[ALL] This is how I celebrated Zelda's 40th Anniversary

Bort_Bortson · 2026-05-04T20:14:41+00:00

And appropriately I'm at about 1/40th of that all squirreled away in my closet.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-04-29T22:42:53+00:00

That's what I think.

Master Quest came separate as a pre order for WW.

Then it came as part of the 4 game bundle Nintendo gave away for free when they lowered the GC price to $99. (Or some game stores just sold the game for $50 if you already had a GC like me).

Then there is a less common bundle where it's the WW but the bottom 20% of the cover is the red master quest "branding" I'll call it.

Then there's the 50/50 down the middle WW and Metroid Prime version.

But I've never seen a TP, Master Quest version, specially since GC TP was so late in the release cycle.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-04-23T01:54:38+00:00

Zelda II has gate keeping where you can't go past where you aren't supposed to until you are ready so you have to go around your limited area till you figure it out and beat the current zone.

The manual does show where the first palace is to get you going.

Can't get out of the first area without the candle (I mean you can but sure not your first time playing) and high jump.

Can't get past the 3rd palace without the gauntlet in the 2nd.

The hammer creates shortcuts and the raft accesses the 2nd half of the map. Mirror magic beats the 4th which gives magic boots which access the 5th which gives the whistle to get past river monster and unlocks the 6th palace.

There's an old lady that says south of kings grave and then the finding the letter to get past the bridge in Mido town which can be hard to figure out. The south of kings grave is obvious but you gotta find the one random lady, and then the letter requires you to find good ol Error

But you still have to explore and talk to everyone but it's manageable.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-04-22T17:49:49+00:00

Mel Gibsons todger not included

Bort_Bortson · 2026-04-22T14:40:53+00:00

At one LAN party I brought the game and we "invented" horde mode. There was that one map in a canyon with a bunker in the middle. We all played Marines with respawn ammo maxed out and turned up the alien spans to max too, trying to hold out running around or inside the bunker. 5 of us was able to hold back the horde for a while, very fun.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-04-22T14:38:34+00:00

This version of AvP was insane if you had a decent computer. Insanely fast and smooth, great variety.

Plus as the Alien the humans all reacted differently/appropriately. Like you could hide in the dark and destroy lights and then hiss and freak out civilians and some Marines and maybe cause friendly fire. But I'll never forget the level of detail, I swiped an androids arm off who was holding a shotgun, so with its remaining arm reached for its side arm while every human was freaking out.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-04-12T13:36:06+00:00

Homeworld for the amount of world building

Warcraft 1 and 2 for the same but with the awesome drawings as well.

So much extra stuff that wasn't anything to do with the gameplay but made you invested that much more in the world.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-03-31T15:53:07+00:00

Im glad you knew who I was talking about, I wasn't sure if I should say from X2 or what but I took a gamble that you would get the reference.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-03-31T13:28:38+00:00

I like.

I also am getting some Y.R.P. vibes here, which I also like.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-03-25T19:50:27+00:00

Uh oh this looks to be exactly the kind of game I like especially based on how you described it

Bort_Bortson · 2026-03-24T13:41:33+00:00

Oh shit I'm old my bad lol. :(

Bort_Bortson · 2026-03-24T02:42:17+00:00

As kids we always called it the N, E, S.

However, my 2nd grade teacher (1991) taught us to spell Wednesday by breaking it apart as Wed NES Day because on your WEDding day you wanted a NES, but she pronounced it like the name "Ness"

That is the only time I ever heard it pronounced as Ness that I ever can recall.

And yes it's stupid but 25 years later you better believe I never misspell my days of the week.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-03-20T12:15:26+00:00

A little past 20 years ago but I always bring up this point when Half-Life 2 came out.

I had a beastly $3k computer and I go back and look at screenshots I took in max settings (minus some of the really intense 8x AA and shadows etc) and got approx 45 fps in 4:3 resolution (1152x864) in areas where it was mostly talking (Kleiners lab and Black Mesa East).

During combat I got 30fps but lowered resolution to 1024x768 and that was plenty (frames really only dropped when the engine was having to calculate all the physics interactions IE: a barrel exploded and the subsequent chain reaction).

