Making games gets harder, longer, and more expensive every year, but nobody seems to have told Nintendo. The platform-holder has kept up a schedule of more-or-less monthly new exclusives all year, and it's been a lineup of impressive breadth and quality. Three weeks have passed since the massive Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, and only two weeks are left until Nintendo Switch Sports Resort.
Time for the hands-on previews, then, and Polygon's Mike McWhertor duly reports that Switch Sports Resort is a perfectly chill compilation that channels WaveRace, Pilotwings, and even Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, as well as the mighty Wii Sports. We all know this is just the build-up, though. Just two weeks after Switch Sports Resort comes The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a remake so consequential, of a game so revered, that it effectively has the status of a brand-new mainline Zelda game.
I've heard a plausible but unverified rumor that this is how it's being treated internally; that, rather than entrust the remake to an outside developer like Grezzo (which handled Ocarina of Time 3D and the Link's Awakening remake), Nintendo made it in-house. There's certainly a sense of event about it, only added to by Nintendo's bold decision to release the game in November. It's the only publisher daring enough to bring a major new release to retail in the same month as Grand Theft Auto 6.
This heavyweight clash was noticed and spoofed by the staff writers at Saturday Night Live last weekend, in a sketch that had Link and GTA 6's Jason making their competing pitches: guns vs. fairies, sex vs. puzzles. The sketch is silly and a bit cringe, but it's not condescending to games (any more than SNL is to any other object of its satire), and it's fairly even-handed in its ridicule. Link is prissy, Jason is a dumb boor.
Under the surface, Zelda and GTA may have more in common than you think (especially post-Breath of the Wild Zelda), but it's easy fun for SNL to contrast their wildly divergent embodiments of video gaming cliché, knowing a general audience will get it. That makes them effective counterprogramming. The SNL sketch posits GTA 6 vs Ocarina of Time as a kind of Barbenheimer, a confluence of release dates that sets the stage for an amusing, all-in-good-fun culture clash.
That's probably overstating things — the two games' release dates are actually two weeks apart, and Ocarina, for all its cachet, is a production on a dramatically smaller scale that can't hope to challenge GTA in sales terms. Last month, I wrote about how Nintendo's bravery is really just common sense, since the games appeal to very different markets outside core gaming fans. Yet there might be something to it, all the same.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
