Zelda 64 - Ocarina of Time : EDGE's "best game of the century!"

The January edition of the superb EDGE magazine - which covers the gaming industry, through all platforms, including coin-ops - features the reviewers' opinion on the TOP 100 video games ever produced, until the end of 1999.

According to EDGE, the best three games are #1 - Zelda 64, Ocarina of Time ; #2 - Super Mario 64 and #3 - GoldenEye, all for the NINTENDO 64, a gaming console that payed a very high price for not using a CD as its storage medium... In fact, if it wasn't for that and for NINTENDO's strict policy towards third party developers, the N64 could easily have been a SONY's PLAYSTATION crusher, since it is said to be easier to program and clearly has better hardware specs, except for using a cartridge...

EDGE's top 3 is very much valid, although I miss ZX Spectrum's KnighLore on the TOP 100. In fact, there is only one ZX Spectrum game considered on the list: John Ritman's Head over Heels @ position #65, ahead of celebs like GTA - Grand Theft Auto and Wipeout!

NINTENDO's achievement on "eating" all the podium is even more relevant, when you think that the top 3 games are all in-house productions! This means that they are games done by NINTENDO itself and not contracted to some alien studio... with the eventual exception of GoldenEye, which is a RARE release. Do you know about RARE? If you ever owned a ZX Spectrum you must know!, since RARE is Ultimate Play The Game! RARE is now a british studio, 20% owned by NINTENDO.

There are some "politics" going on for Head over Heels, as the ZX Spectrum representative, instead of KnightLore... This way, EDGE didn't forget RARE [by awarding their N64 software], and found a way to award the genius of John Ritman, which soccer fans might recall from Match Day and Match Day 2! Yeah, those were the days when soccer was fun! Nowadays, I simply **hate** soccer / european football / whatever you might call it! In Portugal it became a sport that shrinks the population's brain! [literally]

For most PC users, EDGE's opinion will be kind of unexpected, but then again, most PC users can't see beyondQuake... and some even beyond Doom :). The best placed PC game is Quake 2 [ranking #6]. Although I understand the option for Quake 2, I think the PC does better with RTS [Real Time Strategy] games, and if there was a gender to associate with the personal computer, that would be it, thus a software piece like Command & Conquer would have been better.

The best thing on EDGE's TOP 100 is not forgetting"true" games... and the best example is Tetris, for the GameBoy! I couldn't agree more! Tetris scores position #4.

On a slightly different topic, EDGE #80 [issue eighty] sells in two different covers! This isn't the first time EDGE goes double cover - the first one was with the Wipeout 64 edition - but surely is the best occasion to do so, since the magazine has a strong feature on Black & White, a game that should redefine many approaches to entertainment.

Black & White will sell in two versions [hence the two EDGE covers]: the white... and the black. The white version is more expensive [+£5 @ UK] and puts you playing "the good side"; the black version doesn't put you giving money to charity [for that is where the extra pounds go], and - of course - throws you to Inferno :)

If I am doing a research / software project on humor [and I am!- Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Agents, Humor], Black & White goes moral! Of course I am just one, and B&W is a million pound driven software, developed over the last few years, by a very much experience team, but hey... keep cool!

N64 emulation

Of course NINTENDO's high score on EDGE, will put - again - PC users on the run for N64 emulators... As you might know, there is a superb N64 emulator, capable of running the aforementioned top 3 games in your PC!!

UltraHLE is not that easy to download these days, after severe legal action from NINTENDO against websites posting it, but you should find it after some minutes digging the Net, if you are interested... Then you'll just have to dump your original cartridges to a ROM file, or go hunt for the very same ROM, dumped by someone else... another search that has its legal questions...

Straight to the point, do try your best to play the N64! Zelda 64 is such a pure & beautiful game, that you'll probably want to reach the end, non-stop! And GoldenEye might teach the over-hyped Mr. Carmack, some stuff on playability...