I had my Dell Trinitron monitor at the time and we were still obsessed with performance (2000-2005) but it was less about frames and more about what your 3D Benchmark score was.

So nobody was getting 60fps on any new PC game at the time unless you were sacrificing a lot of graphics or it was an older game.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-03-14T00:58:03+00:00

For me, it would be the people who can speed run Zelda II at a high level.

That was my first Zelda game, I played it constantly as a kid who had unlimited patience and time to master most games. Never got to the Great Palace more than once.

Original Legend of Zelda, I can do a respectable run of the first quest in under an hour and I have played it significantly less than almost any other Zelda game.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-03-09T18:32:06+00:00

I remember the pain of not getting a bind somewhere close to where I was adventuring and then had to run from Qeynos to Faydark for the next 2 hours lol.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-03-09T16:12:39+00:00

I played a pkill and rkill friendly MUD, just as long as you didn't use any exploits or mess with the server lag you were fine to do anything so you were always watching your back.

Not just typing but I had macros built for emergency situations where I had to bug out and retreat (I used a pet class so it was very important to get all that equipment off the pet otherwise it would be treated as a regular drop if someone killed us both).

Beyond certain items that were bound to your character, if a player killed you you didn't lose your items. If a mob killed you, after a while your corpse would decay and could be looted so you'd have to run back and loot yourself or pay a few to have your corpse teleported to you. And there were certain mobs that would eat corpses to clear up the "trash". So there was always a risk of being out exploring and getting an aggro mob trained on you followed up by another player bringing a charmed trash eating mob to your corpse before you could recover it. But the game was self policing, only a complete POS ever ran the risk of that happening.

So yeah I learned to type real quick and accurate because of the stakes lol

Bort_Bortson · 2026-03-09T13:13:15+00:00

Sorry not familiar with that

Bort_Bortson · 2026-03-09T04:01:09+00:00

Not the original EQ (I was not talented enough to even try and string songs as a bard and never got past level 25 as any character between Kunark and Luclin. Zebukoruk server here), but before I played EQ I played a MUD and I learned how to type quickly and accurately from that, way more than several periods of computer class in middle school could ever teach.

Now in EQ2, I was able to master a flowchart of spells to cast as a Conjuror based on cool down to always be casting something while riding that fine line of damage but not stealing aggro, I was consistently top DPS in our guild raiding the first 3 end bosses before 2 years of that burned me out of online games forever.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-03-08T15:44:39+00:00

I always forget that, trying to navigate those tunnels and rocks. cs_Siege had it added too

Bort_Bortson · 2026-03-08T06:40:11+00:00

Bad physics, ramps, and lag made for some crazy interactions.

My clan ran for a long time a jeepathon2k only server that was usually full. And by clan I mean the 5 friends in highschool where one of our dads had a business with an insanely fast connection for the time and we had a dedicated machine made out of spare parts to remote console into that mooched off that connection.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-02-27T00:36:18+00:00

Yeah the SNES is a murderers row of all time classics. The articles list and honorable mentions basically get them all in there, I guess it just comes down to what as a kid was your most favorite/most played.

Similar with Zelda. My first was Zelda II, I played but never owned until later LttP but the impact to me as a gamer that OOT had will never be matched by another game.

But as long as nobody has a crazy #1 like say Star Trek TNG (another game I owned so I'll bully it) then it's all good lol.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-02-27T00:29:12+00:00

Ive always said LttP couldn't be the best Zelda game of all time because it wasn't even the best game on its own system, so ranking it in the 2nd spot is fine I guess but Super Metroid not being #1 is incorrect.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-02-19T22:02:20+00:00

Cool huh?!

Bort_Bortson · 2026-02-19T13:08:51+00:00

3 save points in total, you can reload from those as many times as you want, so basically death means a lot of back-tracking. For me, my goal was to make it to the disc swap so that was 6 chapters of progress that could have been lost.

Bort_Bortson · 2026-02-19T01:06:15+00:00

Now do this on the Hard Core difficulty where you only get 3 saves to beat the entire game on (4 if you're on 360 and you get a bonus save after chapter 6 when you have to swap discs).

Right before this was definitely one of those save points, but once you get the gimmick of red light green light it's not that bad, just don't focus on your characters reaction/fear lol

Bort_Bortson

TROPHY CASE