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Ask Joystiq Nintendo: Expressing Interest Edition
In this week's Ask Joystiq Nintendo, a reader brings up a subject we had managed to stop thinking about for a while: the Japan-exclusive Super Famicom remake of The Legend of Zelda. And now we're going to be bummed out all day thinking about all the stuff we're doing instead of playing that.Do you have a Nintendo-related question? Email it in to asknintendo AT joystiq DOT com, and we'll (daydream about BS Satellaview Zelda while we) investigate it for you!
Zelda Week: the Zelda games you'll never play
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.
