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The Legend of Zelda HD Tech Demo Hands On Preview

Huge Definition.

The first demo was a 30-second Zelda HD cutscene of Link entering a spectacular room and fighting a giant spider. The Wii U's HD capabilities turn a simple boss room into a massive and beautiful palace hall, and the spider was incredibly intimidating, full of segmented body ridges, menacing mouth parts, and hair (shudder). It was fluid, detailed, ornate, colorful, brilliant in light contrasts, but a limited experience.

The Wii U controller was simply used to change camera views. The circle pad was used to pan the view, and a button on the screen switched angles from various angles behind the action, above the action, on the ceiling -- all of which took place simulaneously on the television and touchscreen. Another button on the screen changed the scene from day to night, which caused outside light peering in through the large windows to turn on and off instantly. Day and night Zelda mechanics at the touch of a button? There's a game right there. Another button on the screen brought up the dungeon map onto the television, and the rest of the screen was used for the typical display indicators for hearts, keys, and rupees.

HD might as well stand for "Huge Definition," because that's clearly the message of the Zelda demo: huge open spaces and huge enemies are going to be possible on Wii U. The palace hall most closely resembled Twilight's Princess' Temple of Time dungeon. The room was chock full of detail and wall furnishing, open space, statues, pillars, flying bats, multiple stairways, lit torches, and a pool of water. As it crawled along the outside of the windows, the spider shaded the light streaming onto the ground, then smashed the floor as it dropped down from above. The pool's water shimmered, the windows glowed when looked at head on, and changing the scenery to night made the torchlit scene all the more atmospheric.

Having a second player hold the screen and take charge of Wii U Zelda's camera angles could make for some interesting cooperation potential, but I hope that's not all it will do.

Of course, the demo was simply labeled "HD Experience" so it was likely created just to show off the Wii U, but I think it's a good bet in-game graphics will be comparable.


 

Comments

ShyGuy

06/08/2011 at 03:35 PM

This HD Zelda is getting me HYPED

Nick DiMola Director

06/08/2011 at 04:06 PM

@ShyGuy

Me too. Videos make the game look absolutely gorgeous. It's sad that Nintendo has become associated with sub par graphics. This hasn't traditionally been the case, so it'll be nice to see that changed up in the coming generation.

I wish they had some more significant titles playable on the floor, because the ones being shown don't really cater to the crowd that's experiencing them. Not sure how Nintendo didn't realize that before shipping off to LA this year...

ShyGuy

06/08/2011 at 08:00 PM

Yeah the tech demoes like that shield game don't have much interest for me. The bird demo, the Zelda demo, and the Ghost Recon demo all looked good.

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