Stalling For Time: Twilight Princess Delays
4/01/06
I seriously debated putting this up here, after all in a year or so it will be obsolete, but I figured it'd be good for a laugh at some future point anyway so here it is.
Why do they keep delaying the release of Twilight Princess?
They say they are working out the last details, cleaning up the graphics and such, but they've been saying that for the last six months! Plus I just read an article in Nintendo Power that said "the wolf is almost done" - if that's all the farther they are six months after the game was supposed to be released... well, then I have something to say about their time management skills. What were they doing the last four years? Sleeping?
But I have another theory. You see, Brian, my dad, and myself were discussing the differences between "Harvest Moon: It's a Wonderful Life" and "Harvest Moon: Magical Melody". How the first is graphically so much more realistic, but has very little in the way of story depth, and the second has more cartoonish graphics, but much more storyline. We refelcted that this seems to be true of many Gamecube titles and decided that the size of the Gamecube discs probably makes it difficult to have both complex graphics and stroyline. After all, Tales took up two discs, and the graphics weren't realistic at all...
What does this have to do with Z:TP? Well, if Nintendo is to be believed, this game will have awesomely realistic graphics, right down to the wind blowing the fur on the wolf as he jumps you, and an incredibly expansive world, plus our typical level of puzzles and complexity in dungeons, and the Zelda storylines and side quests we all love. We're thinking this is a mighty big order for those mighty tiny discs. I believe my exact estimate was that the game would take 17 discs... that's a lot of disc changing. And since Zelda has always allowed you to travel back and forth practically at will... that would severely limit the player's mobility. Can't you just see having to switch discs to go back home to buy a new shield? Yeah... not fun. So our theory is that they figured this slight problem out a bit late... and now they're stalling until Revolution comes out.
Of course, I may be way off base. Maybe they suddenly realized that they drew everybody's faces on upside down. But we'll know soon (we hope!)