Monday, June 20, 2011

Of Course There's No Anniversary Collection

Recent news (example) reported that Nintendo said no to the idea of a Zelda Anniversary collection. Mainly because they did the same for Mario last year with the re-release of Mario Allstars.

This is no surprise at all. Why? Because there's the Virtual Console and Nintendo wants to sell the games there. It got all the classic console Zelda games already with the exception of Master Quest, which reappears on 3DS anyway. And by now there's even a Virtual Handheld on the Nintendo 3DS for GameBoy games as well. Link's Awakening DX is already there and the Oracle games will most likely follow. If they add GameBoy Advance games somewhen in the future (they probably will), all Zelda games are somehow playable on the current systems, Nintendo Wii and 3DS. The Virtual Consoles prevent Nintendo from making any new collections. All the old games are there and they want to be downloaded, collections would completely kill this service. Mario Allstars was a different case, because it never was available on Virtual Console and now probably never will be.

Also, there's the remake of Ocarina of Time and Nintendo wants to sell it. Who wants to buy the remake, if you can buy a compilation of lots of Zelda games including Ocarina of Time for the same price? Since Ocarina of Time 3D doesn't offer any new content and the graphics are not that important, this is a deal. But when they made the Collector's Edition for Gamecube, they left out A Link to the Past, because they just released the new GameBoy Advance version. If there would be a new Collector's Edition, then Ocarina of Time might get the same treatment. But who wants to buy a Zelda collection, which is missing the best Zelda game?



Talking about the Collector's Edition (was released on GameCube, see picture above), some people suggested to simply re-release the Collector's Edition for Wii. But this is a terrible idea, the collection is completely outdated, it was lacking A Link to the Past and Majora's Mask tends to freeze, unlike the new Virtual Console version. And who wants to play a demo of The Wind Waker and watch a trailer of it, if the game is already eight, nine years on the market? And of course the video covering "all" of the Zelda series is absolutely outdated. To have this bonus disc was really, really cool back then on the GameCube, but simply re-releasing it is not an option.

No comments: