Worst of CNN

"The Legend of Zelda" introduces a young hero named Link who sets off on an adventure to save Princess Zelda from an evil warlock. Through combat, puzzle-solving and item collection, our determined protagonist wades through eight dungeons to solve the single-player quest. Crude graphics aside, "Zelda" translates well onto the Game Boy. (4.5 stars out of 5)

CNN reviews the "retro" SPs, out now but only gives Zelda 4.5/5 stars and Super Mario 4/5. What the heck deserves a 5, then?

Comments

[Rob Drimmie]

I'm of the school of thought that every game to date has signficant flaws, I've yet to encounter a perfect.

Of course, when your rating is star-based, that degree of anal nit-pickery is pretty useless. I think Super Mario Bros. 3 was better by far than 1, so I can see 1 getting a 4, maybe they're holding out with the original Zelda for similar reasons.

The games rock, but maybe they can't all be 5s?

[dj]

Zelda is the most influential console game of all time. People have replayed it hundreds of times. And if even "Link's Awakening," "Wind Waker," and "Link to the Past" are all superior, obviously they don't exist without the original adventure. It's a 5.

[qrs]

tetris deserves the 5.

[Rob Drimmie]

I disagree that Zelda's the most influential console game, and even if it were that alone doesn't seem reason to me to award the game five stars.

It's high as hell up there, but early games like Pitfall, M.U.L.E., Hero and countless others defined genres and influence games and gameplay to this day.

Do any of them deserve a retroactive 5-star when their influence is considered? I don't know. Mostly I just don't think that influence is a valuable metric when rating a game. The game needs to be able to stand side-to-side with current titles and still evidence a great deal of merit (the fact that graphics were severly limited due to technological constraints deserves to be weighed into the calculation, but story entertainment value and to some degree gameplay are all timeless metrics).

The fact that a game that's what, over 15 years old now still rates a 4.5 is pretty impressive to me.

As I've discussed with dj off-site, my memory of the first Zelda is far from perfect, so I can't really honestly judge whether or not it deserves a 5, I just don't think anything automatically deserves a perfect score because of what it influenced.

[yi]

super mario bros. 3 gets a 5 from me, for sure.

i think zoocube is a rather genius puzzle game perfect for gba. ms. pacman is a favorite of mine as well.