding's music was lifted from classic Nintendo games. Now we're officially jealous.
Check out the full gallery at Joystiq to see what a real gamer wedding looks like. We must say: it's epic.
The Legend of Zelda: The Light of Courage is Nintendo fandom gone horribly, horribly right. It's a tale of adventure, lazy eyes and mean-spirited pranks against an IGN forum member.
The Light of Courage got its start when someone convinced an IGN poster named JoeCracker that animation company DIC was interested in using his fanfic as the basis for a new animated Zelda series. Then, to really sell the story, some guys, pretending to be Super Mario Bros. Super Show/The Legend of Zelda producer John Grusd, posted a CG "test animation" featuring a scene from JoeCracker's script. You can see that first animation above.
But they didn't stop there. Two more Light of Courage videos were produced, and they are epic. The lulz generated by parts 2 and 3 of The Light of Courage make up for pretty much all the other Zelda fanfic out there. We don't even really know what to say about them, except that they're embedded after the break, and that we hope we don't have to draw you a map to help you get there. And, if you like them, the Light of Courage homepage has higher-quality (sort of) WMV versions of all the videos, and even the promise of a fourth!
The Broadcast Satellaview was a peripheral for the Super Famicom that allowed Japanese gamers to download games, sort of like the Sega Channel or, well, the Virtual Console. Pretty much the only Satellaview games ever mentioned are in the Zelda series, and amount to a few oddball remakes/adaptations of existing Zelda games.
The first, shown above, was a Super Mario All-Stars style remake of The Legend of Zelda, with some pretty significant differences. Most notably, it was serialized. The game was broadcast over the satellite system over four weeks (from 4pm to 7pm daily), and only one section of the game could be played per week.
However, it wasn't just a pretty, frequently-interrupted The Legend of Zelda. In fact, it's something of a "Third Quest." The overworld map was cut in half, and locations and enemies were mixed up. The dungeon maps were also all redrawn (the maps of the six dungeons spell out "St. GIGA", the name of the satellite network), and Link was replaced by a generic boy or girl "from another world." But those are among the least shocking changes made to this game.
The deviantart page for user DekuPyro is littered with all sorts of homemade Zelda memorabilia. From painted keychains to the coin you see to your right, DekuPyro is quite the Zelda fan. And that's the kind of thing we love to see.
It's been a long week filled with Zeldalicious fun, but it has to end sometime. While the themed coverage will continue through Sunday, this is the last of our week long edition of Show and Tell. We're as sad as you are, and we didn't even get through everyone's submissions! If you didn't see your stuff featured here, don't fret -- we'll continue to take our weekly look at your gaming gear, and so there's still plenty of chances for us to revisit some of this week's submissions.
Since earlier this week, we've been arguing about the best of all possible Zeldas, but it's time to discuss the worst. From the votes (or lack thereof), we might guess that Four Swords Adventures might take the prize, but we guess that the real answer may be more complex than that. So tell us -- which game captivated you the least? Did you finish it, or put it aside? What didn't appeal to you -- and why do your favorites appeal more?
